Chainlink | Substance Designer Pattern Fundamentals

so if you're a long time subscriber to the channel you probably remember that i've done a chain link material before so why is this one any different well that video is really long and really verbose and at the end of the day the material that we made is not very robust so instead in this video let's take a look at doing pretty much a better material all around and we're going to do it in far less nodes so i'm using my custom height template here so you can go ahead and check that video out down below and the first thing we'll need to do is right click drag and drop this in so that we're actually going to be able to visualize our normal and our height and so what i want to start with is going to be the actual kind of shape or defining feature of the chain link because it's got a very kind of interesting and a little bit complex shape that's going to be difficult to replicate with a lot of the nodes available to us however we do fortunately have a pretty good one that we can actually start with and that's going to be the waveform node so i can go ahead and start typing in waveform and you can see that by default we're going to get these two kind of you know waveforms there and the parameters are not maybe going to be the most explicit necessarily as to what they do but the first thing i want to do is i want to get rid of these two and just have one large one in the center so let's go and find our number here bring that down to one you can actually bring it down to zero which is kind of cool but we don't want that we want to make sure we have at least one so we're getting this kind of wave shape and i'm going to bring the samples up so it's a little bit smoother that's actually going to kind of decrease the grayscale just because there's so many of these guys here i also want to be able to bring the noise down so that we're getting just more of a solid shape and i want to go ahead and change the shape or the pattern here and you can see that kind of changes the overall look and the pattern that i want to go with is actually going to be 10 because what i can do with this now is i can get rid of that other side because i only realistically want one side and then we're gonna do a little bit of editing magic down the line to reintroduce the other side but it's just easier to work on the bottom side here so to get rid of that top side there what i can do is add a histogram scan node and in later versions of substance designer i believe you can use a threshold node as well but i like to work with the histogram scan so i'm going to bring this up actually i'll bring the contrast up first and then i want to just bump this up honestly by one point there because you can see as i start to bring this up it starts to capture a little bit of the top there so i want to make sure that we get just kind of right down to the bottom so that you can hopefully kind of see this is going to be one side of the chain link so i'm going to go ahead and bring these over and i want to go and just quickly add a transformation 2d and this one doesn't necessarily make sense right off the hop but what i want to do with this is i want to be able to push this value right here kind of off the edge because that's going to conflict a little bit with some of the later nodes so i'm going to just hold down control and click this in here and i'm actually going to just bring it off a little bit but i know i'm going to change this in a minute i just want to show you why we're actually using this transformation so off of this transformation i'm going to go two different directions the first direction i'm going to go is going to be using an edge detect and let's quickly just go and invert that right because i want to be able to capture just the silhouette and actually i kind of goofed myself a little bit because i actually went a little farther than i was anticipating but you can see the reason that i wanted to move it off is it actually with the edge detect starts to kind of get this little dip off of our texture sheet so that's what i want to try and avoid so that's why we can just go ahead and again holding down control just scooting this up a little bit until we get rid of that little problem there now the second direction i want to go is we'll branch off in this direction here adding another transformation 2d so with these two nodes here and i'll just move these back for some space what i want to do is i want to subtract this value here from this value here so that we're actually only going to get this bottom line so what we can do is add a blends node bring this up let's bring this up and over and we'll switch our blending mode to b subtract so by default it's really not going to do much because really all we've done is just subtract from the center here right so we need to go ahead and actually move this transformation 2d so i want to move it on the y upwards just a really really tiny amount and i think that's going to be probably around 0.005 right so we can see the difference between these two is really not a lot but i've gone ahead and gotten rid of that top piece there so if i hit space we're going to just kind of get this nice waveform so let's go ahead and run this through a bevel node and that's going to help us if we bring our distance down to about 0.05 just kind of round everything out and actually you can see kind of what i was talking about earlier again right where some of this information gets cut off so that's why we have this initial transform so i'll just go and again control and then click just make sure to dial that in so with our bevel node as well just to try and round things out so it's not super sharp