Advanced training videos for Substance Designer

Zack Maxwell

I've been working on some stylized wood materials, and I'm starting to feel the limitation of my skills in Substance Designer.
This is where I'm at right now;
But this is the level of quality I'm currently aiming at;


I'm not satisfied at all with my work right now.
I've been struggling fruitlessly to get the material to this level all week. Yet I've seen far more insane things done purely in Designer.
I know exactly in what areas my material is lacking, but the difficulty is knowing what techniques to use to get the particular effects I desire.
Free Youtube guides don't seem to be up to the task either. Not to boast, but none of the ones I've been able to find are even at my current level, let alone where I'm aiming. I think they keep the videos simple on purpose so it won't take very long.
I have no aversion to paying for videos, but I've just had a hard time finding anything that isn't a basic introduction.
I'm wondering if anyone knows of some high quality advanced tutorials on Designer that could help me.
I've already picked up Jonas Ronnegard's Substance Masters, and I'm going over them now. I'm sure I'll need more, though.

Taylor Brown

Hmm ive only ever poked through Daniel Thigers foundation series and one of the scratch to substance volumes

Finnn

I recommend you get some complex materials and breakdown the graphs yourself. Often times they are commented and filled with good informations about the workflows. Ofcourse a video is a lot more comfortable to learn from, but when learning from graphs you can choose yourself what information you want to take in. You can look for more advanced stuff and for very exact problems you want to solve.

Just choose a material that does very well what you want to achieve and learn how the creator did it

Smashjaw

Like Taylor suggested. Daniel Thiger has made a lot of tutorials on Substance Designer.


So maybe check those out - https://gumroad.com/discover?query=Daniel Thiger

Otherwhise you don't seem that off from the intended goal. There might be a little trickery in how it's rendered with it's lighting and subtle shift of gradients.

The way that seems to be done in substance painter at least is by having two layers with different tones of colours - then you create a mask and apply a blur filter to the mask so it gently shifts from one colour to another.

I couldn't tell you precisely how to achieve this in designer as I've only ever made this and not at that level of mastery myself.

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/0XnN9y

But definitely I would keep checking out Daniels stuff or search Gumroad for a Designer file you like buy it and pull it apart to see how they achieved it. Also your height map seems to be very square and chunky, try rounding it out a little as well. Subtlety seems key.

Panupat

Wow this Thiger guy is such a beast. Thanks for suggesting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNwtc-OeGQ0