Brick Material in Substance Designer | Beginner Tutorial

[Music] and so I've gotten just created a new substance up in file new substance I made sure that we set it to physically-based and we want to make sure that we set our sizemode to relative to parents so we can change the size anytime we want so the first little bit is just going to be set up if you're used to this you can just skip down below in the timestamp in the description for you and we can get started so the first thing that I want to do is I want to add a base material and so we can just set this guy over here and if we right click and hit view in 3d you're gonna see that it's going to show up on our 3d object here so if we come into our parameters for this guy we're just going to use him basically as a quick reference for us to see our things in 3d so we want to change a material preset down to dielectric so it's going to make it more like a white or gray plastic and then we want to expose a few maps that we can input our own geometry into our node here so I want to come down to normal and I want to come down to height as well and so we're going to expose these two guys right down here so I'm going to plug in a normal map into this input and now any grayscale information we plug in to this node will be converted into a normal map and will be displayed over top of our mesh so now that we've got this base setup done we should be good to go on starting our bricks so we're gonna start out by creating the brick geometry or the brick pattern that we're going to use to create the basis of what our bricks are going to look like so luckily in substance designer we have a brick generator down at the bottom here which does most of the heavy lifting for us as you can see it's given us this nice brick pile and it's given us a bunch of parameters that we're gonna be able to play with in order to create the bricks that we want so I'm gonna take this guy and run them into our normals and I'm also going to run it into our height and you can see it's going to show up in our 3d view here because we're using this base material as an output for our view so the next thing I want to do is I want to be able to see this height information because right now all it's showing us is the normals and if I get rid of that you can see that all of our data is lost so if I plug that back in the way that we can go about getting our height map to show up in the 3d view is if we come up to materials we go to default and edit here and we come over to our parameters you're gonna see that there's a height option and we want to bump the scale all the way up and take a look in the 3d view here when I do that as I bump it up you can see that it actually takes the geometry and pushes it into our mesh here and that's because we're using the parallax occlusion height height mode so you can see if we come into here physically-based you can see that we're using the parallax occlusion and if we use tessellation it's going to extrude it from the geometry now this is a little bit more taxing on your system because it's using physical geometry where as parallax occlusion is only a visual illusion or an effect so we're going to go back to parallax occlusion just for optimization and now that we've got our height working I want to come back to our normal map and I just want to increase the normal intensity so that it's a little bit easier to see our geometry so if I come over to intensity and I increase it to something like five now it's going to be a lot easier for us to see our bricks and this is a start for creating our material and so now we've got a brick generator here and I'm going to go in and play around with some of the parameters to just kind of get more of the look that we want to achieve with our bricks here so if I go into our parameters you can see that we get a lot of different options to really make the bricks that we want to make and so immediately what I can see here is the number of bricks that we can use on the x and y axis and you can see just like a tile generator it's going to tile our brick shape across both our X and our Y here and it's going to give us different looking bricks depending on how much we actually tile so I'm gonna put this back to four by eight because it's going to give us the perfect rectangular brick shape that I want our next option is the bevel and if you can see in our 2d here that the bevel is actually the distance from our the face of our brick here to the gaps in between and you can see when I play around with this the less bevel I give it the shorter distance it's going to be or the steeper gradient it's going to be between the two and you can see in the 3d view here what it's doing to our bricks it's just making them a lot sharper and less of a gap in between the faces so I'm going to put these both 20.1 just so it gives us a little bit of a lip but nothing too drastic because we want to have most of our brick being the outward face of the brick and not the sides in between where our mortar is going to be as we keep going down as well you can see that we get a gap option which again just increases and decreases the gap in between our bricks and so I'm going to leave that down to one zero as well just at the default because we're going to actually take a grout or mortar texture that we create and we're gonna blend the heights together so this is gonna give us just the perfect space in between the bricks to have a realistic looking brick material next if we go down to middle size you can see that when we play around with this guy it's going to swap or shift the axis of our bricks here depending on which brick in the chain or the order it is if we play around with the Y as well you can see that it's going to decrease some of the y-axis of the bricks as well and this is going to give us a lot of versatility in the bricks that we're going to create because it's going to give us a lot of different looking shapes and sizes and this will be something that we will expose later so that when we're in the game engine we can play around with this to give us totally different brick materials on the fly so I'm gonna set this back to default and I'm going to take just the X and bring this down to about 0.35 so that we get a little bit of break up in the length of the bricks as well height you can see it's going to randomly shrink and decrease or increase the the variance in the sizes in the heights of the bricks and if you decrease the max you're going to get a very mismatched looking result and again playing around with the balance while you've got these it's going to give you a random selection between the two as well as variations going to give you gradiated effects and not just a binary black and white and this is going to allow you to create a whole slew of brick Heights and give you a more organic look so I'm just gonna play around a little bit with this guy just so that we get a nice kind of organic look and nothing too drastic just so that we get some bricks kind of uneven with each other so that it doesn't look too man-made the next option we have is the slope and this is going to allow for us to create a gradient that's going to do just as the