Create a Leafy Pond Texture From Scratch in Substance Designer

we've been doing a lot of hard surface shapes recently and I think it's time to switch things up and do something a bit more organic today we're gonna create a leafy muddy pond texture where we work with the incredible water level node and scatter a custom-made leaf shape across a dirt ground we've got a lot to cover in this video so let's get started [Music] alright a fresh new graph let's get started here we're gonna use the PBR metallic roughness template and I'm gonna call this leafy pond tutorial great and I'm gonna keep it absolutely 2k 16 bits per channel is good and hit OK alright so we've got our basic outputs here let's make sure they're going into the 3d view and so you can see my layout here is a bit different than the standard one I have my Explorer with my graphs down in the bottom right corner and then I've got my 2d and 3d views appear so that you can see them pretty well in the video I'm also gonna try and do my best to zoom in if there are some specific details all right so let's get started we're gonna start off by making leaves and today we're gonna go for a leaf that is slightly stylized and slightly realistic there are a million different ways to portray a leaf and here's one way to get that iconic shape so we're gonna start off with the leaf body and to do that we're gonna create a waveform so I'm gonna use my waveform one node and let's adjust this a little bit to get the kind of shape that we're looking for so we can change our samples here the size min and Max let's see so I really only want one wave let's increase the size max and finally going to bring the pattern down to the lowest that it goes here and actually that's a bit it's a bit much let's bring that down great so we're getting this kind of wave leaf looking pattern here next up let's rotate it by adding a safe transform safe transform is different than a regular transform because it lets you tile but also easily rotates things at 45 degree increments so you can see I can just rotate here and it only rotates entire label degrees so really I just need to rotate it so that it's up and down here and now I'm gonna add an interesting note I'm gonna add and aneisa tropic blur grayscale this is really curious no and look how I can adjust this sort of phasing of our leaf and you might be able to see where we could possibly get a sort of leaf like shape from this if we continue to adjust it a little bit more so I'm gonna change my intensity I'm gonna increase it a little bit and I'm gonna just some more of these parameters here let's bring this all the way up and it's adjust the angle a little bit and increase the quality all the way up to one you can see how that really like thickens up the shape bit and so now I want to focus on this shape so I'm going to grab a histogram scan and that's just the position here a little bit you can see now we can really dial in this leaf shape by just changing the position and contrast of this histogram scan so I really want to dial this in and i can bring in those edges to a bit of a sharper cut here with the contrast so we have the basic shape of our leaf here just by using this anisotropic blur and you can notice that if you alter it if I double click the histogram scan but single click the blur you can really adjust this shape and what it comes out as just by rotating which is pretty cool so let's make some room and let's add a stem to this shape so a stem is gonna be pretty easy we're basically just gonna get a shape node and we're gonna keep it as square let's dial down the size and let's decrease it on the height and width and we're just adjusting the X&Y here to get the right size of the stem and to get more of an organic shape from this let's add a blur and use a high-quality grayscale blur and let's adjust our intensity I think the default of 10 was fine and then we're gonna focus this again with the histogram scan so bring up that position now don't bring it up too high otherwise you're gonna get this pretty harsh edge on the corners which is good for some shapes but not for the stem so we can adjust the position to get the range that we're looking for and then we can use the contrast to then focus this in here so I'm gonna adjust these parameters just a little bit to get exactly what I'm looking for that's good there yeah let's focus this in a little more nice now up next I want to add some volume to this shape so there are many different ways to add volume but I find one of the best in this case is using a non-uniform blur so let's add a non-uniform blur a grayscale a non-uniform blur is a great way to add depth or mass to a shape if you're looking for a good way to add some height to a basic shape or mask this is a really good way to do it so I've added this non-uniform blur and/or the blur map I'm also gonna bring in the same input and now we can adjust our parameters here so let's see I want my intensity to come down just a bit you can see how in our height map we get more of a rounded 3d shape from our height map just by adding this non uniform blur so I'm gonna alter the intensity a little bit here and I'm just gonna increase the samples that it's giving me and the blades and now let's combine these two shapes together so let's get a blend and I'm gonna put the leaf body in the background and the stem in the foreground set this to add here now you're not gonna see this right away let's add a transform so that we can move our stem into place let's bring this down so I'm noticing that we're getting this really sharp harsh line here I think I want to blur out this leaf shape just a little bit so what I'm gonna do is go to my histogram scan and add a blur high quality grayscale and I think that's going to affect are shaped just a little bit more and you'll see why I did that in a little bit so we're