How to achieve solar crystal like shapes in substance designer

Finnn

Hey friends

I am working on a Solar Panel Material right now.

This is my current WIP:

I want to introduce a crystal like pattern, but have had no luck yet trying different setups.
Any idea ?

 I have tried to start from a tile sampler looking like this:

gnoop

My quick attempt

Finnn

Thanks that is a very accurate result.

havent used the non_uniform_directional_warp_grayscale

much before, I guess I should

Thanks alot!

Finnn

modified your graph a little bit and added it to color and roughness

jStins

Not sure if your shader supports it, but I think this would do well with a smooth clear coat on top of the base panel material. The base color should also be darker with the blue hues being added by the reflected environment. (Sorry for the unsolicited crit!)

gnoop

Strictly speaking those "crystal" patterns are some slant in micro crystal  structure . Perhaps better is to make it very subtle normal map variation rather than roughness and a little bit  color one

Finnn

I tweaked the color and roughness values a bit.
@gnoop I try to establish the crystal in the normal map aswell. But according to my reference, some crystals "blink" with a very low roughness value.
@jStins I am using PBR Metallic/Roughness and I am going to render in Marmoset, perhaps also in UE4 and Unity. Not sure how to achieve the clear coat effect though. Couldnt find anything quickly on the web. Maybe you got an idea

Finnn

This is with the crystals in the normal channel. I tweaked the little stripe details down. Looks pretty good imo
When I throw it into Marmoset I will experiment with the refraction maps etc, maybe I can get some kind of depth in there.

jStins

I haven't used Marmoset in a few years, but the end of this page mentions being able to setup a multi-pass material to create a clear coat effect. The image at the bottom also illustrates how you could cheat the effect with a second piece of geometry lying on top with a transparent shader applied. https://marmoset.co/posts/tutorial-create-convincing-glass/

It also looks like UE4 has native support for clear coat materials. https://docs.unrealengine.com/en-US/Engine/Rendering/Materials/HowTo/ClearCoatDualNormal/index.html

Finnn

Will defently look into those. I think rendering another mesh on top is the easiest way. I couldnt get it right with a quick try though. Will try another time.

Here is some quick render I made in MS

Thanks you both for your feedback.

gnoop

No , I meant not making small bumps  by connecting "normal" node  but rather putting very  low contrast (around 0,5 gray) textures of different maybe inverted gradients   to channels of normal map itself .  With rgba combine node.  Starting  from only single channel at first

poopipe

You want to take the grayscale values from your crystal pattern and use them to bend a normal.  
If you don't want to do the maths you could probably feed it into a flood fill then flood fill to gradient before converting to normal
It'll still look lumpy without a clearcoat but will give you the sort of result gnoop describes 

Finnn

I honestly do not exactly get what you guys are talking about.
"Bend" normals, like having a very high difference in value/direction that each crystal has on the normal map ?

poopipe

Yes. 

Each crystal wants a different normal direction 

Finnn

Will try that

Eric Chadwick

I used a similar bending effect recently for the brushed patterns on velvet. When you see hand marks on velvet, it's the microfibers being bent. 

I took a grunge map, rotated it 90 degrees in the red channel. So then the red of the normal map is perturbing the velvet one way, while the green is bending another way. Might give you some ideas.

https://github.com/KhronosGroup/glTF-Sample-Models/blob/ecd19d7d5b3684b5cf3234feb7f0c095fb445018/2.0/GlamVelvetSofa/README.md#khr_materials_sheen-and-khr_materials_specular

Finnn

Eric Chadwick said:

I used a similar bending effect recently for the brushed patterns on velvet. When you see hand marks on velvet, it's the microfibers being bent. 

I took a grunge map, rotated it 90 degrees in the red channel. So then the red of the normal map is perturbing the velvet one way, while the green is bending another way. Might give you some ideas.

https://github.com/KhronosGroup/glTF-Sample-Models/blob/ecd19d7d5b3684b5cf3234feb7f0c095fb445018/2.0/GlamVelvetSofa/README.md#khr_materials_sheen-and-khr_materials_specular

ohhhh I see what you did there. I abandoned this material or rather called it done. But I will keep that one in mind. I never manipulate the color channels individually, but it makes sense when working with normals to achieve the strong angle difference of the vectors.

But I lolled, I have never seen anyone using git for 3D art projects haha.