title says and slope our bricks so that they're a little bit uneven like they're pressed into the wall and sticking and jutting out just a little bit and you can see in our 2d texture here as we play around with it we're gonna get some gradients that are pushing our bricks farther and farther into the wall and if we decrease this you can see the effect that it's taking and again if we do that with the Y we're able to slope the bricks in different directions and again the balance and the variance just like up at the height is just going to determine how much and the varying degrees with which your bricks are sloping around so I'm going to come back and these reset those and I'm just going to increase the X increase the Y's slightly and I'm going to turn the variation off in this way we're just gonna get our bricks to look a little bit more mish-mashed and organic-looking lastly we have the offset which is just like the tile generator and we're able to push around our bricks and make them look not so tiling or patterning because you can see with our mid size here it's created a bit of a diagonal between our bricks and we don't really want that we want to break it up a little bit more so if we play around with the offset you're gonna see that we are able to shift along the bricks and either line them up perfectly or splay them around a little bit and if we do variation it's just going to give us a random offset of our bricks here and so now something like that looks pretty good so now that we've got our brick patterns situated I want to go and create a bit of a an edge where to the bricks to make it look like they're not so you know manufactured and man-made and you can see that they're very straight and very ninety degrees and I want to kind of break that up a little bit so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take the brick generator back here so we have a little bit more space and I'm gonna add a slope blur grayscale and what this is gonna do is it's going to give us a nice divot out of our edges here and make it look so that it's not so straight so what I'm going to do is I'm going to add a Gaussian noise as our input here for our slope then I'm gonna plug that guy in and immediately it's gonna give us these god-awful looking results and we're just gonna play around with our slope blur if we double-click on him you can see there is that's giving us some nice lava-lamp looking detail and that is not at all what we want so if I go and increase the samples and I decrease the intensity you can see that it's going to slightly resemble bricks a little bit more and I'll bump it down to something like 0.14 and our 2d texture here you can see what it's doing is it's adding a little bit of wave and a little bit of eat away or Edgware to our material and we can still affect this by coming down into our Gaussian and if we increase and decrease the scale we're gonna get a whole bunch of different effects and this is going to give us larger divots in our material and this is going to give us more smaller ones and you can see it's even playing around with the geometry of the face of the brick as well and so I like to have my edge wear a little bit larger so I'm going to come back and decrease the scale a little bit something to around 24 looks good and the last thing I want to do is I want to come back into our slope blur and I want to make sure that we want to switch the mode down to min and you can see that the difference between the three modes is that blur is going to try and blur both of the min and Max together min is going to tear away a little bit at the darker values or the lighter values resulting in the darker values and Max is going to try and bridge some of the lighter values together so we want to come down to min just because we want to tear away from the edges a little bit so we get these little lips and so now that we've got these three done I'm just going to highlight all of them and I'm gonna come up to this guy here and we're gonna put a frame around it and I'm gonna come up into our parameters here and I'm just going to type in brick pattern and hit enter and so now that we've got this framed we know that whenever we're going to need to find where our brick pattern is we've got an easy point of reference for ourselves so now that we've finalized our brick pattern here I want to go and start creating our deterioration of the brick and some chunks that have been taken out just from the wear and tear of the world so I'm going to bring this guy back and I'm going to start by creating our destruction off to the side here so the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to create a cell's one node and this is going to be the basis for our deterioration on the bricks the first thing I want to do with this is I want to add a directional warp because it's looking a little bit too soft so I'm going to add a clouds to node just to be the input for our intensity here and you're gonna see that it's going to give us some interesting looking effects now off the bat we're not going to get too much for two different reasons one the intensity is very low and two the scale for the cells is very high so I want to come back and I just want to decrease the scale of our cells here so that we get some larger detail coming back to the directional warp I want to come to our intensity and I want to switch it to 500 just for now so that we get some visible details of what's going on and you can see as we work this around we're gonna get a whole bunch of different effects based on the clouds here again the parameters that we set for this guy so going back to the intensity we can start to bring this down and I want to have something a little bit closer to we can say about 65 and this is going to give us some nice noisy detail that we can use to overlay on top of our bricks so with that I'm going to just create a blend between our slow blur over here and our warp and you can see when we overlay it it's just going to verbatim overlay our noise and ourselves up top here and you can see this is the kind of destruction that we're gonna get from our bricks so now I want to come down to blending modes and I want to come down to where it says divide and you can see now it's going to take our lighter values from our directional warp and it's going to eat away at our material here and so now what I want to do is I don't want to have that much destruction or deterioration on our bricks so I'm going to add a levels node on top of our directional warp here and I'm going to start by bringing up the black and I'm going to decrease the white output to make the overall texture darker and you can see now that it's a leaving a lot of the rock faces but still having a little bit of deterioration geometry and so with that I'm just gonna take these guys here highlight them all and I'm going to add a frame around them as well and I'm gonna call this brick deterioration so now that we've got the deterioration of our bricks out of the way I want to go ahead and create kind of the brushing the brushstrokes of a brick and kind of the nice smooth stripping that you get which are just a natural byproduct of creating bricks so I'm