giving ourselves a bunch of control that we'll be able to use later on when we see things in our 3d view we can really customize our leaf shape especially with this blur and it's histogram scan so I'm gonna keep the stem right about here for now and you can see that our leaf shapes coming together I'm going to just reorder my nodes here only because I like to think of these as layers especially when they're coming into a blend node so the foregrounds on top the backgrounds on the bottom and to easily straight now nodes select them and press this button here to either align them horizontally or vertically and you can also snap them to the grid here with this button as well up next let's make the veins in our leaf so I'm going to go and get a tile generator and I'm going to adjust the X&Y amount here I don't need any on the X and instead of a brick pattern I'm gonna get a square so that there's no gradual fall off to our shapes and then I'm gonna scroll down and adjust the luminance random property so that we're getting all different kinds of luminance great scale values here on our tiles and then I'm gonna grab another safe transform so I'm gonna rotate this so that we get a nice 45 degree angle and then add a mirror grayscale so we're starting to get these vein-like shapes going on I'm gonna grab an edge detect and this is where you can really see these shapes starting to appear here and I'm really gonna thin down the edge with because these vanes are gonna be very very small if we can adjust the roundness here just a tiny bit because you can see the the round joins here happening so to make this a bit more Ganic I'm gonna increase the roundness here so I'm gonna make another shape for the center vein of the leaf so I just brought in a shape node and I'm gonna decrease the size in X so I really get a thin line here and then and then I'm gonna subtract these two so could it blend bring the center vein into the foreground of the edge detect into the background and set the blending mode to subtract here so you can see we've got this Center vein and I can change the scale of this here and now we want to add some volume to these veins and like I mentioned before to really add that volume we're gonna use a non-uniform grayscale and we're adding this into the blur map as well and let's increase our intensity a bit we really want to smooth these things out you notice we're getting these jagged edges so let's increase the samples quite a bit and the blades and let's play with this intensity not too much and that's looking like a very smooth good shape that we can use to subtract from our leaf shape and to soften this up just a tiny bit more I'm gonna add another blur high quality grayscale and really decrease it just soften this up just a tiny bit so let's take a look at what we're doing so far I'm gonna get a blend and I'm gonna bring our veins into the foreground and our leaf into the background and if I set this to subtract take a look at what's going on here some really cool-looking shape you can see where with the basic idea of what our leaf is looking like it's looking a bit harsh right now but we still have a couple things we need to do to it first off I'm gonna bring down the opacity quite a bit and as I do that you'll see that our leaf starts growing and expanding which is pretty cool so right now you're noticing that things aren't really matching up very well and that's because our veins are very uniform they're going straight up and down they're going exactly at 45-degree angles and leaves are organic right they have a lot of distortions and different shapes going on so what we need to do is start distorting and warping our veins so that it conforms to our leaf shape so what we're going to do is I'm going to get a directional war and I'm going to plug in our blur high quality grayscale here into the warp and then as an input I'm going to get another shape and this shape is a parable Lloyd and so the parabola load shape has a really nice soft fall off and you can really control where the directional warp is affecting these vanes by transforming this parabola would and bring it into the intensity input so after the shape I'm going to add a transform 2d and then I'm going to plug that into the intensity input so if I double click the warp you can see we've got this bending occurring and that's exactly the kind of stuff that we're looking for for a leaf so to get a better idea of what we're doing I'm going to put this directional warp in and replace our foreground in our blend you can start to see what's going on here but to really adjust this I'm going to single click my transformation 2d and just move the parabola load over and if you can see the icon here we've got some tiling going on we don't want that so we go to tiling mode under our transform 2d and set it to absolute and then no tiling because we just want one single shape here so again I'm going to double click on our blend here single click on our transform 2d and now we can really adjust the fall-off of this direction of warp and I might want to change some parameters like the intensity in our directional warp so let's increase it just a little bit see if I increase it a lot and then move our transform 2d around it can shape how these how these veins look so I'm going to dial back my intensity it doesn't need to be too much Dan I'm gonna place my parabola in the bottom right corner here this is giving our veins just a slight sense of organic direction and distortion and if your stem is out of place you can simply move the transform to D of that stem and really line it up to where you want it to go so finally what I want to do is refine our shape just a little bit and that's going to be done with a slope blur grayscale what I want here is to bring my final blend into the grayscale input and then as the slope I'm going to use