Nicolasw's Substance experiments

NicolasW

Hey there,

I've decided to create my own thread to gather and share substance stuff I've made/will make. I work at allegorithmic for quite a long time and have accumulated quite a lot of things, some of them ended up being in the Substance Designer library but some others are too specific / slow to be officially distributed.

It will include tips/tricks, R&D filters with complex FxMap, Substance materials..etc

This first post will be used as a table of contents.

Tri Planar Filter (FxMap)
Full Procedural Stone tiles

arvinmoses

Yea Nicolas! Looking forward to this! You've come up with some very creative solutions for questions we've posed.

NicolasW

Tri Planar Filter

Warning: This filter is extremely slow! It only works with the GPU substance engine (Direct3D 10 or OpenGL)

This filter project a texture from the 3 axis and blends the projections. Pretty useful to quickly project a map without worrying about UVs.

It requires a baked Position (All Axis) and World Space normal map. Ideally without overlapping. Make sure the position normalization is set to BSphere, otherwise you might get stretched projections on some axis.

package: https://www.dropbox.com/s/5ant2eaumtupr1l/triplanar.zip?dl=0

Kon

Pretty cool thread I subscribed instantly

bridgewindsoup

This is rad! I was just thinking yesterday that Tri-planar was one of the last big things I wanted/missed in the Substance family; thanks for reading my mind. Will definitely try this out once I get home.

What other projects are you working on at the moment? Personally, my big requests would be an "X" toggle between black and white when masking in Substance Painter, and the ability to copy/paste content between channels.

NicolasW

This tri planar uses an heavy fxmap computation, I would not advice to use it for anything else than "baking" bitmaps.
For Painter, a tri planar projection is planned (that'll be a lot faster than this ).
Concerning your two requests, they have already been asked several times and will be addressed sooner or (not too) later

noncarbon

The tri planar node is awesome. Now that SD5 has been announced and advertises its own tri planar node, care to share how this one stacks up? About the same functionality wise but I imagine a lot faster?

NicolasW

The triplanar filter in SD5 will use the pixel processor node and will probably have the same features.
I can't promise the performances will be a lot better as this is the very first version of this node. Their is room for a lot of improvements in the following 5.x updates.

zombie420

I'm subscribing to this as well, please

JamesFSky

Nicolas, is there anywhere we can buy that amazing new stone/brick texture you made that's used for advertising SD5? I'm absolutely bananas about it, and I'm dying to explore that graph! Regardless, you're work is absolutely amazing, and I hope you keep it up!

NicolasW

Stone Tiles ! SD 5only !

Full procedural* stone material based on single input pattern
(* except opus and polycount logo patterns)

package here: https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=B12D494B8DD6F4AE!17823&authkey=!ACRMU-K3PI6LyL4&ithint=folder%2cpng

JamesFSky

Forget bananas, I'm going BANOONOOS! Thank you A MILLION TIMES OVER! I love learning from the pros (I'm just a nurse who does SD for fun because it's that awesome), and I hope one day my tutorials will be good enough to where I can give back to the Substance community in an equally amazing way! Seriously, I'm swooning over here, this is embarrassing. Thank you

red2blue

NicolasW wrote: »

Stone Tiles ! SD 5only !

Full procedural* stone material based on single input pattern
(* except opus and polycount logo patterns)

package here: https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=B12D494B8DD6F4AE!17823&authkey=!ACRMU-K3PI6LyL4&ithint=folder%2cpng

Thank you so much for sharing this. Will teach me a lot!

Thanks!

gel

Fantastic,
Thanks Nickolas.

Bertmac

You're to generous. Thanks a lot these will be so helpful

tungerz

Thxs Nickolas,
That's one rocking graph (

Quack!

Thanks for spreading the knowledge Nic(k)!

m4dcow

Thanks, funnily enough best thing I learned from this graph so far is holding shift to re-locate a bunch of outgoing connections

angevill

thanks so much,really helpful.

Brian "Panda" Choi

Thanks you, Nicolas! This seems to be very informative and helpful.

Troedel

Thank you very much. I feel stupid, but I´ve got to ask. How do you get the displacement working without getting seams? Just hidden or is it seamless all around. I can´t reproduce it ( tells something about my skills... ) I would be very happy to get a hint in the right direction. THX in advance

NicolasW

The seams are not visible on the vertical edges because the texture (and the UVs) is tiling, but there is actually a seams on the top edges

Jace213

Thanks man! I'm already learning a bunch from this.

Madzia

Thank you Nicolas for sharing and once again thanks for your presentation in Düsseldorf! seeing You working live in Designer is magic

NicolasW

Late reply..
I'm glad you enjoyed it

Cheers!

LorasTyrell

Hey I know this is kinda old but I just downloaded this, and it was very interesting. At the very end of the colour pass you have a frame called chroma noise. I see what it very subtly does, but I've never seen that in a Substance before. Could you elaborate on why you include that or point to a thread/article?

NicolasW

Hey,
I added that just to get subtle variation in the albedo, there is not really any technical reason to do this (maybe there is but I don't know if this has been studied), I just found the material was slightly  more pleasant to look at.