Substance Designer Improvement

jStins

I use Substance Designer at work, but need to develop my skills further. I'll post my progress here. C&C very welcome!

Starting with a boring old brick...





I'm referencing Megascans materials as I get started...



Please let me know if you have any feedback. Thanks!

BohSheh

Hey! Great to see more people using designer!
Few feedback that I can point out

1)Brick still look soft and new to me . I think its something to do with the height map .
2)Height map lack of depth and crevices.
3)Add more green to the color variation. 

jStins

Hey @BohSheh thanks for the feedback. I've gotten a couple comments on the height map for the brick. I will revisit it and also add some more color variation.

In the meantime I made this floor tile substance. I wanted something that required more detailed shape generation. Question: I would typically make a pattern like this in illustrator and pass that to substance (for speed mostly, maybe I'll get faster making these shapes in designer as well). What is the benefit of doing everything in designer (from a production perspective)? It sometimes feels like using a bar of soap to build a house, but maybe there is rationale for building all the shapes in designer that I'm not seeing. 

Anyway, kept everything in designer for this one. Happy to hear any feedback. Thanks!

teodar23

The reason some people do everything inside SD is bragging rights. There's no real benefit and i doubt there is a company (employer) that has only SD licences and no PS, Illustrator, etc licences (all Adobe products btw). So if you want an extra challenge sure, do it all inside SD. But i prefer working smart not hard. 

jStins

@teodar23 Thanks for the response. That was kinda my impression. I am trying to think about effective ways to make the pattern easy to adjust in the substance to take advantage of creating the shapes there. 

I made some adjustments to the Brick substance based on feedback I got from @BohSheh and a couple other folks. I'm thinking about how I can extend it to make it more useful in creating different types of brick, levels of wear, etc... Happy to hear any additional feedback. Thanks!



 

BohSheh

Hey @jStins ,
it looks less muddy , looks so better now!

A couple more feedback for you,

1) It easier to make bricks by understand how its build .
-First we have a clean brick .
-Stack brick on top of cement , brick might TILT slightly due to even amount of cement applied beneath .
-Brick wall complete , starts wear and tear .

If we follow this steps , the should be no cement  within the crack unless the brick was wounded first . 

2)The wall looks old , but the cement still looks fresh :P.
3)The cement now blend with the brick nice and smooth , give some crevices between it for certain bricks .

Thats all I can think of , good luck!