01 Height Map Start | Cobblestone Series

so in order to start off any project right we're going to need to start with developing a graph or a package so i'll come up and add a pbr metallic roughness graph and we can go ahead and call this cobblestone now i'm going to go and leave all of our graph properties the same because really it doesn't matter what we start developing at we'll be able to change it on the fly anyways as we're working in our project so i'll just hit ok and now the first thing that i want to do with this is actually get rid of a particular output and that output's going to be our metallic because we aren't going to really be having any metallic value i'm going to go ahead and just get rid of it so that we don't actually have it in the project i'll just go ahead and bring these guys back up and now i'm going to do a quick little setup to our outputs here so that we're going to get be able to start seeing things in our 3d view i'm going to add a tile generator and i'm going to want to plug this into our normal there so that we get it in our normal map now by default it's going to be set to one i'm going to want something much more intense than one like 10 and i'm also going to want to change my normal format to opengl now depending on the project that you're working on and the final destination you may want to leave it on directx that being said i normally work in opengl i'm just going to select opengl there and it's going to look a little bit better because my actual substance designer package has been set up in the preferences to work with opengl so now that i've got that looking great i'm going to go and plug this guy into our night map down here and i'm just going to get rid of this uniform color now we're not going to be able to see any height in this 3d view here because we actually haven't set it up to be able to visualize the height so i'll come up to materials default definitions physically metallic roughness by default there and we have parallax occlusion on now i'm going to want to use tessellation to actually extrude it out from our mesh i'm going to do a scale of about 15 here and you can see that that's really going to start to blow stuff out for us there which is awesome because once we start developing the height map it's going to look a lot nicer and help us visualize what we're actually doing with our height map i'm just going to bring the tessellation factor down a little bit there because well you know i'm recording while i'm doing this so it's really going to be eating away at my uh my ram and my memory here and hopefully something like that is going to be a little bit nicer something that we can still work with and finally i want to take a look at our aiming occlusion because right now it's all just uh well it's that pure white right so we technically have no shadow information now what i'm going to do for this is actually add a histogram range node onto my height map here and plug that back in so that i'm going to have control over obviously the range of my height map which is going to be directly tied to our amine occlusion so i'll go ahead and get rid of that plug this into our ambient occlusion and you're probably familiar with the amine occlusion node so i'll just add this on and we've got our height ambient occlusion and normal all set up so that's starting to look pretty cool i might actually just bring the height down to point zero eight because it's a little bit harsh by default with the image occlusion so now that i've got this all set up i'm actually going to want to start with the tile generator because we're going to use that for developing the height map for the rocks and so we're going to start working with the rocks first before anything else because they're kind of the pivotal really primary piece for this material so what the tile generator is going to allow us to do is develop all of the rocks together rather than having to do them individually and tiling them all together and trying to make them fit like that so we'll take a look at how we can actually do that by first starting off with this more grid like or square pattern so the first thing i want to do is i want to change the pattern to be square and it looks like it's going to just be one solid square but if we go and play around with the scale right if i bring that down a little bit you can see what it's actually done is just created a bunch of different squares without any kind of gradient effect on the edges there so to start off with that i'm going to change the x amount to b8 and i'm going to change the y amount to be 12 just so that we're getting something a little bit less uniform right we're getting more vertically than we are horizontally here and if i come back down to the scale or the size area i'm going to set the scale to be 0.8 and we'll set the scale random to be 0.5 just so we're getting some nice random different sizes there and this is going to really help contribute to the overall random organic shape of the rocks and so now you're probably thinking okay well like these really aren't looking like rocks anyway so how how are we going to do that well we're going to use a node called the distance node and the distance node is it's a little bit complex as to what it does it's a little bit intricate behind the scenes but essentially what we're going to use it for is to generate some organic shapes that are going to allow us to start defining the overall shapes of each of the rocks so i'm going to add that on right now so we can see what we're actually doing and why we're using this tile generator so we'll go and add a distance node and we're going to want to make sure that if i shift click and steal this selection here plug that in that it's going to all of our outputs and i'm also going to plug this in to the bottom input there the source input so you can see okay now it's kind of beveled everything that's looking a little bit nicer but obviously you know still not looking like rocks so if i change this to be only source uh you can see that really it's pretty much gone back to being uh just pure white and if i play with this slider it's really not going to do much but you know obviously unless i bring it all the way down to zero which has no effect so i'm going to bring this back up to bring it up to five and we'll see now playing around