gonna bring all of this guy oh these guys back and I'm gonna go and create off to the side here a creased note and you can see this gives us a nice kind of sweeping effect and just kind of like the deterioration I'm gonna add another directional warp on to these guys and this time what I'm gonna do is I'm going to select from our slope blur grayscale here and I'm gonna plug this guy into our directional warp and you can see as we zoom in you start to get some creasing like you would from our bricks you can start to see some of the geometry of the bricks over top of our texture here and so if we bring this guy up to around 500 you were gonna get a bunch of different warping directions and this is just going to allow us to organically create the brushstrokes for our material here and again if we play around with the degrees of the rotation or the warp angle we can kind of get any effect that we want so now that we've got these guys I'm going to again add a blend onto our chain here and plug this guy in overtop and you can see what its gonna look like once we overlay this texture on top of our chain that we're just gonna get some nice subtle brushstrokes so when I come over to the blending mode I want to go down to ad sub and you can see that it's going to take some of our darker values and just kind of subtract them from our bricks here now that's a little bit too harsh the intensity that we have it now and so to fix that I'm just going to take our opacity and bring it right down to something like 0.03 and this is just going to give us some subtle brushing of our bricks and add just a little bit more interesting detail over top and now that we've got that we can again play around with the direction as well as the intensity if we need to find something that better suits our material so now the next thing I want to do is I want to go in and just add a bunch of air pockets all around our bricks here so I'm gonna bring these guys back and I'm gonna start by adding a tile generator and with this guy we're just gonna make our shapes for our little air pockets here and we're gonna just tile them around using one node so I'm gonna come in and I'm gonna come down to where we have our pattern here and I'm gonna come down to paraboloid and we're gonna get these little soft bubbles and this is going to be perfect for the geometry that we're gonna want to overlay on our bricks here we can also play around with the X&Y amount but for now I'm just gonna keep that at ten until we mess around a little bit with some of the other parameters so once we get down here to size we can play around with the scale uniformly but we can also play with the random scale and if we play around with this we're gonna get just like it says a random scale between each paraboloid or each geometry here and this is gonna be perfect to give it a more organic look so we can crank this up and again playing around with scale we don't want something too large because we're gonna be or laying this on top of our bricks so we want to have them relatively small in comparison to our bricks here and I'm going to decrease the randomness just a little bit and again bring that down to something like 0.15 as we come down to position we can change kind of the orientation or the actual position and space of our geometry here so if we play with the offset we're gonna get a bit of a uniform offset like we did with our bricks as well if we play around with the offset random we're gonna get a little bit of a randomized offset and playing around with the seed is just going to further randomize the results that we're getting as we come down further we're gonna get an actual X&Y random which is going to affect each geometry individually and you can see if we scale up the X they're all going to move on their own individual x axis and the same thing for the Y if we increase this up now it starts to look a little bit less rigid and man-made and a little bit more chaotic and organic again we can play around with the global offset which moves everything uniformly and just playing around with these parameters is going to give you some interesting results and if we scroll down further we're gonna get a bunch of different color parameters and if we start checking things off you can see that they're going to start eliminating some of our geometry here and you can use this to give it again a more organic look and remove some of the geometry that we're getting as well we can play with a random mask and it's going to randomly remove some of our geometry and I'm going to bring the random mask up to something like 0.1 just to get a little bit of space in between our divots here the last thing that I want to do is I want to come down to blending mode and I want to make sure that this is on max so that if two of our bubbles here our pockets are overlapping they're not going to create a solid white color but more so make it look like they're intersecting with each other which is going to give a more realistic result and not just result in a flat surface for our height so now that we've got that done I'm gonna take this guy and I'm gonna run him through a directional warp node and for our intensity here I'm just going to add another gosh and noise and I'm gonna plug this guy right into the bottom and you can see that with this we're gonna get a little bit of stretching of our divots here and again we can play around with the rotation of all of this we can also play around with the intensity and we can play around with the scale of the Gaussian noise to give us a bunch of different results and so something like that looks pretty cool so now I'm going to blend these together with our chain by adding a blend onto this guy I'm gonna plug this guy in overtop and you can see right now it's giving us the top geometry here our air pockets and we want to subtract the lighter values of our pockets here from the values of our lowered mesh here so I'm going to come over to our blend and I'm gonna come down to where it says subtract and so now it's going to take all of the lighter values of our air pockets the white values and it's going to remove them from the white values of our underlying mesh here and we're gonna get some pretty sharp divots the dig right in the mesh now that's a little bit too sharp for my liking so there's two ways we can go about decreasing this intensity we can come back to our tile generator here and if we scroll down we can change the global opacity which is just decreasing the opacity of the entire texture or we can come down to our blend and we can just decrease the opacity right here and so I'm gonna stick with our blend and just decrease the opacity down to something like 0.2 and this is gonna give us some nice-looking divots and just the nice looking air pockets so now the next thing I want to do is I want to add a bunch of cracks running through some of our bricks here and now we're gonna do that is we're gonna start by creating a cells to node and with the cells to node one nice thing that we have is the ability to change the width through our parameters here and this is very handy if we want to come back later and make our cracks thinner or thicker I also want to