Beginner: Stylized Brick Wall in Substance Designer

whether you're new to substance designer or looking to expand your texture style palette this next material is sort of a rite of passage when it comes to texture making today we're going to make this stylized brick wall texture we'll go through the entire process from beginning to end while also explaining the reasoning behind certain choices that add more realism to our end result let's get started okay so we're in substance designer let's create a new substance okay i'm going to choose the pbr metallic roughness template and let's call this stylized brick wall uh let's keep the size mode to absolute and the width and height at 2k and we're going to make sure it's on 16 bits per channel all right let's hit okay all right so here's how i have my layout of substance designer it might look a little bit different if you're just opening it up for the first time but what you can do is you can drag these panels around so you probably have something similar this what i'm just going to do is i'm just going to drag my 2d view over here to the left and my 3d view below that and then just resize it a little bit so that we have more real estate so i can show you more of the graph editor but we can also take a look at what's going on in the 2d view and the 3d view here i also have my explorer down here in the corner you probably have it on the left side here i have it down here because it's nice and small and i can keep access to my parameters and we got this nice big graph view in the middle so we've got our graph here and a couple of things are happening so we have our outputs automatically hooked up and we have some defaults here and the first thing i like to do when i set up a graph is a couple things first of all we're going to go to the materials menu in the 3d view so go to materials default physically metallic roughness tessellation so choose tessellation here and then we're going to go and increase the tessellation factor all the way up to 16 and i'm going to add a tiny bit of scale let's say somewhere around 2 ish and so now when we add height to our texture it's going to displace the geometry on this cube here the next thing i like to do is i'm going to hit spacebar and i'm going to add a blend node and i'm going to hook this blend node up to a bunch of these outputs so that all i need to do is input something into this blend nodes foreground and it'll chain react to the rest of these nodes that i'm using so the first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to take the output of this blend and put it into this normal map here don't worry about it being red it's going to change in a little bit then i'm going to go to where it says ambient occlusion down here and i'm going to delete this uniform color and i'm going to hit space bar and add an ambient occlusion node here and i'm going to hook that up to it and then i'm going to take this blend and also output it to this ambient occlusion next i'm going to go down to my height output here and i'm going to delete this uniform color and i'm going to import this blend into the height so you should have this blend going into the normal here which goes into the normal output and also the ambient occlusion node into our ambient occlusion output and straight into the height output so first off i'm going to go hit spacebar and add a tile sampler we're going to use tile sampler a lot in this tutorial so if we go to our tile sampler and we look at our properties here i'm going to change the x and y amounts so you can see the x and y amount give us more or less of these squares in this case so i'm going to choose 3 for the x and for the y let's go with 6. now keep the y amount even so that this texture can tile if i zoom out here and hit the spacebar you can see how this texture will tie on it's going to tile evenly if i if i scroll down here and i go to position and i change the offset to something even like 0.5 you can see how this is tiling but if i change my pattern amount to something like five you can see we get this weird tiled effect because you can see that we have this equal offset here and that's because our texture ends here it's the same on the top as it is on the bottom and it's just going to repeat everywhere so what we're going to do is just keep it an even number and you can't see the tiling so i'm going to hit spacebar again zoom in with the middle mouse wheel and if i hook this up into my foreground of the blend immediately you can see we have something going on it's displacing the geometry and we've got the basis of what our texture is going to be so in the tile sampler i'm going to go to pattern and i'm going to choose brick and that's it you're done just kidding okay so we go into the pattern specific setting and this adjusts based on what pattern you have selected here so in brick if you slide this up you start to see that these bricks start to get sort of a rounded shape to them you can see we're getting a roundness in the height here i'm only going to set this just by a little bit maybe something like 0.14 then i'm going to scroll down a little bit and i'm going to increase the overall scale so if we increase that you can see it's very sensitive if we increase that just a little bit to something like 1.01 we can see that our bricks are now closer together and there's less of a gap between them so this is the basis for our texture so next up i'm going to do something that might seem a bit counterintuitive and you'll see why in the