with the tile generator what that's going to do for us so i'll come back down to position and i'm going to offset this by 0.5 so that you know we kind of got like a rock here and then it's kind of cascading down diagonally rather than just straight up and down i'm also going to come down to our luminance value give some different uh you know maybe like 0.5 on the luminance there just for some different grayscale values and now i'm going to play around with the random mask so if i do something like 0.4 and now i come back to our distance here and increase this up you can see what that's done is pretty much just kind of phased everything outwards towards other pixel values and if we take a look at the official documentation its pixel values i believe of greater than 0.5 on a grayscale value so again you can read more about that on the official documentation but essentially what this is going to allow us to do now is if i come back to our tile generator right i can start to add more or less we can start to play around with the scale of all of these as well as potentially the offset right and it might be hard to see right now but this is going to be the basis of the actual geometry for the rocks because if i use an edge detect node right you can see we're going to start to be able to kind of define some of the patterns and the geometry for the rocks so this is a really really powerful way of creating kind of like an entire rock field without having to create each rock individually now i don't want to get too far ahead of myself but i wanted to demonstrate that just to show you that the distance node can be a little bit confusing but when set up properly it can actually create a very powerful workflow coming back to the tile generator i'm going to leave it on my 8 and 12 and i want to come down to our rotation and we can see that right even doing a little bit of random rotation is going to give us some better looking rock shapes and really create the organicness of it i also between our distance and edge detect here i want to give a little bit more waviness to some of these gaps between each of the rocks so i'll go ahead and add a directional warp and i'm gonna go and use a gaussian noise just to get some procedural noise so we can see right the difference between our distance node and our directional warp just kind of adding some waviness to it all for our gaussian i'm going to do something like 13 and maybe play around with the disorder just to kind of break it up maybe something kind of like point six so i don't want something too noisy or too crazy because these are going to be larger forms for our rocks here and so with the edge detect we can now go ahead and define kind of the crevices between the rocks as well as the roundedness of the overall shape right if i come and play around with the edge width it's going to get some smaller rocks with bigger gaps i can play around with the edge roundedness to really round stuff out and for some areas it's actually going to just remove the rocks entirely so i don't want something like that instead i'll maybe have a width of about 2.25 right something relatively decently big but not too big that it's getting rid of any of the rocks and for the roundedness i'll have maybe about six just to kind of sharp off some of those corners so that we're getting some kind of gaps at these intersections here so now that we've got our base shapes defined let's go ahead and soften things up for that i'm going to go and add a bevel node and again shift select to just steal that output there and by default it's going to really round thing things out there but it's going to make everything kind of uniformly white and we're not going to be able to do much with that value so instead of positive on the distance here we can actually bring this slider down and go into the negatives and you can see it will do the inverse of the positives right where the positive will kind of cast if i get a nice area here start to gradient outwards a negative value is going to start to gradient inwards and so i'm going to do probably negative 0.01 something really really slight but then i'm going to do a smoothing of eight and this is again you can see you're gonna create a big uh drastic change right if i just control z that we're going from really really uh pretty much flat information to very rounded very soft and hopefully now you're starting to be able to see kind of the rock geometry or the rock height information that we're going to be able to use without having to craft these all individually and they're just going to automatically fit together so that we're not going to have to worry about any weird intersections finally for this little bit here i want to go ahead and be able to kind of manipulate this gradient a little and so to do that on our bevel i'm going to add a curved node so with this curve node again you can see we're going to have this linear line here but if i double click we'll be able to just kind of play around with this curve or this gradient to fit a more of a look that we want if i come up over top here actually maybe i'll come in on the side instead i just want to kind of round it up at the top there so that it's not just a continuous rounded object here but instead it kind of comes up and then towards the top brighter values of our mesh or our height map it's going to just kind of round off entirely so maybe bring this up just a touch there scale this in and we're going to be able to do something kind of like that so now that we have the initial base shape for these rocks we need to go ahead and uh well we need to go ahead and destroy them now right to actually make them look more like rocks that you would find out in the real world the first way i want to do this is by adding a slope blur grayscale oh we can go ahead and add this guy here and by default it's not going to do much because we need to actually include a slope value and so for this i'll just go ahead and add a gaussian noise and it's going to do a lot of damage on our initial shapes there so the first thing i want to do bring our samples way up right smooth everything out a little bit bring our intensity way down and uh maybe do something like 0.5 for right now right so that our rocks are starting to be visible again but obviously there's a lot of destruction and wear on