decrease the scale just so that we can see what we're doing a little bit easier and so now with this guy I'm gonna run it through a slope blur grayscale because we're using a greyscale image as denoted by our gray sockets here and I'm gonna take this guy and I'm gonna just increase the samples for now and we're not getting any results because we haven't actually put anything into our slope factor here so what we want to do is we want to create a fractal some base and this is going to give us some nice grapes grayscale information that we're going to use to kind of deteriorate the edges of our cracks here so I'm gonna plug this guy in and you can see right now it's giving us a very noisy looking texture and that's because our intensity is way too high on our slope blur greyscale here so if we take that guy down you can see that it's now starting to resemble the original image so we're gonna bring this guy down to something like 0.4 and if we zoom in you can see that it's giving us like a stained-glass kind of look to it so if we come over to our fractal some base we also have some parameters that we can play around with in here so I'm gonna make sure to double-click on this guy so we can see what we're doing and I'm gonna single click on our fractal sum to bring up its parameters so you can see that bringing up the roughness makes it a little bit blurrier and we want to have a bit of a sharper edge to it so by bringing it down you can see that we're eliminating a little bit of that excess noise and giving us more of a tearing kind of look which is kind of the look we're going for we can also increase the min level and decrease the max level to give us some different looking results and this is more the look that I think we're going for because we get some geometry that's both digging in and sticking out of our cracks here which is going to be perfect for overlaying on top of our bricks and so the next thing that I want to do with this guy is I want to start warping around our cells here because it looks a little too rigid and a little bit too man-made so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to take our slope here and I'm going to add it to a warp I'm gonna take another Gaussian gotta love the Gaussian noise and we're gonna plug this guy into our warp here and you can see it's gonna give us a little bit of that gobbledygook mess but if we just decrease the intensity and we play around with the scale of our warp we're gonna get us something a little bit nicer than what we had before and you can see that again there's not too much of a difference so maybe increasing the intensity a little bit and [Music] decreasing the scale we get something a little bit nicer so I'm going to add this guy over top of our chain here by adding another blend and I'll plug this guy right in and so we're gonna get all of the cracks that we have over top of our material here and I want to come into our blending mode and I'll go down to multiply and what that's going to do is get rid of all of the white areas of our cells here and it's going to overlay all the black parts on top of our texture so that we're just getting the recessed areas of our cells here another thing that I don't like is again how deep our cracks are and so I'm just gonna come back up and I'm just going to bring down the opacity a little bit so that we get something a little bit shallower and again that's still a little too deep so we're gonna bring our opacity down to the wrong point two again and that looks pretty good but now we run into the issue that we have our cracks running through our entire material and I only really want to have some cracks running through some of the bricks and some of the bricks are left untouched so what we're gonna do is we're going to come all the way back to our initial brick pattern here and we're gonna take this guy right here and we're going to add a levels node so we're gonna take this guy and plug them into a levels and what I want right now is I want to just have our bricks as a pure white and I want to have our crevices in between the bricks or our gaps pure black so I'm going to bring up our black values and our white values here just so that we get a fairly binary value and you'll see why we're doing this in just a sec so I'm going to add a flood fill node and so what this node is going to do is it's going to convert our binary white and black map into something that's usable for other filters other flood fill filters or nodes and you can see that on top of this guy if we just type in flood we get a whole bunch of different flood fill nodes which do a bunch of different things and the node that we're going to use is going to be this guy down here which is the flood fill two random grayscale and so we're going to plug this guy in and what you can see is that it's taken all of our brick and just apply different grayscale values over top of each one and so what I'm going to do is I'm take these three I'm going to bring it back over to where our two where we've got our cell cracks and I'm going to add a directional warp over top of these guys and the reason that I've added a directional warp is because I'm going to use this grayscale random grayscale map as the input for our direction of work so that our cells or our cracks look a lot more like they are following the contour the geometry of our bricks so if I plug this guy in and we take a look you can start to see that there is a little bit of a gap between the areas where we have our mortar and our brick and if I start to play around with the angle you can see that each brick is a little isolated and it's separate from the rest of the bricks and if I bump this up to something like a hundred now we've got each brick as its own separate entity from our the rest of the bricks so it doesn't look like there's one large pattern just repeating over top of everything [Music] that looks pretty good but that doesn't fix the issue that I had where I only want some of our cracks to show up on only some of the bricks so what I'm going to do is I'm going to add a histogram scan node and I'm going to plug our flood-fill random greyscale into this guy here and you can see initially we just get a black texture and if we come into our parameters here when we bump up the position it's going to give us different grayscale values and it's going to show the values at different positions I want to bump up our contrast so that it's more of a binary on and off and that's what we're going to use for the opacity of our blend here is just as a form of a mask or an on and off switch where only some bricks are going to have our cells texture and some of them are just going to be the normal brick and if I plug this guy in to our opacity you can see it immediately takes effect where we've got cracks on some of our bricks here and then some of our bricks are just nice and smooth from the geometry that we created before and again playing around with this we're gonna get less and less and as we bump it up we're gonna get a pure white texture across all of our bricks here so I'm gonna bump that down to something like 0.05 because I only really want to have a couple of bricks and maybe I'll