future but i'm going to create the grout between the bricks next so let's bring back our tile sampler here give us some room i'm going to select the connection that's coming right after the tile sampler by just selecting it like this and this is going to allow me to input a node in between the tile sampler and this blend it's really easy click and drag then hit space bar and i'm going to choose an invert grayscale and that's just going to flip this so now you can see that we've just got the space in between our bricks showing up here i want to add a sense of gravity and weight to this material so when a brick layer builds up a brick wall they would lay down a brick and then they would spread the grout on top of that brick which is more like a liquidy paste at the time and this paste was a bit more susceptible to gravity before it quickly hardened and took its lifelong shape so we're going to replicate this with a directional warp it's really important to understand the physical process a material undergoes in the real world so that you can better replicate it in 3d so i'm going to add in between the final blend here and the invert grayscale a directional warp now directional warp takes two inputs one is what you're trying to warp and two is the intensity of how much you want to warp this by so i'm going to warp this with a purlin noise so i'm going to hit spacebar purl in noise we got a noise here i'm going to input this into the intensity input of our directional warp and immediately you can see what's happening here it's pushing our shape here based on this purlin noise so what i can do is if i double click the purlin noise and i go to the scale parameter i can drag it down to almost increase the scale of the purlin noise in a way so i'm going to choose something along the lines of 13 that looks fine and if i go to the directional warp and single click i can change the intensity so if i bring this up it's going to warp it even more and also the angle that i'm warping it by so because i want this grout to be drooping a little bit i want to change the warp angle so that it's going up and down and if you hold the shift key it's going to lock into these increments here so it's going to lock facing down and that's how you know you have exactly -90 on the degrees here so for the intensity i'm going to bring it down just a bit because that was just a bit too much and you can see what it's doing to our grout now so next up what i want to do is i'm going to after the directional warp i'm going to add another blend and i'm going to set this blend in the blending mode to add you see we automatically got our directional warp into the background of our blend in the foreground i'm actually going to take the invert grayscale that we had before and this is the bricks before they were directionally warped so i'm going to put that into the foreground and what this does is it adds on the previous shape on top of this warp shape and it thickens up the grout a little bit now you can see we've got some spaces in here so i'm going to inflate this grout material using what's called a non-uniform blur so let's make some more room bring things over you can see we have our outputs in our final blend over here and our working stuff over here and i'm going to add in a non-uniform blur grayscale and for the inputs i'm actually going to use the same blend for both the grayscale input and the blur map if i go to my non-uniform blur and i bring up the samples and the blades and you can adjust the intensity here and if i bring down the intensity now it looks like it kind of blew up our grout like a balloon in a way it's inflating it giving it more of a giving it more of a softer shape here so increase the samples and blades and i'm going to take the intensity and i'm going to yes i'm just going to keep the intensity kind of low and that kind of gave us our thicker shape along with the droopiness of that directional warp okay so up next i want to add just a tiny bit of surface detail to our grout i know we're doing a stylized brick material but i do want to add some sort of tactile feel to this so one way to do that is to blend in a noise onto it i'm going to make some more room after the non-uniform blur grayscale i'm going to add a blend and for the foreground i'm going to hit spacebar here and search for spots and i'm going to get a black and white spots 1 here and that's the texture i want so i'm going to leave it as is but i'm going to take its output and put it into the foreground of our blend now immediately you'll see this looks a bit crazy that's because we need to adjust our blend a little bit so if i double click the blend and change the blending mode to subtract that looks pretty cool but it's kind of a bit much so i'm just going to take the opacity down and now you get to see we have more of a tactile feel to this grout i'm just going to adjust the opacity a little bit you really don't need that much because if you go too far it's going to look fake so let's bring the opacity down to something right around here now right now this grout looks like it was just laid and it's oozing out on top of our bricks however we know that grout is hard and cracks and chips so let's add that effect onto it now the way i'm going to do that is with a slope blur grayscale note so i'm going to add one in right here spacebar slope blur grayscale and in the slope input i'm going to add a crystal one so this is our crystal noise it's an extremely useful noise very useful for rocks and for