Kristof's stylized Substance Designer material practices

Obscura

Hello. I haven't posted a thread here for a long time now, because I was busy with work, and when I had free time, I usually spent it with examining some technical stuff instead of doing actual art. Its about time to break this, especially because until now I was spamming the waywo, which isn't a nice thing to do. I was at home for like a week because I got very sick, so I was very bored, and I started doing daily practices in Substance Designer. I always liked stylized textures, especially the ones after the transition to pbr, so I thought I'll try to make some. They are nowhere perfect, but I'm pretty happy with the initial results. If you have some ideas about how could I take this to a next level in the future, please let me know. I already got one feedback on the planks on twitter. I've been told that the cracks are a bit too wavy, and I should use the Orb brush as a reference for this kind of stuff. Note taken. I will definitely make more of them, as practice never hurts, and actually I can produce these fairly quickly - ~ 2-4 hours. I'm also considering making some meshes for them, but thats still a big question mark.
Here they are in chronological order:

Planks

Bricks:

Roof plates:

Stucco / plaster


And an extra image, showing some blending test of the bricks and the plaster. This shot was made in Unreal, instead of Toolbag.


Hope you like them, and feel free to comment / give me advices about how to improve the approach.

Bek

They all look pretty neat. With the plaster/brick blend I feel like the transition should be sharper; the plaster kind of has a limit on how 'thin' it can be before it just gets wiped away.

Obscura

Thanks for the tip, I'll take a look into that.

Obscura

Back with the daily one for now. This one took much longer than any of the previous ones.

Obscura

Yesterday I took a break from these, but today I'm back with a new one. A tree bark.

Obscura

I got some feedback on the tree bark on facebook, and I wasn't really happy with it either, so I gave it another shot and a different approach. I fully reworked it, and it turned out like this. I think it looks much better, but let me know what your opinion.

m4dcow

Nice. 
Might want to fix your email text... Unless hormail.com is just something I don't know about.

Obscura

Damn. Thanks man.

Obscura

I think I will probably remake my old diorama from 2014, as the most of these materials would nicely fit in the theme of that. Unfortunately I can't do the practices on a daily base anymore, but this won't stop me. Might do 3-4 over the weekend if I can. Here is a river bed stones thing for this time. No flood fills were harmed - originally I tried them on this one, but it got really slow with the multiple layers so I switched to the oldschool mosaic / bevel, which worked very well.

AlirezaMorgan

These look very cool
I've tried to create stylized materials using substance designer but never been able to extract a quality such as your work

Obscura

Don't give up, its not that hard actually. Just like with any other substance, good heightmap is the key to everything. But in case of stylized textures, you keep the details and shapes somewhat simplified. Colors needs to have unusually a lot of detail and shading in it, even if its for pbr.

Back to my studies, I thought I will give a shot to the coal with lava from the WoW - Siege of Orgrimmar art dump.
Link to the thread where I had the references from:
http://polycount.com/discussion/125737/texturing-siege-of-orgrimmar-wow/p1


And this is how mine turned out:

Obscura

Made one more... I think I should start sleeping too sometimes.

Houseleeks:



Also made a full breakdown of this one.

Graph of one leaf:


Graph of one flower:


Graph of scattering, coloration and other stuff to create the final textures:

Obscura

A strawberry, lol. One of the members from my game art group on facebook came up with this idea, and I thought it would be cool, so I made it.

Krystian_Zem

Nice, I like those treebark materials, very nice natural patterns.

Andrew_Sovetkin

Very strong art

Obscura

Glad you guys like them. I'll do more, and soon I'll wrap some of them into a small scene but I got quite busy this week. But the weekend is mine so I'll be back to the otherwise normal tempo. I also needed to rest some, because doing these after work lets me sleeping only a few hours which doesn't really help on a long run and I started feeling it. Too much from good can be bad, unfortunately, even though I'm really enjoying making these. Food stuff is especially fun to work with, but now the internet is flooded by them so I'm not sure if I should make more from that category.

Obscura

Been working on a tree generator blueprint (not done yet) so I could easily create the hardest part of the scene, the trees. Monkey puzzle trees are on the way. The texture shown on the screenshots is just a placeholder for now.


As this is only partially related to my substances, I'm not going to show more from this here, but if you are interested about the generator itself, you can check it out in my another thread, which is heavily technical oriented:
http://polycount.com/discussion/157279/the-wonders-of-technical-art-unreal-engine#latest

Obscura

Here is a new tree bark, for this tree:

Reference:

Obscura

And a cracked mud...

Obscura

Its kinda weird that the examinations about different social media platforms works differently in the reality, than what I've been reading. Like they've been saying that facebook is the worst regarding feedback, attention etc. I get feedback there more often than here, in general. Needless to say, normally I would trust people here easier. Then, twitter seems to be the worst, at least it seems like I don't know how to do it properly. Taking an example, I made the earlier 2 tree barks like weeks ago, and somehow it just got picket up, and now people starts seeing it. Not sure about this one. Anyways, I got bits of feedback on the mud on facebook, and on artstation so I'm going to iterate it further. It was a quickie though, kinda like a sketch, but maybe it worth tweaking it.