bump this up to will do 0.08 get another brick in there just so we get some variety in our cracks the last thing I want to do is I want to come back to our cells because I don't like how thick these cracks are and so I'm just going to bring down the edge width again to something that looks a little bit more realistic and we can also play around with the scale to add more cracks to our bricks or we can do something a little bit smaller and I just nicer-looking single cracks and so now for the last part of our brick geometry what I want to do is add all of the detail that we're going to get in between our bricks with the grout or the mortar and all of that information that we're going to need so the first thing I'll do with that is I'm going to come over here and I'm going to add a fluid node and this is going to give us these interesting looking kind of raindrops or like dripping concrete and what I'm going to do is I'm going to add a height blend node and I'm going to take our blend here in our chain and I'm going to plug this guy into the top the height top there I'm going to take the fluid and then a plug him into our height bottom I can see now what we're gonna get is a blend between the two grayscale geometries here and it's going to be relative to how we actually in put them in our node you can see that if I plug in the fluid on the top here and our bricks on the bottom we're gonna get our fluid showing up over top and it's going to be more prevalent when I play around with our height offset so increasing more of our top geometry here or increasing the prominence of our bottom geometry so while you can do it both ways it's just good practice to think about which node is going to be over top of the other one from a geometry standpoint so we're gonna keep our fluid guy in the bottom here and I'm gonna bring my bricks and keep them in the top and now we can play around with our offset just a little bit to get different results and you can see as I decrease the height offset we actually get part of the fluid node down here sticking through our bricks and so let's go ahead and plug this in and we can see what it's doing in real time so you can see we start to get some things popping through our bricks here and as we increase our height offset our grout sinks away or sinks back into the bricks so we can decrease this a little bit so that we're able to see some of our grout coming through and another thing that I want to do is I want to increase the contrast to one because you can see in here what we have is these kind of sharp lines these sharp dark spaces between our grout and our bricks here and if we increase the contrast to one it just blurs that out a little bit makes it a little bit more seamless and now the next thing that I want to do is I don't like how we get some of our grout peeking through the middle of our bricks here it's not very realistic as to what would happen however I do like that it pops out a little bit in between the bricks there and we really want to kind of keep our grout sticking within the bricks and not actually going on top of the faces here and so with our high plan know we actually have a mask input here that we can use to drive the position in the areas which we're going to get our grout so in order to start with our mask I'm gonna go all the way back to where we get our brick pattern here and I bring this guy over and plug him in and so with this what we're gonna get is just a straight gradiated mask which is not very conducive to what we want because it's a non-binary visible and transparent mask so what I'm going to do is I'm going to add a levels known on top of this guy and I'm gonna hit F because he's highlighted and it will bring us to wherever this note is and I'm gonna bring him over and so I'm gonna double click on our height blend here and I'll single click on our levels so that we get to activate and play around with them and as I bring the parameters or the the handles towards each other you can see kind of the effect that we're gonna get so the black areas in our mask here are going to be where the grout is going to show up in between our bricks and the white values are going to be where our bricks are without any of that grow information showing up and you can see areas that are a kind of a grayscale mix are gonna have more of this grout material showing up so as we increase the white value you can see that that's going to slowly peak out and as we decrease the black and increase the white we're gonna get a very binary mask now what I need to do is I need to just play around with the height offset a little bit so that we're gonna get a very sharp looking material with our grout in the middle there and you can see we still get it showing up just a little bit so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to bring up the height offset just a little bit more and now we're gonna get this banding effect because our mask is a little bit too small so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to just bring back our white values just a little bit I'm going to bump up our black as well and the last thing I'm gonna do on top of this is I'm just going to add a blur node and I'm going to decrease this just so that we get a little bit of a softer fall-off and so now we're gonna have our grout that's going to be peeking through the bricks and we can also go and play around with our fluid as well changing the scale to get a little bit noisier and smaller geometry there we can play around with the disorder to move it around we can play with the warp intensity so it can be a little bit more bulbous and less drip like or we can increase that to make it a little bit drippy err we can also play around with the pattern size and if we take a look at our fluid here you can see exactly what it's gonna do so increasing the stretch on the X and Y and we could do something like to to make it even thicker to make it a little bit less contrasting with the darker values and make it more of a uniform white or gray and I like something like that that's starting to look pretty good so I'm gonna take these guys here and move them over and we're just gonna label this as our grout so now that we've completed our height information I want to go and start adding on to our normal information and the difference between the height and our normal here is that our height is used for actually displacing geometry and actually using polygons to create the difference in the shape of the material or the texture what our normal map does is takes these RGB values and each value or each color is corresponding to a different direction and these directions are used for light calculations and how the light actually bounces off of our material so this is used more for when we want to create a surface irregularity that is a little bit too small for us to accurately and efficiently capture in a height map so what I want to do with our normal map here is I want to add both our surface detail for our bricks and for our grout so I'm going to start by creating a black and white if I can spell it - and this is going to give us some nice-looking surface irregularities and we're gonna get a bunch of