chipping things so if i pump that into the slope and i need to double click the slope blur and if we just bring down the intensity quite a bit you can start to see what it's doing it's taking this noise and pushing the grout based on these gradients so what i'm going to do here is i'm going to increase the samples all the way up to 32 and i'm going to bring the intensity down very very small something like 0.2 and this still looks a bit intense and what i'm going to do now is i'm going to go to my crystal i'm going to bring up that shape a bit i'm going to bring down the scale to increase the size something like 10 and then you can see that this slope is pushing the grout over these bricks and i don't necessarily want that so what i'm going to do is i'm going to double click my slope blur grayscale i'm going to change the mode from blur to min and you can see what that does now now only the inside of the shape is being affected you can switch this to max you'll see only the outside is getting affected and blur does both but i'm going to stick to min here and now you can see we've got a little bit of chipping occurring finally to finish up our grout here at the end after the slope blur grayscale i'm going to add a levels node so i added a levels node here because i'm thinking about the future and how i'm going to blend this height with my bricks and all the other things so one thing you can do with the levels note is you can take this bottom right triangle and you can adjust the overall brightness of everything connected before it and so you can really bring it down and adjust how intense it is on the height so with that in mind we can add levels nodes or you can do the same thing with the histogram scan node and you can adjust how far out the grout is so you can choose you can have a sloppily made brick wall where the grout's all over the place or you could have a much cleaner wall where the grout is between the bricks which we'll get to in a bit because right now we're just looking at the grout so i added this levels node but i'm not going to touch it because i'm going to use it later on so here's our grout and what i'm going to do is i'm going to frame up everything between tile sampler and before our final blend so i'm going to select all these nodes hit spacebar and type frame and now if i go to the title i'm just going to call this grout just a way to keep organized here so i left the tile sampler out because we're going to use it for something else but let's just put the grout up here for now and let's make some more room and let's go on to the bricks so for the bricks i'm going to start off with our already made tile sampler because one of the cool things about substance designer is if you change this tile sampler then the rest of everything that comes after it is going to update and this demonstrates the procedural power of substance designer so we're starting off with this tile sampler and what i'm going to do right away is i'm going to drag off here and let go and this is just another way to add nodes and i'm going to add an edge detect so this edge detect node finds all of the edges between all of these shapes and we can adjust some of the parameters here so if i double click the edge detect you can see this is what we have and what i want to do is i want to refine and focus in a little bit on these bricks so that they don't clash with our grout so with my properties here under the edge detect i'm going to make my edge with just a tiny bit smaller so to see what we're doing i'm going to go over here select this connection and i'm going to hit space bar and add a blend and i'm going to set this blend to add and i'm doing this so that i can see what i'm doing in my 3d view while i'm working so i'm going to take our edge detect and i'm just going to connect it to the foreground of this new blend here so you can see what we've done now it looks a bit intense that's okay we're going to refine this a bit so you'll notice if i increase the edge width of our bricks they're sitting right in with our grout that's because we're using the same tile sampler here so let's just zoom in and let's make sure the edge width is nice and snug with our ground we can also adjust the roundness of these edges so if i bring this in you can get a rounder kind of brick if that's what you're going for or you can have a completely square brick what i'm going to do is i'm going to add just a tiny bit of edge around this so that these bricks catch some highlights so let's adjust it to something like that where it's just a tiny bit round on the corners there and now after this we're going to add a distance node now the distance node is really cool it takes these pixels these brick pixels and it searches for a way to expand them so that they touch the next island of pixels so if i go into my distance node you can see i just bring the maximum distance down to zero and then slowly bring it up you can see that it expands our bricks out so i'm just doing it a tiny bit to get this bit of a bevel which you can see is going on here and then i'm going to focus in this shape with a histogram scan histogram scan if i bring up the position you see it tightens up our shape here similar to what a levels node can do and you can adjust the contrast as well and now we're going to warp these bricks with the same directional warp that we had from our grout so that everything seems to conform together so i'm going to do exactly that i'm going to find our directional warp that we had from the