Trim sheet - Substance Designer, Help.

Gleeba

Hello everyone. 

I just started studying the Trim Sheet technique but i'm coming across several problems and doubts. Since i am also not good at researching specific and sometimes hidden information on the web regarding the topic i will try to ask here. 

In few words:

 - I made 4 different marble materials using Substance Designer.
 
 - I would like to pack them all using the Trim Sheet technique so that i will have just one texture in the 0 to 1 UV space with 4 different marble textures. 

QUESTION: 

Each marble is a single material and since I am using Substance Designer how can i pack all the nodes together to create one single material composed by a Trim Sheet of 4 different marbles?

Thank you for your time in advanced.

zachagreg

Drop a tile sampler node in, set the X amount to 1 and the Y amount to 4. Make sure the pattern is square and the scale is set to 1. Under Color set Color Parametrization Multiplier to 1 and the Mode to Row Index, this will give you 4 different grays in descending value. Then run these through 4 histogram select to pick out the shades of grey and make them white. Use these as your masks to mask out using material blends.

If you want bevels in between your materials, then on the final material you can take out your height and you would in essence blend in those 4 masks with bevels on them to get transitions between your separate mats.

Gleeba

I made the mask as you said, but i am still confused. 

Do i have to bring 4 different sequence of nodes into 1 Substance Designer file or I can/should pack all the nodes into "base color" "Roughness" "normal" before copy and paste them into the Trim sheet Sub.De. file?

Cause i have minimum 20 nodes for each material and i don't think i should copy and paste 40 nodes into one single file

zachagreg

Set the outputs of each material properly to what you need. Then pull in the graphs of those materials into the new "Trimsheet" graph. Your individual materials will come in as their own material nodes but will still hold the link to their graphs. Then you blend these graphs together using the method above. Your Explorer should resemble something like this.

icegodofhungary

Gleeba said:

Cause i have minimum 20 nodes for each material and i don't think i should copy and paste 40 nodes into one single file

 You can use just the outputs of each marble substance rather than dragging the entire graph into your trim's graph. This is how some of the generators are made. Something like grunge 001 is just a substance graph, like your marble, but it looks like a single node because it's using an output of its graph. When you make a graph/substance you want to use in other materials, you don't have to copy the whole thing into whatever you're trying to create.

Larry

For what you want to do the term is "texture atlas" 

gnoop

My SD graphs are usually  pretty heavy   and combining multiple materials constructed of hundreds nodes of dozens  sub-grapfs is hefty  to load/update etc.

 So I sometimes  just render outputs of each material  to 16bit  tiffs  and then combine/compose/ height blend/mix   them in a Photoshop file as linked smart objects.   Alt+drop in Ps makes any file linked smart object easily.           Whenever you need to update something , just re render outputs in SD and they updates in PS automatically.    

Wish  I would have the whole SD as Ps plugin  working live on smart objects but it will never happen I guess:(

zachagreg

Exporting out an SBSAR and using that instead of dragging in the SBS or Graph and then material blending will condense the nodes and use only the data needed to produce the material render. There should be no hit to blending performance in a separate SD graph when you do this as your just blending the outputs and not frolicking in the individual graphs.

Its a bit messier to do than using live SBS grahp nodes if you need to tweak a material after blending but loads easier than using Photoshop to blend maps.

gnoop

I am getting weird errors in every forth sbsar export .    I use SD since the very beginning  and still couldn't figure out  why  something that had been working before suddenly start to give you errors.     You mess exposure things  or use some super old tools you did for SD version 2  , or it's a dead link    sbs is still usable and working  and sbsar just doesn't work .    

   Before it always highlighted your syntax errors, now  it sometimes doesn't .          SD is in fact  super unforgiving  and never help you  to find an issue.   You may spent hours to solve puzzles  instead of working for actual art solutions. 

And in Photoshop you could do same   height blend through  faking interactive "mask stack" by groups clipping   and using  same   lighten and subtract  blending modes.    Plus you  are getting truly interactive and well working hand painting   to adjust the mix on the fly.    Plus all the subtle touches you could do with its adjustment layers which are still way more convenient and responsive for subtle things than anything else.

 I unsubscribed from Photoshop last year considering it redundant  but  to be honest neither SPainter no Quixel Mixer  is fully there yet IMO to make it same easy and simple.  So getting back actually