[WiP] A Pilgrim's Mountain Journey: A Material Blending Project

Daniel_Swing

I recently started my exam project at FutureGames. I'm focused around texture creation in Substance Designer and the end goal of this project is to create an exterior environment with major focus on the materials.

Unlike making a single material and posting it to my ArtStation, I want this project to be more cohesive - all the materials need a the same style, matching colors, etc, so that it can be used in the same scene. It's one thing to make one Substance Designer graph work in it's own vacuum and make a cool render on a sphere in Marmoset - it's something completely different to make a cohesive set of materials.

Here's what inspired me, from Joshua Lynch's ArtStation: You can see several matching materials blended together into a piece of art - No 3D models in focus or essential for the scene to work - just the materials.

So I'm going to do basically the exact same thing: A bunch of materials blended together, where I can show that I can create several materials with matching color schemes, roughness values, etc and carry a scene with it.

These are some of my reference images that I'm looking at:

Ignoring the foliage, I'm looking to make Cliff Rocks, Rubble, Dirt, Mud, etc. in Substance Designer (aiming to keep it 100% Substance Designer) and then blend them together, making a "pilgrim's mountain journey" scene.

Daniel_Swing

I've been doing some doodling and testing in Designer for the last three days, just to get back into it.

Nothing I'm doing this early in the project is "finished" - I'm just trying to establish a structure.

Today I started on the "Rock Sample" node - It's a tool that I made so that I can spread out pebbles and rocks over a texture without having to re-create that entire graph every time I want to add pebbles to my mud, dirt or whatever texture.

The 'Rock Sampler' node uses my "Rock Shape" and "Pebble Shape" nodes (The two nodes to the left in the graph. Check out Wes' rock tutorial if you want to see a similar approach to what I did to make these 'Rock Shape' nodes), spread them out over the texture, warps and slopes them and adds some rock-esq micro-shapes. It also generate a Base Color and a basic Roughness, in addition to the height information.

I can then use a 'Height Blend' node to blend the 'Rock Sample' height result with something else (the 'Height Blend' node also gives me a mask of the rocks and pebbles, which I use for blend the basic Color and Roughness of the 'Rock Sampler' node and the rest of my other graph).

The 'Rock Sampler' node can take a mask-input, which prevent rocks and pebbles from being generated in the masked areas (the mask input i connected to the 'Tile Samplers' inside the 'Rock Sampler' graph). This is useful if I want to add pebbles in-between larger shapes, such as cobble stones - this way, the pebbles won't be overlapping the cobble stone.

Tomorrow, I'll get to work on some dirt.

Daniel_Swing

I've been doing some practice and tests and updated some of the last nodes from last week.

I've been working on some dirt, which is surprisingly hard.

I check out Ben Wilson's contribution to the "Substance Master Vol.2" and took some insperation for the 'MicroShapes' in my graph.
For the macro shapes, I blended, warped and sloped a perlin noise and plasma noise together to get small hills and holes for a very uneven surface (I think I'll add a tweak-able levels node to flatten the hills out).

I updated my 'RockShape' node to use the 'Crystal 1' noise in my 'non-uniform directional warp' node. Check out Ben Wilson's contribution to the "Substance Master Vol.1" and Daniel Thiger's Concrete Rubble, where I took a lot of inspiration.

Below you can see what it looks like with the new and updated "RockShape" and "RockSample" nodes, blended with my dirt.

Lastly, I've also researched the FX-map for a bit, and I made some basic grass tests, check out Vincent Gault's grass/FX-map tutorial if you want to know how I did it.

Flight

Heyo! Looks like you are making good progress! Don't get caught in the details at this point! Looking forward to the next update. 

/Edit: Awful phone-spelling

Daniel_Swing

Thank you @Flight !
It's really hard not to pinch the details, but I know it's better to let them wait.

Daniel_Swing

I've been investigating cliff-rock, lichens and moss a bit since I last posted:

I'm not really done, but I'll let it go for now (I have some more work to do on the moss).

I'll try to post more consistently (preferably once every work day), even if I haven't done as big of a leap as this!

Daniel_Swing

I made a new type of moss that I added to the cliff wall. I also tried to make some very simple cliff mesh and not just render the material on a sphere:

More renders on my ArtStation

Krater

Love the details, Swing! How's the project as a whole comming along?

Daniel_Swing

Thanks @Krater . The project is going nowhere fast atm. I'm trying to find time for it.

Daniel_Swing

Today I basically re-made the entire grass graph from scratch:

This time, instead of using the FX-map, I used the regular 'tile sampler' and blended them together with 'max lighten' to get a thick layer of grass ( except of where I masked out some holes in the tile samplers).

I made a "Grass Straw" sub graph that I instance and use to generate different shapes

I also added the moss strands that I made for the cliff material to the mix:

I have to work much more on the color. I also want to add some more variety of plants.

Daniel_Swing

I'm getting somewhere - I noticed that it's really hard getting the right colors on grass:

Daniel_Swing

Just a quick update on the colors today.

Daniel_Swing

Check out more rendered images of the grass on ArtStation.

I generate the grass with four different 'tile sampler', that I later blend together with the 'max (lighten)' blend mode.

I can the subtract the new result with one of the tile samplers, meaning that I will get information from the other tile sampler (the one I didn't use to subtract) and all the grass from that made that one through the 'max (lighten)' blend node. I then run it through a histogram scan (at 95-100 'position') to get a mask.

I use these masks to add color variation to the grass:

Daniel_Swing

Doing some more experimentation on compact dirt and pebbles.

Tomorrow I'll try to get going with some sort of road-tile material and start working in Unreal again.

