Add Impressive Variation with the Flood Fill Node in Substance Designer | Javier Perez

hey guys my name is javier perez and i'm currently a senior material artist at playstation visual arts service group i've been in the industry for about nine years now and in this lesson we'll be diving into the flood fill node within substance designer i'm not necessarily going to show you guys how to create a full on material but more so dive into the details of what the flood fill is what can it do and how it can add so much more variation onto our tiling patterns within substance designer so let's get started so to begin in our last lesson um we went over how to create different tiling patterns so to get started with the flood fill i'm just going to open that last file but um anyone else you guys can just create any sort of pattern within substance designer using any of the tile generators but i'm just opening the old file that we used in the last video so we can just get a head start on some different things that we can do within this guy so let's see i'm going to choose let's try this one that we did earlier so this one's just a basic kind of brick pattern so i'm just going to plug this guy in and i'm going to go ahead and delete this guy and i'm actually going to [Music] copy this and then paste it and then we can rename this into flood fill demo cool so to bring up the flood fill node all we have to do is just start searching for your different nodes and we're going to bring in the flood fill node now uh by itself it's not it's not necessarily um made to be used by itself uh you'll notice what happens when we plug in any tiling pattern to this guy we're gonna get these different kind of colors and different gradient values and with this you're not gonna get much out of it you're supposed to plug this in to one of the many other flood-filled nodes that there are within substance designer so we have the flood fill to be box color gradient grayscale position etc one other thing to note about the flood fill is that we have to have um kind of these outlines with within our pattern that we plug in so for example if one of these was touching or something like that so basically if the pattern was kind of broken so let's just i'll show you guys what happens when we bring in a different flood fill and i'm just going to break the tiling on this guy so i'm just going to bring a regular shape in here and i'm going to do a blend bring this guy in bring this guy in i'm going to change this to just like a circle or something bring down the scale and i'm just going to blend this guy into like something like this so once we add this guy into this flood fill you can kind of see what's going to happen so basically all the different bricks within that range so any bricks touching this kind of interior circle what the flood fill is looking for is looking for solid black lines within your pattern so it does doesn't actually have to be black and white you can still use a grayscale kind of valley like we do here but if we had some connecting lines in between these guys it might work but just keep in mind if we start getting some weird colors like this um watch out and make sure that you have um always connecting lines within this guy one other thing to note is that sometimes when you first load in the flood fill node you might you might not see it how i see it currently in the 2d view and that's because we have to turn on the show checker board and that'll give us these nice kind of gradations and colors that you see here so just make sure to show the checkerboard if not you're going to get just kind of this opacity looking transparent thing kind of what we have here so i'm just going to go ahead and delete this stuff right now so now that we have this guy on its own um let's go ahead and see what the different options are that we can plug this guy into so again we have the color gradient grayscale position random color etc so the first one i want to show you guys is the gradient now i'm just going to plug this guy in and you can instantly see what's going to happen we're going to get these different uh gradient values within our pattern now doing this if we had just started with this and try to add gradient values it might be a little bit kind of difficult to get the different gradients within this guy but with the flood fill node it's processing everything and then we're able to just get gradients onto just our bricks now the one thing that we're going to use this guy for is to get some nice um kind of variation when the light hits on the normals so i'm actually going to turn on the tessellation on this guy first that way we can kind of see what's going to happen so i'm just going to bump this guy up bring up the scale and already we do have some nice kind of variation because we do have these grayscale values but one thing you'll notice is that they're all pretty much on the same plane so they're all laying flat now if we just plug this guy in we can kind of see what'll happen so instantly because we have these gradients on this um on this tiling pattern we have the the whites to the blacks we're getting the the peaks of the white going to this black and they're all going in the same direction and that's because within the settings of the grading we have a few different things that we can play with my favorite one is to use the angle variation and what this angle variation does is that it's going to give the gradient a different kind of rotation on each uh kind of brick pattern and that's why we're getting this kind of cool effect so it almost looks like we have some kind of broken bricks and they're coming up from the ground or something like that this might be a little too aggressive as in it's it's just extruded too much so what i like to do personally is just take a blend node i'm going to set my regular pattern at the bottom and it's going to take this guy i'm just going to set it to opacity on a copy and then we're just going to plug this guy in and kind of see what's going on so that's something this is a little bit more doable and we can kind of go through the different if we set this back to one we can actually go through the different values you can kind of see the different effects that