the leaf without the vanes double-click that and you see it's gone all crazy let's increase our samples for one bring down the intensity quite a bit and I want to set it to min so it's only altering the minimum values here and we can adjust the fall-off of our leaf and give it a more sense of where the leaf ends and this will become a lot more clear when we put it in our 3d view so let's keep organized a little bit and let's make some frames so we can take this top section we know that's gonna be our veins then we have our stem here and finally our base shape then let's take the whole thing select it add one more frame and call it leaf nice and organized so we've got our basic leaf shape and if you'd like you can turn this into a separate graph and create your own leaf generator or if you'd like to throw in some diversity you can make a couple of different leaves with different amounts of veins stem lengths and directional warps once you're ready for the next step it's time to create the ground that we're going to spread these leaves upon so let's do that I want to make some sort of soil e mud texture and to do that let's make some mounds of dirt so I'm going to grab a grunge map and substance designer has a bunch of amazing grunge maps that come in for the mounds I'm going to use grunge map for you can see we've got all these different splotches really organic looking grunge shapes really cool and there are so many uses for this and the grunge map has a bunch of parameters so we can change the balance here of which of these splotches we can use what their values are if we crank it up you can see there's all kinds of stuff coming on in the background I don't need so much of that so I'm gonna bring this down to about maybe six-five and the contrast was get around 0.5 you can adjust the brush pattern here you can sort of bring it in and this is useful if you want to multiply this pattern across by using something like a tile sampler or tile generator but for now I'm going to keep it down to zero now to make this more smooth I'm gonna add a blur so use a high quality blur I don't want it too intense I still want to get some sort of that grungy sort of texture but then to sort of tighten up the edges of these mounds and to add a bit more of that detail that we're looking for let's add a slope or grayscale now instead of putting itself into the slope let's add something with a bit more noise so I'm gonna add a black and white spots too I get lots of good texture here for this and this adds the sort of sand dirt kind of broken up texture that I'm looking for so let's bring that into the slope see what we're doing here of course we need to bring up our samples and we need to heavily bring down the intensity and if we bring it down to the point right around right around just point one we're getting these sort of almost brushstroke like dabs and it's a really cool shape and texture and that's gonna be great for our dirt so I've got these dirt mounds but I kind of want a sort of uneven surface to put it upon so an easy way to do that is get a Perlin noise you can bring the scale down let me just blend these two together so I'm gonna for my Perlin noise in the background and our mounds of dirt from our slope we're in the foreground and set this to add and you can see we're sort of blowing out the mounds so let's bring that opacity down and we just want hints of it let's start looking at what we're doing in our 3d view so I'm gonna create a blend node and I'm gonna hook up this blend to a couple of our outputs so we can see what's going on pretty easily one blend that feeds into all these other outputs so I'm going to bring this blend into the norm I need to create an ambient occlusion so we'll get rid of this uniform color and add an ambient occlusion node hook that up to the output and then hook this blend into that ambient occlusion and don't worry about the red dashed marks for now they'll go away later and then finally let's hook this blend into the height and get rid of that uniform color if I take the blends that we have here of our ground and our dirt that we have so far bring that into the foreground you'll see that we're starting to get something in our 3d view and you can see what this noise with the slope learn and that grunge map is starting to add adding a really neat looking texture and to increase our quality of view in our 3d view let's go to materials defaults and make sure it's set to tessellation let's change our tessellation factor I'll bring it up to 16 and I just want to add a tiny bit of scale so I'm around here so that you can kind of get an idea of that uneven ground that we did with that Perlin noise and the height that we're adding with our mounds of dirt so this is looking okay but there is a lot of flat uniform smooth shape still going on and we need to add just a tiny bit more of detail so I'm gonna get a dirt one noise and it's useful for what it's called it's dirt so let's blend in that so we'll create another blend after the blend that we have and we'll bring in the dirt one and our foreground set this to add and you can see it's way too much right now so let's bring down that opacity break up some of that texture so now you can see we're getting just a little bit more noise here and I'm thinking mainly about viewing this material from right about here I'm never really gonna see it from this close really we're just looking at it from here you really need to think about how closely somebody's going to be viewing your material in either a game or a render or something like that you don't need to go head over heels on the detail if you're not going to come close enough to the material to see it so we've got a muddy ground here so let's select it and frame it up I'm gonna call it bunny ground and we now have these two components for our material so in addition to