grout and i'm going to hit ctrl d to duplicate it just drag it over here and i'm going to select these connectors and just delete that for now so what that means is this directional warp has the same parameters that we've already set so it has the same angle and the same intensity so if i take the histogram scan and put that into our input and then i use the same purlin noise that we had from our grout and make that drive the directional warp so that we have those same swirls and let's put this directional warp into the foreground of this blend here that we have connected to our final blend so that we can see what we're doing in our 3d view so you can see our bricks are now following the same path as our grout and i'm just going to take the intensity of our new directional warp and just bring it down a bit so if i adjust our intensity a bit you see we're getting a bit of a wavy getting our wavy bricks here and now that i'm looking at my material i think the bricks are just a tiny bit too close together so to fix that i'm going to go back to our histogram scan that's between our distance and our directional warp i'm going to just bring the position down and if you see what that does if i bring this down you can see that the bricks are getting a bit smaller i'm going to choose something around 0.53 and now you can see we've got some more space around it and i use histogram scanned nodes all the time to focus in things or to create masks so that's a great example of just adjusting and refining the shape a little bit i'm going to bring down the directional warp just a little bit more so that we have something a bit more like this so you can always adjust this based on what you're looking for but i'm looking for a slight wave so it's easier to see a more defined shape like this when you're further away from it and lastly for the base brick shape i'm going to add a levels for the same reason that we added one last time so that we can adjust the height offset later on so this is our base brick shape and now it's time to reshape them a little bit to add more character and more of that brick tactile feel okay so to keep organized i'm going to select our nodes here hit spacebar frame them up i'm just going to call this bricks so now that we have the basic shape of our bricks let's deform them a little in order to give them a bit more depth and character older bricks have harsh plane changes and weathered valleys across the surface so to recreate this we're going to cut out some bits and pieces from our bricks to start off we're going to use a tile sampler so click off in your graph somewhere hit space bar type in tile sampler and for this tile sampler i'm going to decrease the x amount to something like eight and eight and i'm going to change the pattern to paraboloid and i'm going to bring up the scale so if i go down to size and go to scale let's zoom in here so i'm actually going to bring up the scale quite a bit something like 3.2 and the magic happens if we scroll down to position and we go to position random and we increase that you can see we're getting this sort of cellular mushy pattern here so you can put this at pretty much wherever you'd like it to be i'm going to keep it somewhere around here and what you can also do is you can go up to scale and adjust the scale random value and adjust even further this tile sampler is going to cut out shapes from our bricks so to do that i'm going to select the connection that's going into this blend so we know that this blend is combining the bricks with the ground so i'm going to select the connection that's coming out of our brick shapes add a new blend i'm going to set this to subtract and what we're going to subtract by putting in the foreground is this tile sampler now immediately you'll see this has some pretty dire consequences but you can start to get an idea of what's going on here so let's go to this blend and let's bring the opacity down and if you press ctrl shift and right click you can rotate the light source so you can start to see what's going on you can also rotate the shape by just left clicking and moving around you can zoom in with the scroll wheel so i can adjust this opacity you can decide how undefined you want these plane changes and cut shapes to be i'm going to pick something pretty close to 50 maybe 0.55 and to disrupt this shape even further i'll take this blender and move it over a little bit and after that blend i'm going to add a slope blur grayscale you see it automatically put into the grayscale input our blend here but the slope amount is what drives this effect so in this slope amount i'm going to hit spacebar and add a cells four this is what the cells for noise looks like and you can change the scale you can make it more complicated less complicated i'm actually going to make it a bit more complicated by increasing the scale parameter and then after this cells i'm going to add a blur high quality grayscale and we can adjust this intensity a little bit now we can take that output and put it into the slope input of our slope blur double click on our slope blur and we can adjust its settings here so i'm going to decrease the intensity quite a bit almost almost nothing and if i zoom in here let's see what's going on that looks pretty crazy how about .05 and i'm going to set the mode to min because i don't want it to affect anything outside of the brick and we can increase the samples just to add some quality here and you can see what's going on now now our brick shapes have these