different grayscale values what I want to do with this guy here is I want to plug him into a normal map because we're going to use that black and white values as indication for our surface normal geometry here or our surface normal information and just like a height map darker values indicate recessed areas and brighter values indicate more elevated areas so it works almost the same way as a height map does it just does something a little bit different so you can see when we click on our normal map here we're gonna get a very very noisy map and I don't want something this incredibly noisy overlaid on top because I want to have a little bit of break up in between our surface detail here so what I'm gonna do is add a levels note in between here and I'm gonna start by bumping up some of our darker values and just like a height map would a pure black or a pure white value is going to give us a flat surface information and you can see when I look at our normal map now we get some flatter areas and the same thing goes for white values as we increase our white values we're gonna get some flatter areas I'm also gonna just increase our intensity to two just to make things a little bit sharper and so now we've got some surface break up I'm going to decrease the black and make them about even so now that we've completed our normal map for our information we need to blend the two together so what we're gonna do to blend these two is I'm going to on top of our chain here add a normal blend node and this is going to allow us to blend both of our normal maps together so I'm gonna take this guy and plug them in on top now you can see if we play around with our opacity here it's not going to show up at all and that's because we also have this use mask option and because we have two different height or detail normal map information that we want to do we're going to use this mask so what I'm going to do is I'm going to come over to where we have our blur here that we've created for our grout and I'm going to plug this guy in to our normal blend here and you can see once we do that it becomes very very harsh very very jagged but you can see that it's not actually affecting a lot of the grout just more so the edges so what we can do is even if we don't like that we can just plug in the levels node right before it and it's going to give us a sharper looking contrast and you can see that it's only affecting our bricks so what we have to do is we have to come back to our normal blend here and we just have to turn the opacity down and you can see as we turn the opacity down it starts to take more information from our normal map here and less information from this guy here and so I want to really crank this down because I don't want a lot of information from the one up top I just want to have a little bit of surface irregularities but I want most of our normal map to be driven from the one that we've created from our height node here so I'm gonna bring this down to something like 0.1 and this is gonna give us a nice noisy but somewhat subtle look and we can take a look at our normal blend you can see that we've got just a little bit of surface detail but we still get the same normals that we got from our original normal map so with that done I'm just going to take these guys and I'm going to call them our brick detail and we're gonna use pretty much the same method that we just did for our grout here so I'm gonna take everything and I'm gonna push this over so we have some more space and we're going to start by adding a black and white spots three and I'm gonna do a three just because I want to have a little bit of different geometry or different surface normals than we did for the brick just to make it a little bit more distinguishable and different so I'm gonna do the same thing by a first adding a normal map onto this guy and I also want to add a levels node as well and as I double click on our normal map to watch what we're doing I'm gonna single click on our levels I'm just gonna start by increasing the black and decreasing the white just so that we get a little bit of a contrasted look and I might decrease the black a little bit because I don't want to have too much flat space for our grout here because normally it'll be pretty noisy with information so I'm gonna bring these guys back here and just like we did over here I'm gonna add another height blend or normal blend sorry onto our chain and I'm going to take this guy and plug them in on top now we're going to need to have a mask in order to mask off the brick areas that we don't want the normal information to affect and so what I'm going to do is I'm going to just hold them shift and left click and it's going to take the same mask that we've inputted here and I'm going to plug it into that node there now because we have a mask that's indicating the bricks and not the grow we're just going to need to invert it so what I'm gonna do is on this guy going into here just add an invert grayscale node and make sure to use grayscale because we are using grayscale images for these masks so we'll take this guy over here and you can see now that we've got some noise information coming in on our grout and you can play around once again with the opacity to make it more or less subtle so I'm going to bring this down to around 0.2 to and I'm just going to increase the intensity of this normalmap as well to two and so now we're getting some nice normal information to accentuate our height information that we've created so I'm going to create another frame I'm going to call this grout detail so now that we've got pretty much all of our height and our normal information done I want to go ahead and start plugging all of our nodes into their appropriate outputs so I'm gonna take our base material here and I'm just gonna delete that guy and I'm gonna bring all of these over so now we can start plugging things in so I'm gonna plug our normal blend right into our normal map there or a normal output and I'm gonna plug our height over here and bring that down to our height output so for the most part our normal and our height are done but we still have a few more outputs that I want to deal with before we continue on and so now if I right click anywhere in the graph and I hit view outputs in 3d you can see now we're viewing this on our 3d mesh and we're no longer using our base material to view anything in our 3d view here so you can see it gives us a little bit of a different look and that's because we don't have anything in our albedo our roughness and our metallic outputs and so first things first we can get our metallic out of the way because we don't actually have any metallic objects in our material so with our metallic I'm just going to add a uniform color and I'm gonna make sure that it's set to grayscale and so black is going to indicate that we don't actually have any metalness and if we did have metal items in our material we would mark those as white which would indicate to our shader to utilize metallic properties so from here I'm going to go back up to our albedo base color and I'm gonna bring this guy up so that we have some more room to work with so the only thing I really want to do