i also want to bring the smoothing up to about 3.5 so it's going to just kind of you know like the name suggests smooth it out a little bit and it's also going to make sure that we get a little bit of a nicer fall off so hopefully we can kind of start to see this chain link shape coming together however before we actually go ahead and try and kind of mirror this over so that we can finalize the shape we need to actually introduce a gradient so that this is going to be able to give the effect like it's kind of entwined with itself right kind of like a chain link looks like so in order to do that let's add another blend node and what i want to do is i want to go ahead and add a gradient node here and it's just going to be a linear one so that we're going to get a white value all the way down to a black value and we can plug this in and i'm going to rotate this actually 90 degrees so that it's going to be from black to white and i want to make sure that we're going to use the multiply so essentially what that's going to do is take any of the darker values and just overlay that on top of our chain link and if i go ahead and hit spacebar again right we can kind of see the effect that it's going to do is it it can kind of look a little bit like it's going to be you know going back and kind of pushing in or recessing into our image here and then coming back out at the other side almost like a corkscrew really but we'll notice that we have a bit of an issue here right where it goes from pure black to basically pure white so the first way we can kind of try and mitigate that is going to be just dropping our opacity down to 0.9 so that we're working with some actual values and not just pure black but the way that we're going to actually be able to have more control over this is by introducing a curve node and this curve node is now going to allow me to actually use a curve editor to manipulate these values that we're going to be subtracting so i'll just make sure i double click back there so we can kind of see what's going on and in our curve i'll just go ahead and double click to add a point i'm going to take our black value and actually bring that all the way up and that's now going to actually make sure that this area and here is going to be white right because if we take a look now we've made this area white now we're going to have to take a look again if i just come back at actually introducing some darker values here on this left side or you could do the right side but we're going to do the left side for this tutorial and all we're going to have to do is simply just add in these two values and just bring these down so you can see that as i bring this down right the multiply blending mode is going to kind of do its work for us i just want to try and round these out just a little bit i'm also going to go ahead and actually just add a point up here and i just kind of want it to round out just a little bit like that now what i might do is just bring this over and this is really an area that you can go ahead and start fine tuning things but i want to make sure that it's going to be like a nice gradual and kind of soft round off there right so that we're going to get this kind of again nice corkscrew looking shape now the final thing i want to do and it's a little bit insidious because it's a little bit tough to see right now but if i come back to our shape you might be able to see it in the video here but there actually still is a very sharp line down the center and the reason that is is because we have it pretty much coming to a pure white value but it's actually kind of like reaching the value here only for about one band of pixels down the center so it's it's still a little bit of a harsh cut off so what i want to do is select this value this little handle that we have in the top left and i'm going to come over here and click on this button which is going to basically make the left side of it dead and give us a rounded corner for the right so that you can see it's actually added a little bit of information but maybe a little bit more than i want so i can click this handle and drag that down just a touch so that now if i come a little bit closer right hopefully you can see that that's now gone or if you couldn't see it in the first part then you're gonna just have to take my word for it so now how do we go ahead and take this corkscrew shape and turn it into a chain link pattern because i'm pretty sure the title of this video said it was about chain link fences so what we can do is add a transformation 2d and i'm going to want to go ahead and branch this one off as well into two different directions so let's go and add our blend first and this is how we're going to consolidate all these shapes together and i'm going to be using the max lighten blending mode now i'm going to go and also bring out another transformation 2d and for this what i want to do is i'm just going to simply rotate it 180 degrees now i want to make sure that we're using a transformation and not just mirroring this because if you can notice we actually have the darker value now on the right side and that's going to be a result of you know rotating this 180 degrees so that if i add these together using our max lighten mode you can see right that this brighter value once we move it is going to be over top whereas if we mirrored it we'd have the brighter value and the brighter value and they just kind of intersect and nothing you know and it wouldn't know how to overlay one value over the other so that's why we want to make sure we're going to rotate it and not mirror it so now if i come back to our first transformation 2d remember that it's actually going to move both