indents so this was before the slope blur this is after adds these cuts and these ridges now you've probably noticed these strange lines appearing on our bricks that's because we're getting a bit of a clashing height going on here you can see that our grout is actually clashing a little bit with our brick we're going to have to subtract our brick shape from our grout a little bit so that they fit together better and we don't have a conflicting height issue going on here so in order to fix that i'm going to go to this levels and this levels is the one that's at the end of our bricks and whether or not you're using the levels or not you might be just going from the directional warp out from here but what i'm going to do is i'm going to pick my last node which is in this case a levels i'm going to right click and say add comment i like to do this because we're going to use this quite a bit as a mask for our brick shape so i'm just going to call this brick mask so now you can see that comment here and that comment since we right clicked on our levels is going to stick with that note so i'm just going to bring it up close there so now that we have this brick mask we can use it to cut out shapes by setting a blend node to subtract so really what we want to do is we're going to take this grout and subtract our brick shape so i'm going to take this blend that we've been using with in the background we have our grout in the foreground we have our bricks and it's set to add i'm just going to bring this next to our final output here and what i'm going to do is after the levels from our grout i'm going to select that connection and add a new blend and this blend is going to be set to subtract and what are we subtracting our brick mask so let's take that brick mask put it into the foreground and immediately you can see what happened here the brick mask has subtracted itself from the grout and now it perfectly sets in with our brick so i'm just going to make a little bit more room here so we can organize a bit better now this new blend is the one that subtracts our bricks from the grout then goes into this blend which adds in the rest of our bricks so to keep ourself organized now i'm going to take our tile sampler and all of these nodes down here with the cells and slip blur everything like that just going to group them up frame them and call it reshape bricks so so far so good if i go to materials default and hit edit and then bring up the scale we can add a little bit of height to our viewport here and see our bricks and grouts sticking out a bit more so now i want to add an extra level of detail to the bricks because right now they're looking very smooth and we want to start adding a tactile bumpy feel to them so if we go to the reshape bricks frame that we have here and we go to the slope blur grayscale and after that let's add another blend node and it sets a copy which is what we want it to be at and in the foreground we're going to add a clouds to noise so if i double click that you can see we've got this interesting puffy organic looking noise here and you can adjust the disorder and play around with that i'm going to increase the scale to something like yeah four to get more detail here and i'm going to pump that into the foreground of the blend now it's looking a bit crazy right now and it's happening everywhere and it's all a mess what i want to do is blend nodes also have an opacity mask input and so we're going to be using our brick mask as that opacity input so let's connect it now bring it out and i'm using the middle mouse button to click and pan while i'm holding the left mouse button and i'm plopping it into the opacity mask so now it's just happening on the bricks and if we click on our blend here we can bring the opacity down and fine tune how much noise and detail we're getting you really don't need that much so i'm going to probably set it now let's set it to about 0.1 that's looking good and to add a bit more diversity and noise to this i'm going to add a blend after this and i'm going to set this blend node to subtract and in the foreground i'm going to get another clouds too i'm going to keep it default the way it is and put it into the foreground and i'm going to do the same thing i did before just grab that levels or your brick mask and put that into the opacity and i'm going to decrease the opacity of this blend so that we can again adjust how much it's subtracting from our bricks you see if i go too far it really affects the height of our bricks overall so i'm just gonna dial it in a bit now we have a bunch of plane changes here and it's really starting to look organic now you'll notice a couple things are happening here while we keep subtracting from our bricks the height is going down down and down if we look at it right now actually you can see it's getting pretty dark and this is where our levels nodes come in handy here so we're going to do a couple things first off if i preview this on a let's say we preview it on a sphere sphere 2 tiles the texture is quite large actually you can see that our bricks are quite big and what i want to do is uniformly scale down our material so that it tiles but also shows more bricks at a time so what i can do here is before we get to our final blend right here we have everything plugged into this blend which is then going into our final blend into our outputs so between these two i'm going to add a transform 2d and the transformation 2d node has a really handy feature if we go down here to where