with him right now is I just want to add a color and I want to come over to grayscale just to make it easier for us right now we will be working in color as we come back to it but I just want to be able to view things in our viewport a little bit easier so I'm gonna bring up the levels to something that's like a mid gray tone and this is just gonna make it easier for us when we start looking at our roughness map which we're gonna do right now so as I come back down we don't actually have anything going into a roughness map and what that's going to indicate is basically a black or null value and in a roughness map black values or darker values means that it's going to be a lot and glossy or a lot smoother and so therefore we're gonna get more of a wet or mirrored like effect whiter values are going to indicate rougher areas and it's going to be a lot more diffuse lighting and not as sharp reflections so the first thing that I want to do and that I normally do when creating roughness maps is I'm going to take our normal map and I'm going to use the edge information that we get from this map I'm gonna create a curvature smooth map and I'm gonna take our normal map and plug him in and you can see that we're gonna get some edge information which is going to be very useful for when we want to drive our reflections and as I plug this guy in you can see that immediately it goes matte and it's no longer glossy or very shiny however like I just mentioned darker values indicate glossy err areas meaning sharper and finer reflections and you can see that our darker areas are all in the recessed parts of our material so in reality that really wouldn't make sense to have our sharpest reflections in the most occluded or hidden areas of our material so what I'm going to do is I'm going to bring our roughness over there a little bit and I'm gonna add a levels note on top of our curvature smooth and what I'm going to do is invert the input and the output so that the rougher areas are going to be white and they're gonna be the areas that are hidden along the cracks and sunken into our geometry here and you can see this looks a little bit more realistic than when our map was inverted and as we play around with our dark outputs and our light outputs you can see that decreasing the overall brightness or value of our material is going to increase the glossiness and vice versa if we increase the black output it's going to make everything a lot more matte and so I'm going to bring down the bright output and bring up the dark input just a little bit so that we don't actually ever get a pure black and a pure white and we can also decrease our black value a little bit and we can increase our white value so that we get a little bit of gloss but nothing too reflective or too shiny so before I go about creating the albedo map there's actually one more output that I want to create that's going to help us further push the illusion of the material that we're creating and that's going to be the ambient occlusion that we're going to get or the shadow information that we're going to get in the more occluded areas of our height so I'm going to come down below our height here and I'm going to just start by typing output and we're gonna get another output node like we've gotten with our metallic height roughness and so on and with this guy I'm going to come into its parameters here and under usage I'm going to add an item and go up to defuse and I'm gonna go down and find a mune occlusion and I just want to start by making sure that I identify everything that we're doing so that when we use this later we're going to be able to tell what this node is for we also want to make sure that we put this in the material group so that we're if we're using this graph later on it's going to help us by just making things a lot easier so that we're noting that each one of our outputs is in the material group so now what I'm going to do is I'm going to go back to our height information here and I'm going to use this to drive our ambient occlusion node so as I bring this I'm going to put this in the ambient occlusion output and then I'm going to also add an ambient occlusion node over top and so you can see that this is going to give us a lot of shadow information that we're going to get from our height and we have some parameters that we're going to be able to play around with to kind of make this a little bit more efficient for our material so first things first I want to just right click in our graph here and I want to view outputs in 3d again so now we're gonna be able to see what our ambient occlusion is doing and so right now I feel like it's a little bit too dark and so what we're able to do is actually decrease the height depth so that the height information that's that's getting put into it is not as contrasting or Stark and you can see that if we crank this up we get very very unrealistic lead arc information the last thing I want to do is just hit GPU optimization because you can see here currently this node takes a hundred and ninety-seven milliseconds to render or to draw call and if I hit optimize it greatly reduces this number and so now I've come back up to our albedo output and I want to start working on creating the base color for our material so the first thing that I normally do is I create kind of a base color scheme that I want to work with for our material and then I build off of that so the first thing I want to do is I want to come back again to our initial brick pattern and I'm gonna take this output and I'm going to plug this right into our base color here and I'm gonna get rid of that uniform color on top of this I'm going to add a gradient map so that we start using color again and you can see that it's denoted by this yellow line or connector and a yellow socket and this is going to allow us to use the grayscale input and overlay color information over top and you can see that when we come into a gradient map here we click on the gradient editor we're gonna get this spectrum here and then we're gonna get a color graph and if I just kind of click up into our spectrum over here our linear gradient editor we're gonna get the two black and white values and it's gonna work somewhat like a levels node does and you can see as I increase the black level our blacks are going to increase to the point where it's entirely black and the same thing for our white levels however what's different about this is that if we click on one of these guys and then we drag around in our editor here we can change it to any color that we want and the same thing for this guy over here we can also add multiple other points where we can do a whole whack of different colors and then move these around to get different effects so what I want to do is I want to start by just getting a nice base color down so we're able to work off of it and you can see that because our input is a gradient we're going to get a little bit of a blend between the two and so what I'm going to do is just increase the amount or increase the position of our orange orange color I'm also going to bump up the position of our gray and if we come in here you can see that the orange is overlapping