it does or sorry the different blend nodes and you can kind of see the different effects that it does so one cool thing that you'll notice when we do an ad it looks like the the kind of um [Music] the pattern is actually getting chipped away almost like if we were sculpting it in zbrush or something like that and this is kind of a cool effect that we can also get with the gradient node but we can actually push this further even more if we wanted to so one way to do that is we can actually start chaining these guys a little bit so what i'm going to do is i'm actually going to unplug this guy and just put it back so we can kind of see our default and what i'm going to do is i'm actually going to take another flood fill here i'm going to duplicate it and i'm just going to set the random seed to something different so we do have the angle variation at 1 but because we have a random c we can actually just move it up or down and we'll get a different result from our last node now what we can do from here is that we can take a blend node and i'm just going to blend these two together and we can go through the different kind of blend modes and we can actually use the mint darken is a good one so already with the mint dark and you can kind of see what's going on we're getting the gradient from two different um positions and so one gradient is coming in from this way one gradient is coming from this way and we're getting this nice kind of hard cut here and it's happening on every single one of these bricks so what we can do is let me just delete this guy right here let's just plug this in and see what we're getting so now we're getting kind of like this chiseled look on these stones but again it doesn't stop here we can actually just duplicate these guys so i'm just gonna do a duplicate i'm going to take this gradient move the random seed i'm going to take this guy because we have already have on our node we're going to add a third cut in here so you can kind of see what's going on so you can actually keep kind of chaining these guys on more and more and we're going to start getting this kind of nice chiseled chip effect which is really cool and again if we wanted to if we thought this wasn't kind of what we want we can actually just bring this guy in and then blend it into it here and then we can mess with the different blend modes and see what kind of effects we get so right here on this one we did it on an ad so now we're going to get some more kind of chiseled look on this these guys so it looks like we're kind of beating down the corners and what's nice is that we're getting like enough variation that it's not hitting all of these guys but just a few of them so it's giving us some nice kind of variation within this tiling pattern now let's go over some other ways we can use this guy the cool thing about the flood fill is that you pretty much only have to create one for said pattern that you're using and you could just plug in whichever other nodes into this guy that you want now um let's go back into this original tile generator now we added these different grayscale values within the actual node itself because we had the luminance random and whatnot now if we had a pattern that we created with different tile generators and all that we might not have the ability to add this grayscale value into set patterns so for example let's just take this tile generator and i'm going to actually turn off the luminance random on this guy now say we had something super intricate where we didn't have this option or even in the tile generator we just didn't have the option the cool thing about the flood fill is that we're able to introduce grayscale values into your original pattern because within the different list of flood fill nodes that we have we have one that's called flood fill to grayscale and it's exactly the name um it's exactly as the name says we're gonna get some grayscale values from our flood fill in our original pattern so if we plug in this guy we can start messing with the different luminance random values and you can kind of see that we're starting to get some just by adjusting this guy so in my opinion it gives you a little bit more control than just adding different grayscale values within the actual tile generator but it's also a great way to add just some different variation on a tiling pattern that might not have the ability to do that within the generator so just keep that in mind in case you wanted to add some variation into a pattern so now that we have this we can actually just do a blend on this guy i'm going to take our uh original pattern i'm gonna take our new grayscale values and then we're just gonna do an opacity and then we're able to kind of control how strong and how light these guys are which is really nice so and the cool thing about this is you'll notice so here's a great example actually when we did the ad on this guy because we added this flood fill you'll notice that we lost all the different grayscale values from this guy which um you know maybe you want these grayscale values while still having this nice uh kind of edge shipping what we can do is kind of do the same thing i'm just going to duplicate this guy over here and i'm just going to plug the flood fill node into here i'm going to take our original pattern and now we have these nice values what we can do here is add a blend i'm going to plug this guy in place on top just lower the opacity and not only do we have those original grayscale valleys but we also have the chipping from the original kind of edge chipping with the flood filter gradient that we were doing so we can just plug this guy in and now we have the different kind of height values within the bricks but we also have some nice chipping going on too and again we don't have to just keep it on the copy if we want we can actually just go through the different values and see what we got so maybe a different mode works better like this one we're able to keep these nice hard edges but we're also bringing in the full on spectrum of the grayscale values so this is kind of giving us a cool effect here one of my favorite uses for the flood fill node is being able to add some overlays and some variation onto our tiling pattern so let's