Daniel_Swing

This is what I did today:

I borrowed one of my earlier crack generators - it was made for a stylized material so I'll have to do some heavy tweaking. I'm not too happy with the basic macro shapes of the tiles and the edge fall-off yet.

Daniel_Swing

Update: Today is technically my final day on this project.
Looking for internship/job, art tests and teaching two texturing courses at my school took a lot of time away from this project.

However, I will continue on this project when I get back after the holidays. I'm doing the 'PBR Material Mentorship' with Josh Lynch in January, where I aim to brush up on at least one of the materials for this project.

Daniel_Swing

I got some tips from Josh Lynch, so I've spent the last few days experimenting with some new dirt (and updated my pebble and rock generator, nothing to show however). Still not feeling it.

Daniel_Swing

Pebbles WiP:

Note: The dirt is too noisy.

Daniel_Swing

Soon done with the height, just need to tweek the rock-shapes a bit.

I'll be moving on to the colors soon.

Daniel_Swing

Started an early pass on the colors. Need to distinguish them more from the dirt.

Daniel_Swing

A bit further into the coloring. Tomorrow I'll add some grass, roots and twigs.

Daniel_Swing

Think I'm done with this one. I'll move on to a gravel-type material (basically the same thing, only smaller rocks).

bobmartien

Glad this thread is on the main page.
Awesome work

Ged

great result!

Finnn

That turned out great Daniel, the stones have a natural looking variety and they blend in very well. Also the last color update pushed it alot.

What was your thought process when finding the right size of the stones ? You have alot of variation from very big to very small. Do you handle these only in different tile samplers or do they also run through different processing for height and surface editing?

Daniel_Swing

Oh no, not again! My shitty art-thread can't handle all this attention! Seriously though, thanks for the all kind words, it means a lot.

I'm currently being mentored by Josh Lynch (via the Mentor Coalition) and he's given me a ton of great pointers and new techniques to work with.

Daniel_Swing

@Finnn I'll be doing some sort of break-down sometime next week (hopefully) where I comment my approach a bit more!

xChris

Nice, is that still in marmoset or are you blending materials in an engine? 

Daniel_Swing

These render are from Marmoset, but I do plan on taking them into an engine soon (probably Unreal).

Daniel_Swing

Trying out some gravel now.

Is it too noisy/busy?

McGergs

Looking good Daniel!

Daniel_Swing

Thank you @McGergs !

Daniel_Swing

Small changes to the grass:

Josh gave me some feedback;

-I made a parameter to feather the grass out by the edges of the exposed dirt instead of having sharp, abrupt changes.
-I added more micro-surface variation in the grass, much like how I made the base color.

-I lowered the AO on top of the clovers and increased the amount baked into the base color underneath them (to make them appear more on top of everything else).

Daniel_Swing

Doing some midnight doodling. Gotta stop before I get too tired and ruin it.

I like some of the rock surfaces I'm getting, think I'll adopt it for my other rocks as well.

Daniel_Swing

Cleaned the cobble up a bit.

I'm also tweaking my rocks a bit. Is it better than the previous rocks? Any opinions?

Daniel_Swing

Some more updates on the shapes.

Daniel_Swing

Finally starting up with Unreal

Need to get into how tessellation and LODing works properly.

Daniel_Swing

Some test renders from Unreal! I'll take a pause and then look at it again. If I'm still happy when I get back, I'll upload more images!

radiancef0rge

this is some nice stuff man.

Daniel_Swing

Thank you!

Daniel_Swing

Experimenting with some cliff wall shapes.

Daniel_Swing

Trying out the mountain/rock material.

I really should add some specular control to my materials (see the "wet" spots on the hills?)

Daniel_Swing

Made some small changes in the grass color to get a dryer look.

I'm not too happy with the mountain rock material, I'll be revisiting it later this week.

Daniel_Swing

I ran into this little problem today:

This is because the height-map of the grass material (that I use to displace the landscape geometry) was much darker than the other materials, meaning that it's retracting the geometry / not pushing it out as much. To fix this, I added a 'Histogram Range' node at the end of my height-map, where I pushed the 'Position' up high and set the 'Range' to clamp the values.

Fixed result:

I have to take a pass through all materials and normalize them more precis, since I can find some discrepancies between their height-levels a bit here and there.

Daniel_Swing

Trying some new rocks shapes:

Daniel_Swing

Rock update:

Daniel_Swing

Been struggling with the rock shapes. The first one was too "tutorial", the second one was just an oatmeal, the last few blocky approaches really didn't lend themselves to the environment. Though I think I'm starting to get some nice macro-shapes.

Flight

Will the texture be supported by meshes or will it be standalone?
Tbh, I wouldn't worry too much at this point. Just get something out that is decent and keep moving forward. 

Daniel_Swing

This project has slowed down during the last few weeks again, partly due to my "internship" (I put the word in citation because I'm not happy at all about how it turned out to be more "plz work for free and fix out game, because we won't pay anyone to do it"-type of deal rather than having a mentor and get a chance to learn from the industry).

But another thing that is taking my time is an art-test (for another studio), which partly requires me to learn Speedtree. So I subscribed to Speedtree for a month to practice. If I have time after the art-test and before my subscription expires, I'll add some trees and experimenting with bark/leaf textures in this project as well.

Really hope this art-test goes my way, because I may not be able to return to my internship after this post (though I don't think they read this thread)... #BurningBridges

Finnn

man that sounds awful, sorry to hear that your internship isnt what you expected. It still pays you off I think because work experience is good anyhow. But still, this makes me kinda angry how companys can treat people. This kind of work model shouldnt be permited in my opinion.
Even more so, I wish you luck for your art test. I am sure you will nail it!
Would be cool if you share some insights in what is expected from you and how you approach preparing for it.

radiancef0rge

quit