just a little bit on to the gray so I want to bring up the gray amounts but also making sure to watch any blowouts that we're gonna have like over here and so something like that should be okay so that we get a nice base color between the two and now we have something to work off of so the next thing that I want to do is I want to add some variation in the colors of each brick and we actually have created a nice gradient to work from over here where we use the flood fill to randomly grayscale some of the bricks so I'm gonna take this output and I'm gonna plug this guy into our base color now and you can see that we're gonna get some randomized brick values so with this I'm gonna add another gradient map and now I'm gonna blend these two together so on the bottom one adding a blend taking our top input and plugging it in and then plugging this guy into our base color it's just going to give us the top result because we haven't changed any of the blending modes or the opacities and you can see if we go over to our blending modes we're gonna get a whole bunch of options that are gonna get a going to give us some interesting results and so I like these soft light results as it gives us some interesting looking geometry here but you can see that it's also affecting our grout and we don't want that we just want it to affect the bricks so if I come back down to where our grout is you can see that we've already created a mask for our bricks so I'm gonna take this guy here and I'm gonna plug it into the opacity of our blend and now you can see that it's only going to do the bricks and not even touch the grout with this we can also play around with the opacity so that we get slightly contrasted bricks or we can get very diverse of colors for our bricks so I'm gonna bring this down to something like 0.5 because I just want to have a subtle difference in values for our bricks the next thing I want to do is I want to add a little bit of detail to our cracks here because right now you can see that it's still using the color that we have over top of the bricks and not its own kind of color information so I'm going to add another blend and I'm going to go over to where we have our cracks then you can see these are the final results for the cracks that we're going to get on our material here and so what I'm going to do is I'm going to take this guy and I'm gonna plug it over top of our gradient here or our blend sorry and you can see that we're gonna get this red line and that's because we are plugging a grayscale map into a color blend and you can see that that's denoted by the blend over here and it's color input and output so in order to fix that all we need to do is add a gradient map onto that chain and if I hit F you can see that we've got our grayscale input and our color output and so we just need to make sure that we are conscientious of those those discrepancies and those color conversions when we're working in our graph here and so with this we're just going to get a black and white map and that's going to be perfect because in our blend all I want to do is get rid of the white and keep the darker values so in order to do that I'm gonna go down to our multiply option and hit that and you can see now it's going to give us the darker areas and if we decrease the opacity it's going to give us a little bit of break up in our material here but now we run into the issue of having crack information where there actually is no normal or height information and so again we just need to mask off the areas and we've already created a mask down in our cracks here and you can see with this we're just going to be able to plug this in and boom all of the non-essential cracks are gone and they're only in the areas that we've denoted with our masks and you can see in here we're just getting the areas that we actually have cracks now the next thing that I want to do is I want to go and start creating some variation for our grout here and so again I'm gonna add a blend node making sure that we have more space and I'm gonna go down to our grout detail here and you can see that this will be perfect for our albedo because we're using this to drive the normal information and so if I bring this guy up here and plug him into our blend we need to make sure that we have a gradient map in between the two and we're gonna get some cool information overtop now again we need to make sure to mask this off and how we're gonna do that is I'm just going to again ctrl and click on our input here and bring this in because we have the white areas as our bricks it's going to show up in the bricks and not in our grout so all we need to do is get an invert grayscale node and now you can see that we've got it just showing up in our grout areas I also want to play around with our blending modes a little bit just to see if we can get some interesting looking stuff and again so I like the soft light blending mode but I just want to bring the opacity down just a little bit and we can take a look in here that we're getting some different information and so now our materials starting to actually take on the form of a brick wall the next thing I want to do however is I want to add some more color information to Edgware of our bricks because right now they look pretty uniform and they don't look like they've really been weathered at all and so what I'm going to do for that is I'm gonna come down to where we've gotten our levels here and I'm gonna go to our curvature smooth and this is gonna give us those nice brighter areas along the edges that we're going to use for our edge wear and so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna have another blend along our chain here go back down to our curvature smooth node and plug this guy right in up top again adding a gradient map and you can see that it's gonna give us some nice highlights of our edges that really would be worn out from wear and tear and so I'm going to come into our gradient editor here and I'm going to bring up our black-and-white values here and I really want to crank up the black so that we get most of the material looking black except for the edges which we're gonna keep a nice white and I'm gonna come into our blend here and I'm gonna go down to where we have screen and what screen is going to do is get rid of all the black values and it's only going to keep the lighter values and so now we've got some edge where on top of our bricks I'm just going to come down now and decrease the opacity a significant amount to something like 0.25 and this is just going to give us some nice edge wear of our bricks the final thing I like to do in our Obito is I just like to add a sharpen node and this is just going to sharpen up some of our destruction information and you can see it's a little bit too blurry but as we increase it up we get a little bit of a crisper looking detail in our map here [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Get Learnt w/ Chunck

Views: 85,476

Keywords: 3D, tutorial, material, substance, substance designer, designer, brick, texture, lesson, substance designer 2018, get learnt

Id: ji45Nmc93Nk

Length: 78min 29sec (4709 seconds)

Published: Sat May 26 2018