we have these times two and divide by two options so we hit divide by two once you can see it evenly scales it down still tiles and if you look on our sphere we have many more bricks appearing now let's change this back to our rounded cube here this has enhanced a bit of our problem even more you can see the grout is sticking far out from our bricks so let's go back and we can go to our levels here at the end of our grout and we single click on that i'm going to take that bottom right arrow down until now you can see that the grout is starting to appear behind the bricks you can zoom in a bit and if i i can show you what's happening here if you increase it you can see it's sticking out and you can just refine the ground a little bit here so now it looks like it's part of the wall behind the bricks a bit and the bricks look like they're about to pop out which is great remember you can do the same thing with our brick mask in this case with our levels and you can bring that down and now you can see the bricks are going down so you can control you don't do too much now but you can control the height specifically of the bricks or the grouts to get the kind of look that you're going for and so now that we've decreased the size and we've basically tiled our material twice and that has an effect on the overall height scale of our scene so i'm going to go to materials default edit and what i can do is i can just bring our viewport displacement scale down a little bit to kind of normalize us back to what we had before so to continue keeping ourselves organized let's select our clouds and our blends here frame them up and i'm going to call this surface noise make sure to give your material a save there ctrl s and now it's time to add just one more detail to our bricks and that's some cracks and chipping onto the bricks themselves so i'm going to make some more room here just bring everything out and i'm going to hit space bar and i'm going to add another tile sampler so this tile sampler is going to be a bit different so if i double click our tile sampler i'm going to add a bit more to the x amount let's go 30 and we'll do 30 for the y amount as well i'm going to change the pattern to disk so it's more like a bunch of circles we're going to go to the size and bring the scale really far down something like yeah something like that and scroll down a bit more and crank up that position random the idea is that you don't want most of these circles to touch one another so you can adjust the offset as well to try and help you out a bit and finally in the tile sampler let's scroll all the way down and where it says color random bring that all the way to one so now you can see all of our dots have multiple grayscale values i'm now going to add a histogram scan and i'm going to connect the tile sampler to it and i'll just bring the position all the way up and the contrast all the way up i'm going to move this up here i'm also going to add a distance node in and i'm going to connect the histogram scan into the mask input and then i'm going to bring the tile sampler into the source input so you can see we've got all these different colors and weird shapes going on if i double click the distance node and just crank up the maximum distance in fact you can crank it up even more to something like 900 as long as you're not getting some weird like half circley shapes just crank that up as much as you can so you can get these clean lines so let's see what's going on here if after our surface noise if we select that connection and add another blend and we can set this to subtract let's just take our distance and put that into the foreground see kind of what's going on here a bit let's bring the opacity of our new blend down now you get this sort of chipping cracked effect but what's happening is if you look closely you can see that all of these shapes are kind of all following each other they're all flowing from one to the next because it looks as if we just stamped on this cracking effect onto our bricks and that's not really what it looks like in the real world so we kind of want to displace and move this effect over each brick separately or with different values and what we're going to do is use the flood fill nodes to fix that okay so with and type in flood fill now this flood fill node takes a mask input which means we need something like our brick mask here which has completely white and completely black values we also need to make sure that the shapes inside this mask have sort of these islands so that none of these bricks or anything have anything touching so for the flood fill node let's take our brick mask and we'll drag it into the input of the flood fill and if i double click you'll see we've got these islands that have these different colors on them you can see that the flood flow has detected that these shapes aren't touching each other and they're all separate so after the flood fill node i'm going to add a flood fill to grayscale node and you'll see there's nothing happening but if we take the luminance adjustment bring it all the way to the right to one and then we take the luminance random all the way to negative one you can see our bricks have different luminance and grayscale values here so this is great because what we can do is we can get a directional warp and in the intensity input we can put in this flood-filled grayscale we can then take our distance node and put that into the input of our directional warp and if we increase the intensity here you'll see