go ahead and do that really quick so a lot of people when they add overlays they usually bring them in so for example i'm just going to bring in one of these grunge maps that we have within substance designer and i'm just going to do a blend right here so i'm just going to bring this guy in and i'm just going to set it to something like you know what let's actually bring a grunge map that's kind of more like for example this guy this guy has an overlaying kind of full-on um continuous pattern on this guy so we have the streaks going on so i'm just going to plug this guy in i'm gonna set the opacity down to something like this and let's plug this guy in so a lot of people right now they'd probably call it done and kind of you know keep this probably mess with the opacity just a little bit more so it's not as strong but still have that pattern so the the thing about this pattern is that this this kind of grunge overlay is a continuous streaking going on the vertical kind of uh plane now the one thing you'll notice is that it seems kind of odd for the streaking to be kind of going all the same direction on say if this was a floor pattern or something like that maybe you want might want that but i'd like to give this some more variation so what if we wanted let's say the grunge going in all different directions kind of like we had in the in the flood filled a gradient we had the ability to change the angle variation so we can switch it up what if we had the ability to do that within a grunge or anything you overlay for example so one cool way to do that is we can actually bring in a let's see let's do a flood fill to random color so when you plug this guy in you're going to get some random colors which is kind of see it might seem a little weird but this is a great mask to be used in conjunction with the vector warp node so i'm just going to bring in a vector warp node right now and i'm just going to do vector warp grayscale the grayscale gives us the ability to still plug in our original grayscale input but the vector map is actually looking for a color here so what we can do here is just plug in any uh grayscale that we want we're going to plug in this flood filled a random color as our vector map and instantly you can kind of see what's happening here all the different um colors are giving it a different direction to take this grunge and just kind of move it in a different direction so for example if we had that and kind of see how it starts breaking up the pattern so i'm just going to plug this guy in and that just gives us a little bit more variation it's just it's not as kind of just throwing on a simple grunge and just kind of calling it done this actually moves the different patterns so we have different um kind of overlays within each brick and it's not just a continuous overlay so i'm just going to plug this guy in and just mess with the opacity one cool way to use this would be if we had created cracks so i'm just gonna bring in the cells and kind of show you guys that so i'm just gonna do a cells one bring up the scale and i'm just going to do an edge detect so i'm just going to pretend these are like some cracks that i created here now if we overlaid these said cracks on here it might look weird because all the cracks are interconnecting and that's just not necessarily how it happened in the real world so the cool thing about this vector warp that we have is that it changes position of each different kind of area of the cracks so now we have something that's a little bit more believable and they're not as connected or conjoined so we get a more natural feeling on this now we have these cracks or let's say if we just kept this grunge map and but the one thing i'm not liking is that we have them placed all over the place so how can we kind of fix this the cool thing is again with the flood fill node we have another node that can help us with that so we can actually bring in the random grayscale onto this guy and we can plug the flood fill in here and what this does is it essentially does the same as this grayscale but without the kind of parameters and sliders that we can manipulate here so with this one it's just going to give you straight up just random grayscale values as the name implies but the cool thing about this guy is that we can actually bring in a histogram select and with this histogram select we can actually bump up the contrast and we can start messing with the position and range so this gives us a nice black and white mask that we can use as an alpha to tell the blend okay i only want the certain grunge or cracks or wherever in certain areas of my texture so we can actually go back into our position we can if we want we can mess where these cracks are it's kind of a random effect or we can just kind of bring down the range and say oh i only want them in a few different spots so this already is giving us way more control on the variation that we have within our overlays um of our texture and again like i said the cool thing about this is that all i'm doing is just using a single flood fill you don't have to necessarily go in and duplicate this five four times to whichever one flood fill you want to use you can consistently keep using the same flood fill especially if your pattern is staying the same the whole time um you you just don't need to bring in more than one flood fill now let's say we're happy with our current kind of pattern and whatnot but what if we wanted to do something crazy like adding another pattern within our pattern so let's say we want to add like a specific kind of i don't know we could do bolts we could do just another tiling grid pattern what if we wanted to do that so the great thing again the flood fill has another node that can help us with that and that is the flood fill mapper grayscale what this guy does is we can plug in our original pattern and then under the pattern input 1 that is where we're going to just plug in our shape or whatever we want to kind of tile on set pattern so for example i'm just going to bring in a random tile generator here and i'm just going to set it to the default values or just keep it at the default values of the square cubes and we plug this into our pattern 1 and instantly within 2db you