it now it's still a little intense i'm going to switch the mode from blur down to min and hopefully you can kind of see where i'm going with this is i want to try and get some of these kind of divots off of the sides there i'll also need to go ahead and change the gaussian noise down to something like eight right so that it's much softer much larger and we can also go ahead and play around with the disorder maybe even bring the intensity back up try something like two and something like that's looking pretty cool right we're getting some of those kind of edge distortions now that might be a little intense so let's do something like 1.5 again just to help with that so now that i've got the larger kind of edge wear for the these rocks i want to go ahead and add some smaller detail or smaller destruction that will find more on the surface of the actual rock itself rather than contributing to the overall shape i'll go ahead add a dirt one node and you can see that a dirt one node is really just a bunch of procedural dots and we have the ability to you know decrease the scale play around with the disorder and all that and this is going to be the basis for a lot of our surface imperfections so on top of this slope blur grayscale i'm going to add a blend node bring this out a little bit and we'll plug this in now obviously i don't want to just blend this over top right we actually wanted to kind of chip away from our rocks here so i'm going to go and change the blending mode to be subtract and that's starting to look a little better but again really really noisy so i'm going to go and change the opacity down to something like 0.05 so that it's really almost just kind of barely visible on our 2d image but you can see that it's really got a lot of detail for our rocks now i find that this kind of uniform kind of tiling you know dots and all that stuff over our mesh doesn't really look that good and so instead i want to go ahead and actually break up a lot of this so that we have some smoother faces tied in with some you know a little bit rougher surface so in order to do that on our dirt here i just kind of scroll out i'm going to add a histogram scan node and so this is going to just allow us to essentially you know scan through a histogram or a gradated value or image so i might just bump up the contrast to something like 0.4 ish and now you can see that uh as i scan through right we're gonna be able to get a lot of this uh these surfaces here without getting too much roughness overall and actually i might go and just decrease the contrast maybe back down to something like point one bring the position maybe down to 0.3 just so that we're getting some kind of surface roughness without completely just destroying the entire rock and finally i want to go ahead and do some distortion to these dots here and we're going to do the same thing pretty much that we did for the rocks just by adding a slope blur grayscale and i'm going to go ahead and just actually plug in this gaussian right there and i just hit alt and select it on the connection socket to add this little kind of organizer there now if we take a look right we can see that it's kind of doing a bit of a trippy effect now that's not exactly what we want but if we go and increase the samples decrease the intensity there and if i come and play around with the mode to be something like min right i'm going to just give us kind of these irregular shapes here and this is going to allow us to get some more believable looking uh kind of pox into our rock shapes and now finally i want to just do one more pass over our rocks here using pretty much the same methodology that we've been doing by adding a blend and in our top layer here i'm going to go ahead and add a fractal some base and so we can see that this is just a bunch of noise right so if we can go ahead change our blending mode to be subtract and then change the overall opacity to be something like 0.1 this is going to provide a lot of that roughness over our entire rocks here and maybe even 0.1 is a little bit harsh so let's do something like 0.05 just a little bit smoother and if we take a look up over top here right it's just giving us a lot of surface information really for minimal effort now this next part is where we're going to introduce some more surface destruction or surface wear but i find it's one of the more enjoyable aspects of getting to work with height creation because we're going to make cracks no we're not going to make crack we're going to make cracks plural so the way that we can go about making cracks is pretty much all stemmed from one particular node and the node we're going to be using is a cells 2 node so hopefully you can already kind of see right kind of the crack like nature of this particular node and i actually go ahead and i use two so the top one i like to go ahead and make it a scale of a little bit smaller right now obviously this is much larger than what we had by default but now if i go and change this one to something a little bit bigger like five and maybe just double click that so that loads right so that we get these to kind of play off of each other now i also want to make sure i play around with the disorder so that we're not getting kind of you know the same cracks but one's a little bit smaller but it looks kind of the same so they're kind of overlapping each other and i'm also going to change the edge width down to b zero so in this case zero doesn't actually mean zero um it just means really really thin and same thing for these guys here well again i keep forgetting to double click on that so maybe if i do something like 0.5 just to have it a little bit thicker than these guys here now i want to show you a really cool way that we can actually like i said use these to play off of each other right so some kind of areas might have several fractures in it but some other ones might not and so we can make it more organic and contextual to the different areas of our mesh so that it's not just kind of cracks everywhere so first things first i'll go ahead and just blend these together so that we have something to see as we work and we're going to be able to just leave this on copy because i don't want to add any kind of different blending modes or blending operations i'll just bring these up just a touch there and so conceptually where