that the warp is occurring at different rates based on the grayscale value from our flood fill to grayscale so we can go crazy here we can crank this up to something like 60 and then you can see now those shapes are moving at different rates so now if we go to our blend that we used originally which has our surface noise and what we were using as our cracks before we replaced the foreground of that blend you'll see now that we don't have the problem that we had before none of those shapes are running into each other in fact to make it even better if we go to that directional warp and we change the warp angle to something not so like something in the bottom left corner here now you can see that the cracks are all different on each of the bricks that's all fine and good but i don't want all of my bricks to have cracks so we can use this flood-filled grayscale to create a mask where we can choose which bricks have cracks and which don't so what we can do is if i click somewhere in the graph hit space bar and get our histogram scan node and i can plug in our flood filter grayscale into the histogram scan and bring up the position and also bring up the contrast so if i bring the contrast all the way up to one and then adjust the position i can now choose how many bricks in my pattern i want to have cracks and this creates our mask for us so 0.32 is good for me here and we can plug that histogram scan into the opacity input of our blend so now we can see that some bricks have cracks while others do not and you can choose the opacity of this blend to decide how much of the cracks and chipping you want i'm actually going to make it very subtle you really only see it on an angle yeah so 0.5 is going to be fine so like before let's select all of these chipping cracks nodes frame them up and let's give it a name brick cracks and so now we've pretty much completed the height of our entire texture here so we've got our cracks we've got the grout with some texture we've got some broken up texture there's some planes in here that kind of weather the bricks a bit and we're starting to get a more complete picture of what our brick wall texture is going to be the last thing i want to do is adjust some of the roughness and give some color to our bricks so let's do that let's find where we have our bricks and where we have our grout so this blend right here seems to just have our bricks and this one here has our grout so let's make some comments here i'm going to right click our grout blend here and choose add comment and just call it grout then i'm going to go to our bricks blend right-click comment bricks and then this one combines the two so now what i'm going to do is i'm going to click on my graph hit space bar and get a gradient map you see it's the first one there and i'm going to bring our bricks and input it into the gradient map so this gradient map's pretty cool if you go to the gradient editor what we can do is we can add some keys here so i can make this one red add another key make this one green and it maps it to the black and white values here so you can just adjust these and you can move them around it's going to remap itself now clearly that doesn't look that great so i'm going to hit clear all and so that we can see what we're doing in our 3d view i'm going to exit out of that and i'm going to connect the gradient map to the base color output here now you'll notice something weird happens let's get rid of this uniform color you'll notice that this doesn't quite match up with what's going on that's because you have to remember we're transforming our bricks to tile them down basically twice so we can just do the same thing here if i just ctrl d duplicate that transformation 2d i can bring in the gradient map and then bring the output into the base color and now you can see it matches up perfectly so now we can see what's happening in our 3d view let's double click the gradient map go to the gradient editor and instead of manually adjusting these colors we can choose pick gradient so let me show you what i mean in a second so i've gone to google and i've found an image of bricks with some grout here with some neat colors that i like so if i go into substance designer and i go back into my gradient editor i can go to pick gradient here if i just drag click and drag my cursor it's going to pick all those colors and apply them to this gradient and map them for us so i can see what's going on here that looks interesting and what we can do is we can invert the positions and get the opposite of what's going on and i can go and pick another gradient so let's choose something a bit darker getting something like that that's actually not looking that bad it's got a good color range but you can see we've got some weird some weirdness going on here let's see what we can do with what we got here if i drag a selection of these keys i can move them around you can see what that's doing to our texture that's interesting in fact i wonder what would happen if i just inverted it nah that's not quite right so i'm going to select these keys and i'm going to click and drag up to delete them and then you can do the same thing here you can just move these around sort of play around with the kind of detail that you're looking for here that's cool i don't really like the light color so i'm going to drag those up maybe space these out differently delete that lighter color here the tighter you make these keys the sharper they're going to appear on your gradient so maybe i'll just