It also worth to mention that I know, now we are much more crowded here, and I also know the old diagrams about posts of differently skilled people. I feel like I'm somewhere in the valley currently, but like the whole thread suggests, its about improvement, so just leave your comment here if you feel like it could help me in some way. Without input other than cool or not cool, I'm kinda shooting in the dark.

If anyone has some cool material ideas for practice, please let me know. Also, additionally, if you have any input regarding my work on stylized substances, your opinion is welcome. Thanks!

Bumblebee

Would you sell me some of these? I’m not a studio just someone who likes stylized textures and would like to work with them. I can understand if you don’t want to sell them. They look really stellar!

Obscura

@Bumblebee   Maybe not so surprisingly, I got  some very similar questions, rather than feedback or stuff like that. I'm definitely considering making a thing like a gumroad profile, so if you are about that kind of stuff, I would say, just stay tuned, it should come soon... What would be a fair range of price in your opinion, and what should it include? I think I mentioned this somewhere but I would imagine like a 2-5 $ range for individual materials, maybe slightly higher, depending on its complexity. Like I could sell blending materials too, including multiple of them, as some Unreal source files for example. Or some bundles.

And again, my experiences about this topic goes totally against the data I gathered about selling individual materials  - because I did. From what I've been told, people don't but individual materials normally, but the messages and requests I got shows totally the opposite.

Bumblebee

thats a totally acceptable price man! good luck with your journey in substance

Obscura

Here is some bathroom / toilet carpets because my friday afternoon is so exciting.
I also have a gumroad page now, so stuff will get uploaded soon.
https://gumroad.com/l/ProceduralBathroomCarpets

Obscura

Here is a new ground substance. It was inspired by the Warcraft 3 ground textures.

Stexara

I love the color of the bricks and the new tree bark! The rocks remind me of some overwatch environments Tho, the newest W3 ground texture looks ok, i think it needs more colors variations of the brown/greens, and maybe adding a subtle variations of some other. Keep up the cool work btw

hypronost

Really great work man. Very inspiring. Love seeing stylized substance stuff.

Obscura

Made 2 new ones today...
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/1KLoX
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/vn9rv

Obscura

And one more. Corroded bronze roof tiles.

Obscura

Decided to remake this guy. I think it looks better than the previous attempt, and its closer to the original WoW texture.

Obscura

Here's a new one:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/KN0gW




And the previous that I forgot to post here:

Obscura

Some planks:

Iwalyl

Absolutely awesome works man! Count me in if you decide to teach us something on a tutorial!

Obscura

Thanks!
Here is a reed roof:

Obscura

Thanks Eric!
Here are two things that I made recently and didn't post in this thread.

NikhilR

So lovely! 

melviso

These are great. Maybe trying it out soon myself. Keep it up, mate :- )

Obscura

Thanks guys. Here is a little breakdown of something I started working on:

Obscura

Also, something that isn't as stylized as I do usually, but not fully realistic either. Some brain coral experiments. Reaction diffusion, curve, and tile sampler nodes where used mainly.
 

Obscura

Not stylized again, but here is a little height map modeling exercise I did this evening.

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/nQYX69

Lurcisia

Amazing work! I feel like the more you post the better these get! Mind sharing your process on the coral? They're stunning.

Obscura

Hello. The main shape of the first coral was done with the reaction diffusion node, and then the "legs" of it were placed With tile sampler and they were rotated according to the Flow of the body using the vector map input of the tile sampler. I also used the mask map input so they only grow on the body. 

BlankMauser

Your work is really great! Do you have anything to share about your coloring and lighting process? Your renders come out very vibrant and colorful!

Obscura

Hi @BlankMauser . Thanks! If you look through all the images in chronological order, you will notice that it came over time, and I'm still experimenting in this topic. To be honest, I learned a lot about this at my current job at Digic, from my mates there. They really know what they are doing, and it isn't easy to describe how to do it in a few sentences, but here are a few things that I learned.

- Usually the lighting should cover a wide spectrum of values, from dark to bright, but full black and burnt white should be avoided. But this can depend on the scene... In my newer setups, I use subtle ambient light from a skylight, and 2-3 spot lights, lighting the asset from different angles. Giving them different color and intensity usually looks good on presentation renders. Making them lighting from grazing angle usually looks good as well. Lighting the asset evenly from all directions will make the render look flat, so in my experience, the few lights with different values works the best.

- I usually use small fov with slight depth of field where its applicable. This mostly applies on plane renders, but I give a very little of it to the sphere ones too. Subtle grain and chromatic aberration improves realizm but it shouldn't be overdone.

- I use filmic tonemapper and some color grading. This can really help making the colors pop much more, and enhance highlights and shadows, but it shouldn't be overdone either, unless thats the artistic direction of the piece.

Hope this helps!

Finnn

Your substances look great Kristof, your progress is remarkable. Keep it up!

AFsoft

wow excellent job 

Obscura

Thanks guys. Here is some ice I made this morning, inspired by this:
https://cdna.artstation.com/p/assets/images/images/012/277/072/large/michael-vicente-orb-ice.jpg?1533940750

Obscura

Another Heroes of the Storm inspired substance.

Obscura

Some railway.

Obscura

A new tree bark.
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/2xy16B

Noren

Awesome, loving those! 
The treebark could use some color variance, perhaps.