can kind of see what's going on it's taking this pattern and it's applying it onto every single one brick that we have within this um texture so let's actually blend this guy in kind of see what the effect it gives us here i'm going to set this to something like maybe multiply and just set it to something zero and there we go say we wanted like a grid on these guys for some reason we can we have that ability to do that and the cool thing about uh the mapper is that we do have a few different options that we can play with so we can play with the scale of these guys of how much like the pattern is in there so you know we're it's still kind of keeping true to the to the the underlying bricks but um it's just messing with the actual grid that you have plugged in here so i'm just going to set that back here and we can actually bump this up to like a two or something and we don't necessarily have to just have one tiling pattern it kind of works the same way as the tile sampler where we're able to continuously bring up the different pattern inputs so let's say on this guy we want to do i don't know like a disk or something so let's go ahead and do that like a disk plug this guy in here and now we have these kind of disc patterns on this guy so this is kind of cool so there are ways to add like say we wanted um just for example bolts around this guy this would be a great way to add kind of i don't know like a different tiling pattern on this guy one cool way one cool interesting technique we can do here is we can actually just bring in a single shape here so i'm just going to do that i'm going to scale this down just a bit i'm going to bring in this into pattern one delete this tile generator here i'm going to set this flood mapper back down to our original so we can do something like this now from here what we can do is we can just start messing with the size of this guy so we actually just let me actually keep the scale random off on this guy and then let's actually set this to subtract and then i'm going to go back in here i'm going to change the shape of this guy on the x so now we have kind of like this intricate almost like pattern within our bricks so it's just a nice way to if we had certain patterns or certain things we see in our reference that we'd like to add onto our our already pre-existing bricks we have the ability to do that so the last flood fill node that i'd like to show you guys is the flood fill to bounding box size now what this guy does is that it takes the size of the different shapes in your original tiling pattern and it makes a mask a grayscale mask based on that so for example if we plug in the flood fill this guy it's going to give us a mass depending on the size of the different shapes that we have within our tiling patterns so if you notice these bricks are actually slightly bigger than these or vice versa we can change the x if we want so this is a nice way to actually create a mass based on the size of certain bricks within your pattern so for example we can take again our histogram select and we can just bump up the contrast and just kind of plug this guy in so this is a really quick and easy way to get um certain patterns or masks that we can use within our kind of blends that we do another great example of this is let's just take the actual tile generator and we're actually just going to change the scale on this just slightly so we're going to go into the settings we're going to do a scale random and we're just going to scale some of them just slightly so we're going to bring in a new flood fill i'm just going to duplicate this guy and then maybe this one can kind of illustrate you guys what exactly is happening with this one so i'm just gonna duplicate this one as well and plug this guy in and as you see with this is that it's kind of super subtle but you'll notice that the bigger blocks are actually a wider value than the counterpart of the smaller ones so it's gradually going from this lighter gray to this darker gray so if we actually go into our histogram select again [Music] plug this guy in bump up the contrast just bring up the range and position let's bring this guy up we can actually just get a mass for let me just get it super close here it's there we go we can actually just get a mass for the bricks that are the largest within the pattern which is um sometimes it's useful depending on the tiling pattern that you have so if we actually kind of uh bump the random scale on this guy so we have more kind of um different scales on these guys we can go back into the flood field of bounding box and you'll notice that we're introducing another grayscale value so once you kind of go further back you can kind of see the darker areas and the lighter areas but this is just a great way to get just another mass so if we wanted to go into our blend and we only wanted like certain kind of characteristics on the larger bricks whereas the smaller bricks don't get that we could go ahead and do that so i'm just going to use this guy as a blend and let's go ahead and just add some more cracks onto this guy and we're only going to put them on the vertical planes i believe yes so now the cracks are only on these guys so it's a really quick and easy way to just get cracks on certain areas uh depending on the size so let's bring down the opacity on this guy and let's actually turn these guys off so we can kind of better see what's going on here so now as you can see only the cracks are going with every other line within the pattern which is really cool and that about covers the main uses of the flood fill node we were able to get a bunch of different customization into our tiling textures with different gradients mass and colors that we introduced within our flood fill so it's a nice way to just kind of push what we already have within our tiling patterns and just kind of give them a little bit more uniqueness to them i hope you guys found this useful and stay tuned for more tutorials on this channel i'll see you guys in the next one you

Channel: NVIDIA Studio

Views: 4,475

Keywords: NVIDIA, NVIDIA Studio, RTX Studio, NVIDIA Creators, NVIDIA Design

Id: eTud3wUQFnQ

Length: 27min 57sec (1677 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 28 2020