i'm going to come and bring this up on the y just a little bit to about 0.028 and you can see that's now going to intersect things a little and it might not intersect you know great you maybe want to have it a little bit darker kind of at those edges there so that this can kind of you know come up over top a little bit better and all you'd have to do is go ahead and play around with your values in your curve node just to get that how you like it and to really fine tune it but i think it's going to be in a good spot so let's go ahead and add another transformation 2d and i just want to go and rotate this so you can rotate it clockwise counterclockwise however you want i just want to make sure that it's going to be vertical like this and you can see that we're getting really really close to the final result and now where this is really going to start to come together is when we go ahead and actually take this shape and start to tile it so i'm going to use a tile generator node you could go ahead and use a tile sampler but i think it's a little bit of overkill for this particular shape so we can go ahead and change this to image input i'm just going to bring the x and the y amount down to 3x3 and if we look real close you can see that we're going to get this black line and you might have kind of had this issue in previous materials you made and the way that we can fix that is honestly just coming under the pattern header here and under our image input filtering let's just change it to bilinear you could also change it to nearest but bilinear is going to give you better results and you can see now that that's gone so now let's actually make this kind of link up right as a chain link would i'm going to come down to our size and the first thing i want to change is the scale so that we're going to get some overlap so let's bring this up to about 1.2 so that you can kind of see there's going to be a little bit of connection between them you know horizontally like this but we're going to get this weird kind of like kind of peaking points right and the reason that we're getting that is because our blending mode by default is going to be on additive so let's go ahead and change this to max just like our blending mode was for this blend mode here and you can see that there's going to be a little bit of intersection and again you can play around with just some spacing positioning as well as the curve to kind of get a better blend so now that we've got that i want to come back up to our size and i just want to change our interstice y so that we're not getting these weird kind of collisions and so i think a good number for it is yeah 0.16 is going to be able to connect this for us and we can see that we've now gone ahead and got a chain-link pattern however if we take a look it looks kind of squished on the vertical here and i want to go ahead and actually kind of stretch that out just a little bit to have it more square like so finally we can add another transformation 2d our final transformation 2d for this particular material and i want to come over to the height and i want to stretch it about 150 percent so i'll type 150 and hit apply height and now 150 is going to be a perfect percentage because it's actually going to basically be a good interval to tile this at you'll notice that if i went ahead and did like you know 115 right you can see we're going to get a very visible repeating pattern because it's not going to hit the tiling target but 150 or just going up by 50 is going to be a pretty good percentage to hit so i'll go back and do 150 and we can see if i zoom in here right we're not even going to notice the line other than when i bring my cursor back into it and so that's going to look pretty good now finally i'm going to add a levels node and this is just going to allow me to pretty much increase kind of the intensity or the background right because by default it's a little bit dark back there so if we bring in this middle piece i can still increase the levels of those background gradients while still maintaining the overall relationship between the front and the back parts of the chain now i can go ahead drag this into our normal and height and if i want to go ahead and now update the number of tiles that we're going to get i can go ahead and maybe make this six by six and you can see that it's still going to tile perfectly for us and it's going to be a nice you know more square shape and now i've gone ahead and just plugged this into our final outputs given it a color and made sure that it's metallic because i also want to show you that we can go ahead and give this an opacity output so that you know you're not going to be able to just see this very mirror-like background so let's go ahead and create another output node and we'll bring this down i'll go ahead and make sure to name this appropriately and now in order to actually use it as an opacity output let's go ahead and add item change its usage to be opacity and from our final output here i'm going to go ahead and just drag this in use another histogram scan or threshold node if that's what you want to use make sure that we can go ahead and bring our position up and turn our contrast up as well so that we're only going to be able to find our chain link and now let's right click in our graph view outputs in 3d and you can see that i now have control over the actual opacity of these chains here you

Channel: Get Learnt w/ Chunck

Views: 1,824

Keywords: 3D, tutorial, patterns, chain, link, fence, material, game asset, texture, pbr, get learnt, substance designer, substance painter, substance suite, adobe

Id: q0WtBVYzBDQ

Length: 18min 7sec (1087 seconds)

Published: Mon May 17 2021