[HELP] Learner struggling to fill my knowledge gap - Substance Designer

taylerhughes

Hi,

First post. Long time lurker. 

I'm trying to follow the following lava material tutorial.
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/QGB04

I'm excited by the result (as it's my first time using the software) but I'm obviously missing something big. I've been watching hours and hours of videos to try and get my head around the software. 

Mine is nowhere near, not even remotely close the the tutorial end product. I know it's not going to be because I've just started but I'm obviously missing something in terms of high map or normal map? My material has nowhere near as much depth as the original. I was hoping someone could point me in the right direction so I can learn about what I'm missing?

Snweos

You don't appear to have a roughness map set up, I'd work on that first.

Also in terms of extra depth, the original person probably has a tessellation map set up to distort the geometry of the model. I'd focus on setting up your roughness and normal maps correctly before worrying about tessellation / height maps though.

Axi5

Your material probably has height scale 0 too

taylerhughes

Axi5 said:

Your material probably has height scale 0 too

I think this was the depth issue. I put material scale height up to 1 and this was the result. Depth issue fixed, many more to go.

Thanks for the pointer.

taylerhughes

Snweos said:

You don't appear to have a roughness map set up, I'd work on that first.

Also in terms of extra depth, the original person probably has a tessellation map set up to distort the geometry of the model. I'd focus on setting up your roughness and normal maps correctly before worrying about tessellation / height maps though.

I think the depth issue was the sale height was set to 0. Now that's sorted I can really see how bad my normal maps and everything else is. I'll play around with them in the morning. I've been working all day my brain has no chance of figuring it all out tonight. 

Although saying that. It looks like there's more depth but the surface is still flat, is this what's supposed to happen?

Axi5

taylerhughes said:

Snweos said:

You don't appear to have a roughness map set up, I'd work on that first.

Also in terms of extra depth, the original person probably has a tessellation map set up to distort the geometry of the model. I'd focus on setting up your roughness and normal maps correctly before worrying about tessellation / height maps though.

I think the depth issue was the sale height was set to 0. Now that's sorted I can really see how bad my normal maps and everything else is. I'll play around with them in the morning. I've been working all day my brain has no chance of figuring it all out tonight. 

Although saying that. It looks like there's more depth but the surface is still flat, is this what's supposed to happen?

Depends on the shader technique.

If you're using tessellation then more geometry is being created on the graphics card at render time in a tessellation shader. Tessellation allows you to move points away from the surface or into the surface, it also tessellates based on how close the camera is to the surface.

If you're using Parallax Occlusion then the depth is faked in the pixel shader, no additional geometry is created, this means you can only inset into the geometry to give the illusion of depth.

They're pretty much the only two real-time techniques that attempt to truly fake depth unlike normal maps which fakes detail depth by altering the way the lighting falls on the model.

Substance Designer allows you to choose either tessellation or parallax occlusion in the material definition. Also I'd recommend keeping your height and normal map tied together for the most part, else the normals won't update over the deformed surface and it'll look flat.

taylerhughes

Thanks for the explanation @Axi5, I understand.