Getting started with Substance Designer. What is the best learning curve for begginers?

Bletzkarn

I'd image it would go something like this:

1. clean concrete, stucco, painted metals.

2. clean bricks and tiles.

3. clean wood floors and features.

4. marble, more complicated patterns. Still relatively clean.

5. More dynamic iterations. Cracked tiles, iregular bricks, dirt blending, damage blending.

6. Organic materials, dirt ground, cracked ground.

7. Organic materials +. Cliffs, leaves, moss, grass etc.

Elithenia

just doing something.
Fail. Learn. Redo

Bletzkarn

true, I just don't like making crap that is unusable. At least if I start small I can actually render with these materials. 

Elithenia

in a year, whatever you do now, you'll think it needs reworking.. 
So. see it as a learning opportunity. Do the best you can, with whatever basic things you can do, then do more, challenge yourself, make it the best of your abilities. Rinse and repeat.

poopipe

If you came to work for me I'd want you to know how to break surfaces  down into constituent layers  and package those into modular graphs that can be reused across a wide variety of textures at a wide variety of scales. 

Every material breakdown I see posted with a million nodes feeding backwards and forwards across the graph makes me die a little inside.

As does every material that only covers 50cm of space - modern game maps are 5-10 pixels per cm tops.  If you can't make an 8metre tile you're no use in production at all. 

Bletzkarn

poopipe said:

If you came to work for me I'd want you to know how to break surfaces  down into constituent layers  and package those into modular graphs that can be reused across a wide variety of textures at a wide variety of scales. 

Every material breakdown I see posted with a million nodes feeding backwards and forwards across the graph makes me die a little inside.

As does every material that only covers 50cm of space - modern game maps are 5-10 pixels per cm tops.  If you can't make an 8metre tile you're no use in production at all. 

excellent feedback! I suppose that's the advantage of starting of with more simple materials that are easier to break down.

poopipe

It's a matter of identifying what is the material, and what is an environmental effect on the material (dirt/sun bleaching etc). If you separate those off they're easier to make and you don't have to remake them endlessly. .

 Fundamentally there are no complex materials, just lots of simple layers.. 

LorasTyrell

My first substance and my last, one year inbetween. If you wanna get good at something new, you're not going to be good in the beginning, that's only natural. 

My best advice is try to create a variety of materials. Organic shapes, sci-fi walls, broken pottery - they all challenge you in different ways. Then after a while, get back to the same material and look at it critically. You can learn a lot from looking at your old work with new eyes! 

Also like has been said, layering is one of the most important things when making substances. Being able to split a reference into sections is super important, and it will make the creation process easier. And like poopipe (...?) says here, a tidy graph is worth something in itself