First Substance - Concrete Slabs

MaiMelhor

Hi Guys! This is my first substance done all by myself. I'm trying to create a concrete slabs material but I still have issues with realism. Does anyone have recommendations or advices to improve this?

Thank you very much!

stilobique

Take more refence image to compare with your rendering. It's a good start ; i think your roughness/metalic pass can be upgrade !

MaiMelhor

Thank you very much! So I worked on it since and improved my AO, added some dirt and tried to fix my issues with the roughness map. I'm considering it done for now and will go back to it in a few months to take a look at it in a diferent way. But I would still love reviews or comments.

MaiMelhor

Good morning!
I returned to the project after taking a step back, allowing me to approach the problems with a new perspective. I thought about the dirt (don't know how I didn't see it) and worked on the concrete texture. I also exposed the roughness, so it can either look pretty rough, or smoother. I worked on the slabs edges as well, adding details.

lloydj14

I am liking the rough version but the smoother versions aren't working for me.

I feel that the smooth version of the concrete seems to lack colour variation in the actual concrete. This might be due to such contrasting dirt (in both the diffuse and roughness), I feel like this should have some gradual transition/ areas of light (slight) dirt. 

However, the rough version works well. I don't know how many of the setting you have tweaked or if it is literally just the roughness of the concrete but this version has good colour variation and overall looks much better. A few things that could just add that little extra bit to this would be to add some normal/height  information to the mortar between the slabs. And the another possible thing that could be added is some large height information such as dips so that the slab isn't perfectly flat (like if these are floor slabs that are old and people have walked over them, water has worn them etc. ) Hope this second bit makes sense

Hope this helps. 

MaiMelhor

Hi! Thank you for your feedbacks! I tried to take them into account to make my work better. So I removed my exposed parameter to work more on my rough version. I also changed my AO to make it less contrasted and more credible. I worked on my base color to make it better, and have a more realistic result. I had some issues with my references so I took time, before going further to make a whole new reference library and have a better start.

Thanks and have a great day!

Kid.in.the.Dark

This is a really nice start... I'd say for me the only thing that defines the next level of detail for you is actually looking at surfaces microscopically... I tend to add fine details even though they may not transfer 100% when textures come to down-res etc... so in this case, you want to really look at the surface of how a concrete slab would look, there's always small little pebbles here and there that's actually melded into the surface and together...

for example...



All those little white dots and additional noise can really help sell the surface. Obviously knowing when to stop since less can often mean more.

So make sure to include the variety of different off tones of each layer of pebble build up and keep the normal/roughness values to something more subtle.

Also, it's always nice to include small hints of high frequency detail e.g. small cracks, small dents in the surface which are really sharp and do not dip in so much that you can tell it's there.

Subtly is key.

Keep going