Tree bark - Substance Designer material

hublus

Hey everyone, that's 3rd material I made fully by myself in Substance Designer. After huge number of tweaks I decided to post it in the end, because at current skill level I won't be able to improve it any more. That was a nice challenge for me as tree bark has pretty complex shape with a lot of variety in it. Feel free to give some advice/feedback etc. Thanks!
Artstation

Ashervisalis

You've got a nice pattern going for the bark. Here's some critique!

1) Your render is incredibly dark and difficult to see.
2) Your material should have some larger forms, whereas you've just got small forms. You could add large vertical strips to add to the height/normal in order to make the material not so flat. Or, you could add knobs and grooves.
3) Your albedo looks like it hasn't been touched. I just see one colour in there.

Were you going off reference?

hublus

Ashervisalis said:

You've got a nice pattern going for the bark. Here's some critique!

1) Your render is incredibly dark and difficult to see.
2) Your material should have some larger forms, whereas you've just got small forms. You could add large vertical strips to add to the height/normal in order to make the material not so flat. Or, you could add knobs and grooves.
3) Your albedo looks like it hasn't been touched. I just see one colour in there.

Were you going off reference?

Hey, thanks a lot for feedback. I really appreciate it. I have weird habit of making my renders too dark  . I worked a bit on things you mentioned and here are renders. Still looking for critique and opinions!
 

Ashervisalis

I think a lot of people have a tendency to make their images really dark when starting out. I feel like I've just broken that habit myself. Did you add subsurface scattering to your material here? Also, did you create an ambient occlusion map? It doesn't seem like you did, and it would do your material wonders. If you're unsure how to do so, create an output node, assign it to being an ambient occlusion output, and take your height, hook it up to an Ambient Occlusion node, then hook that up to the ambient occlusion output, Using the AO node, you can adjust how much or how deep the AO is, and it'll make the deep parts of your bark a bit more shadowy.

hublus

Thanks for explanation, but there was other problem. I used Material Color Blend node to add some slight dust layer over everything. Because of this node my AO was too soft and it didn't give me results I wanted. I didn't notice it earlier, because there were other problems to solve. I had to drop opacity level for AO in Material Color Blend node. I also changed my lighting preset so my albedo doesn't look so uniform on render.

Ashervisalis

It's looking even better! When I asked before about subsurface scattering, I actually meant to say it shouldn't have it, and it looked like it had scattering, just wanted to clarify. A quick trick you might like; have a separate height map for the small bark chunks, and a height map for the larger shapes, then plugging them into a blend multiply node, and then plugging that into the height output. Then, you can reduce the opacity of the small shapes while keeping the height intensity of the larger shapes. I'd suggest lowering your small shape height a bit here.

hublus

Thanks again for all helpful advices mate. I tweaked height map a bit. I think I will leave this material as it is now. Time to move for next one.