having this sort of mud texture I want to break it up a little bit with some pebbles and some small rocks so I'm gonna quickly make some pebbles and I've covered this more in detail in a previous video so if you'd like to check that out I'm gonna put it up buff and below that like button but we're gonna create some small broken-up randomized pebbles that we're gonna scatter across this ground layer so let's get started I'm gonna make some room here let's start off by getting a tile sampler and let's zoom out here I'm gonna change the pattern to disc and I'm gonna bring this scale way down change the position random quite a bit and I'm also going to go down all the way to the bottom and change the color random property so it's going to give these small circles a bunch of different grayscale values up next I'm going to add a distance node and I'm gonna bring the tile sampler into the source input and then I have to get a histogram scan to create a mask and let's just crank up the position and the contrast so it's just a black and white mask go into our distance node and let's crank this up to something really high like a thousand and we're getting this really cool Verona a pattern shape it's get an edge detect and we can adjust the roundness of our rocks and the width of these edges and then I'm going to detect all these different islands here with the amazing flood film node then attach a flood fail to gradient you can see now we have all these gradients that are specific to each of these separate rock shapes so I'm going to adjust the angle variation to one so they're all different and then to duplicate these a bunch so I'm gonna click on my flood fill the gradient hit ctrl D to duplicate and then all I need to do is single click on the flood filter gradient and then change the random seed and the random seeds going to adjust these random gradient variations on each of these shapes so I'm gonna do it again control D single click to make sure that we're looking at the properties that's what this little icon means and adjust the random seed and let's do it one more time control D single click I set this to 3 so we've got all these different variations now let's blend them all together so let's get a blend node and this blend nodes gonna be set to min darken so we'll take the first one in the foreground second one in the background and we're getting these planes now where they meet up they're creating these edges of just what really sells this sort of pebble rock shape in our height so I'm gonna duplicate this blend and let's put the previous blend in the background and the third flood filter gradient in the foreground and making sure this is set to min darken so we're adding another plane and we'll do the same thing for the last one put that in the background and our flat feel degrading in the foreground so we've got these different rock planes going on with all of our pebbles finally to add more of an organic feel to these rocks let's get our slope flare grayscale this final blend is going to be our grayscale input and then I want to kind of blur out this final blend with a blur high quality grayscale and then put that into the slope let's increase the samples and decrease the intensity and this is giving us our organic looking pebble shape here you can adjust the blur to really customize what kind of pebbles you're looking for maybe they're closely fitting together maybe they're more spread apart and to add more or less rocks if you go into your tile sampler you can increase the amount and if they all disappear that's because your edge detect has too high of a number for both the edge width and roundness in its properties so if we bring down that edge width and the roundness you can see we're getting a lot more of our rocks and this is a great way to mask off the amount of rocks that you have in your material so let's do a couple for now we can adjust this later but really I want to see what I'm doing here so let's blend in our rocks on to our ground material so let's bring in our slope flare into the foreground of our blend and change our blending mode to add you can see what's going on here now already I can tell our rocks are very pointy and I think we need to remap some of these levels so after our slope blur greyscale that's at a levels node and let's decrease the white amount here we can start globally adjusting the maximum point where how high our rocks can get just with this bottom slider here and that's looking better so let's frame up our pebbles generator and now I sort of on a plan ahead by creating some masks so thinking about masks ahead of time it's really important because you're gonna need those to directly enhance and alter the albedo the roughness and all the other values that you have in your material later on so these masks can let you selectively adjust those properties and thinking about that ahead of time really saves you time in the long run so I know that I'm gonna need a mask for just my rocks so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna drag off another output from this levels node from our pebbles and get a histogram scan we can just bring that position in contrast all the way up and now I have a mask for just our pebbles and this will update no matter how many pebbles we create from our I'll sampler note and to remember what each mask is I'm going to add a comment to this note so I'm going to right-click choose add comment and let's call this pebbles mask and this comment is going to stick to this node no matter where I put it so as we go along I'm going to create these masks which will come in handy later so now it's time to scatter our leaves across the ground there's an amazing node built into substance designer that lets us do just that with a bunch of powerful parameters and that's the shape splatter node let's make some room here and let's