Da Dawg Bowl 2 - spaceships n' things ✧NEW✧ Advanced Normal to Roughness filter for Substance

ActionDawg

I'm doing things.


Advanced Normal to Roughness Node - Transform Normal and Height map info into accurate Roughness info for easy free detail!
https://gum.co/n2r
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/lV2Z2a


Pixel8r v1.5 - Create retro style textures directly in Painter and Designer
https://gum.co/pixel8r
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/4brm5l

Scifi Research Ship:
My current work in progress. Doing an exterior and interior scene for it:

ActionDawg

I've added automatic Gloss map support to Advanced Normals to Roughness

ActionDawg

Better Edge Detector - Find edges in textures with 5 different detection modes
https://gum.co/sbsbed
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/zAlbD6

ActionDawg

As a fun experiment, I've implemented shadow maps purely with Substance Designer's pixel processor. What your'e seeing here is completely black and unlit, and the ShadowCaster node is plugged up as the Emissive texture.


It needs only a baked world space position map, which it then compares against the light source many times to find occlusions. It's extremely slow and nonviable, just a fun experiment The weird trailing band artifact is sadly a limitation of the technique, though I could reduce it a bit with my (currently hidden) threshold variable.

It would be cool to have access to the mesh data in the future so things like this would be properly possible. Right now there is nothing out there for Substance which can cast shadows despite there being many baked lighting filters available. The closest thing is the PBR Render node in Designer, which can approximate height-field shadow casting, but it can't support arbitrary 3D meshes like this generator does.

An interesting side-effect of the technique is that with no extra effort this can "bake" across texture sets by providing it with two position maps, though it's not configured to do that here.