Distance Field bits for Substance Designer

poopipe

Hello, 

I made This so I thought I'd pop it on Gumroad 

What you get is a few (more to come) primitive shapes made of distance fields,  nodes for boolean operations on distance fields, a mask generator with nice smooth edges and a trippy distance field visualiser. 

With these tools you can easily create masterpieces such as those pictured below or alternatively do something constructive like make complex masks or combine heightmaps with soft intersections

gnoop

Wonder what 's an advantage over default distance or bevel nodes?   Could you explain please

poopipe

You can absolutely build the same sort of thing with distance nodes and a bit of fiddling around - I use that sort of technique a lot for converting handpainted masks to distance fields for further processing. 

The main benefit of the included primitives is that the shapes are defined by a function that emanates from the defined central point so  your distance field stretches from 0 to infnity rather than you having to explicitly define a distance either side of a defined shape as you do using distance nodes. 

The magic bits in this package are really the boolean operations and mask generator though 

The boolean nodes support smoothed intersections so you can add fillets at joins between shapes etc.  This will work with heightmaps (invert the values on the way in) as well as basic shapes so you can Eg. punch holes in a heightmap and filet off the edges

The mask generator is nice because it can give you a black and white mask with an anti aliased edge that's sharper and cleaner than blurring the result of a histogram scan/select/whatever.

You can certainly fudge all this stuff with standard nodes,  I built this because I wanted a general solution that didn't require lots of manual tweaking

gnoop

Thanks poopipe   . it's definitely interesting .

poopipe

I decided I should try doing something vaguely constructive with this stuff so I knocked together a couple of little dioramas. 

I'm very much enjoying mixing heightmap info with the df_boolean nodes - beats the shit out of being stuck with just max and signed add.

I ended up creating a load of extra nodes that help out in terms of combining distance fields with "normal" heightmaps - I'll get those into the gumroad package once I've tidied them all up. 

Polynaught

Would buy, but Paypal is missing from payment options.

poopipe

someone else built a similar set of nodes since that are more fully featured (including angled bevels etc)  I'd recommend grabbing those instead.  cant remember who it was now I'm afraid but it was posted on here somewhere

Polynaught

thx for pointing that out, these I guess:

https://www.artstation.com/marketplace/p/ojWxD/substance-designer-signed-distance-fields-vol-2

poopipe

yep, that looks like an updated version of it. 

I'd go with that - wouldn't have made mine if it existed at the time