i want to start with this is i want to kind of break up these cells and just be able to mask some of these off so that some of these lines in here are going to show up in some of the cracks or some of these areas and they're not going to show up in some of the other ones well the way that i can actually go ahead and isolate each one of these cells here is by using what is called a flood fill node now if we take a look right we can see that each one has got its own kind of vector map thingy going on here and the flood fill note has its own range of or own suite of different nodes so if i just drag this off start to type flood fill you can see that we have a lot of flood fill nodes here and these are only going to work if a flood fill node is plugging into them so that's something to be aware of so for this particular one like i said right i want to be able to mask kind of random ones off well i'm going to be inclined to go ahead and use the random grayscale so we're almost getting there right if i go ahead and plug this into the opacity you can see that we're kind of getting you know lighter cracks over there you know more severe cracks over there but it's not exactly on or off right i don't really want to kind of have like lighter smaller cracks in one area and darker ones than the other i want to have kind of a more binary mask so in order to do that again what i'll do is on our flood fill to random grayscale i'm simply just going to add a histogram scan and so this way if i just bring the contrast up and i start to slide up the position right you can see that we're going to get all of our cells here just kind of showing up at random intervals and so this is what's going to allow us to play around with these cracks here so that even if i go ahead and start you know playing around with these a little bit it's going to show up in different cells it can even bring oops the position down so if i want to mask off some different areas and just kind of have some random ones it's going to allow me to do that so i don't know if you think that's really cool i personally think it's pretty cool but let's keep going now that i have all of these cracks kind of defined i want to add a little bit more organicness to them because right now they're you know pretty straight and if i'm to go ahead and actually just blend this onto our height information and just using a multiply node here you can see right it's pretty straight and like it looks okay but we definitely want to start to continue developing it just a little bit more before we call it done so to do that i'm going to add a directional warp and i'm going to use a clouds 2 node just to give it some randomness so you can see right we're giving it a little bit larger scale forms there we can play around with obviously the angle as well as the overall intensity so i don't really want to do something too high i actually may just probably going to want to leave that on 10. that's going to give us you know kind of imperfection scratches or cracks there i also want to go ahead and actually have these cracks kind of conform a little bit to the geometry of the rocks themselves another way we can go about doing that kind of stuff is if i go and add a not a vector morph if i click away there a vector warp node and plug these cracks in by default it's not going to do anything because we actually need to plug in a vector map so okay how do we go about making a vector map well vector maps are pretty easy to make you can really kind of use any gray scale or sorry any color gradient but to make our vector map here i'm actually going to go ahead and you know use our most up-to-date rock information run it through a gradient map here and i'm going to need to update these to more gradient or vector map colors so a traditional vector map is if we take a look at our gradient editor just kind of a greeny to orangey colored map so what i'll do is pretty much just replicate that right making our rocks kind of orangey and our kind of spaces in between there a little bit greeny so now when i plug that in you can see all chaos and pandemonium ensues um now we just have a really high intensity so if i bring that down right bring it to zero and start to kind of inch it up a little bit it might be a little bit hard to see right now however if i just plug this in and i start to play around with it again it's actually conforming a little bit to the geometry of our rocks here so it's going to start kind of bending and organically moving and we're going to get that pretty much all for free just by using the information from our rocks so now i don't want to overdo it i'm also going to maybe just use opengl normal format right because that's the one i'm working in but at the end of the day it doesn't really make too much of a difference and i might do something like i'll do 0.02 so that's starting to look pretty sweet and maybe find that uh the cracks are a little bit too uh you know too strong so i might go ahead and just bring this down to something like .02 let's see what that looks like yeah maybe something like that and finally i want to be able to mask off cracks from other rocks and actually maybe bring this up to something like .05 there yeah something more like that and like i said i want to go ahead and actually just mask off the cracks from some of these rocks because i don't want them to be on everything so like we did down here with our flood fill we pretty much have a similar format that we're going to be able to use our flood fill node with so i'm going to just duplicate these guys here i'm instead going to plug in our rocks right so that we're going to blood fill the rocks give them a random grayscale value and give us a binary mask now if i plug this into the opacity of our blend between our cracks and our rocks well it's going to be tough to see on there but if i go ahead and start playing with our position right i can start adding more cracks to rocks and start taking them away and so i'm maybe going to want to do something like let's try 0.2 and that's starting to look pretty sweet you

Channel: Get Learnt w/ Chunck

Views: 3,567

Keywords: 3D, tutorial, material, texture, substance, substance designer, get learnt, course, cobblestone

Id: jIFs3GYQNcs

Length: 30min 50sec (1850 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 16 2020