extend this a bit you can also select a key and go to this this is a hue saturation value and opacity so if i just bring the value down i can just darken it specifically you can also select all of them and lower the value as well or the opacity we can move this around i'm just looking at the bricks i know the grout is colored we'll fix that in a second so let's stick with that for now next up we need to color the grout so how are we going to do that well we need to create a mask for just the ground so let's go back to where we had that blend and if we double click the blend you see this isn't really quite a mask it's got some grayscale values to it and it's not quite as precise as we'd like it to be so to create a mask i'm going to hit spacebar and get a histogram scan and i'm going to connect it to the input there and just bring the position all the way up contrast all the way up and so now i have a nice clean mask and i'm going to keep this transform right up next to this base color maybe just just like that and let's add a blend between our gradient map from before and the transform 2d and let's put our histogram scan of our grout in as the opacity and nothing's happening but that's because let's just add a uniform color here something like this black put that in the foreground and so now you can see yeah just our grout is being affected by this color or by this foreground in our blend so you could go ahead and pick a new gradient map for the grout which is what i'd recommend because you get more variation in the color but in this case i'm just going to go to the uniform color and increase the value so let me get something a bit brighter and you want to look at this from multiple angles because it does get affected by the light and it also gets affected by the roughness so you can see as i move this around we're getting that severe highlight here because the surface itself is extremely shiny it's not very rough so if we went all the way over to our roughness uh roughness output here in our uniform color that's driving it if you increase this and bring it towards white the material gets a bit more rough so i like to keep mine a bit shinier than maybe what you would expect in the real world you can do whatever you would like to do for your project however i just want to be able to see that there's a highlight occurring so if i do that you can still see a bit of that light reflecting off of it you get sort of that hardness that you're looking for and so now i can go over to that uniform color for the grout and i can go back to the value and i can make it lighter or darker i don't want it too light here zoom out and this is kind of what we're looking at now is our brick material again you can go to that uniform color that's driving your roughness you can also use this slider bring it down for a bit more of a shiny look just dial it in right about here and if i control shift right click i can move the light around yeah i'm just going to fiddle with that a little bit you can also go to your ambient occlusion which is connected to your ambient occlusion map and adjust the height depth so if i increase it you can get like a really grungy dirty looking brick wall or you can bring it back down something like this and even it out a little it really doesn't take that much when it comes to the height depth in the ambient occlusion and there you have it so now we have our brick wall material what's neat about this is because it's procedural if we go back all the way to the beginning me go to our tile sampler double click on that if i change let's say the x amount to four you know we can make smaller bricks or if i go back to three but then i make this eight you see we have much thinner bricks and all you have to do is change one slider and the rest of the material propagates and creates that desired result that you're looking for without tweaking anything else we can then look at it on say a rounded cylinder and here it is on the sphere and there you go thank you so much for watching i hope this tutorial helped you better understand some of the inner workings of substance designer and how to create your textures from scratch using some simple shapes and then narrowing it down into more and more complex features now it's kind of funny i just moved to london and today it is 90 96 degrees so if it seems like i'm talking a bit fast it's probably because there's no air conditioning here and it's extremely hot i've been having a great time making some textures setting up the new office and yeah so it's been a great process moving i have a vlog coming that i want to make that kind of explains where this channel is going and sort of the future of what videos are going to be on this channel if you liked this video please leave a thumbs up and subscribe to the channel if you'd like to see more tutorials from me and hit the bell to be notified when i post new videos until next time i'll see you in the next one

Channel: Jeremy Seiner

Views: 4,850

Keywords: substance designer, game art, how to, learn to, game texture, stylized material, step by step, physically based, game dev, game material, low poly, stylized texture, substance designer tutorial, substance designer brick, game art design, blender 3d modeling tutorial, game art production, game textures tutorial, game texture maker, physically based rendering, game development, brick texture, intro to substance designer

Id: mDmgd9eszDw

Length: 47min 15sec (2835 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 31 2020