bring in that shape splatter and it has a bunch of inputs here but we're really only gonna use two of them for now so for our background height let's bring in this blend that has all of our rocks and pebbles and dirt everything that we're getting coming out of our to muddy ground and pebbles components and let's bring that into the background height input here and secondly for pattern 1 let's finally bring in our leaves now if I double-click on here you'll see our leaves are getting distributed very evenly across our ground so to see what we're doing let's just pump in our height output here into the foreground so we can see what's going on in our 3d view here so clearly that's way too uniformed let's mess things up a bit double clicking on our shape splatter node let's adjust how many leaves were going to want to put onto our ground I'm thinking 22 ish for the X&Y amount then let's increase our scale you want to give some volume to these leaves then we can randomize the amount of scale that we have here so that we can get different sizes and if we scroll down now we can randomize the position of these leaves and finally to get things really cooking let's bring up the rotation random now these leaves are starting to look like they're being scattered over the surface and this is trying to really sell that randomness that we're looking for now the sheep's platter has a lot of amazing height parameters too because we're not just scattering this shape across a texture it's looking at this base height that we have here and we can conform these leaves to this base height so let me show you what's going on if I scroll down and go to the height we can adjust the height offset so if we want to sync these leaves in more or if you want them to pop out a bit more we can do that I think because this ground is a bit soft you want you want to make this seem like this texture has existed for a long time so you would imagine if things were coming through or if it rained or something that these leaves would start to get covered with that mud so let's bring the leaves beneath the ground just a little bit much like displacement in any render engine you can adjust the height scale what's going on here and I'm gonna keep it at 1 but then you can also randomize it so I'm gonna crank up the randomness and you can see what that's doing is it's just adding a bit of variation into our leaves some more the name of the game here really is variation now things are looking better but let's check this out we've got this one leaf here that's sort of just sticking out from the top and that's because it really doesn't know what it's doing with this height we haven't enabled one of the most important parameters in our shape splatter and that is giving our pattern of leaves here the ability to conform to the background so if I drag this conform to background parameter to the right you're gonna see that the leaves are going to lay on top of our base height that we created and I can you can see that better if I bring us down to a lower angle if I slide this back and forth the leaves are now starting to wrap around that dirt ground but you can also see that it's giving us another problem in the corner here our leaves are all of a sudden getting a bunch of dirt on top of them while that may be a cool effect you can prevent this from happening by dragging this smooth conformed background option so if I drag that you can see that our dirt is smoothing away and we're just left with our leaves so I'm gonna bring that all the way up to two because right now I really don't want any dirt covering our leaves and now our height is really starting to come together here we've got our leaves scattered across we've got kind of a dirt ground for them to cover we've got our stone pebbles and we're really creating more detailed realistic looking round material here the shape splatter note also generates a couple really useful outputs that we can use to generate some of our masks that I was talking about earlier so we have this splatter data1 and splatter data too if I double click this output you can see we're getting some information here kind of similar to what you'd get the flood fill node so you see we've got our background information and then we also have our leaf information here as well and the shape splatter node has some counterparts in the built in substance designer node library and one of those is called a shape splatter to mask node so if I type that in and you can see we have a bunch of different shapes but or notes here but if I grab a shape splatter to mask and bring in our splatter data one it automatically converts all that information into a useful mask that we can use and even with these parameters from this mask node you can randomly mask away different leaves so I'm gonna keep this mask around and I'm gonna comment it and call it my all leaves mask I'm also going to use this same mask for a background mask so I'm gonna use an invert grayscale and this also creates a mask for just the background and I'm gonna give it a comment with everything that we have here so far I think it's time to start creating some of our albedo and roughness maps so let's make some more space here in order to create our base color or albedo I want to focus in on our shape splatters height and I want to isolate the leaves and the background I want to separate them from each other so that we can alter them specifically so let's get a blend let's bring in the height information from our shapes bladder into the foreground then to isolate what's going on here let's get that shape splatter mask that we created for our leaves and bring that into the opacity instead of just having a straight black and white mask now we have all of that juicy grayscale height data to work with in our albedo I also want to do the same thing for our ground layer so blend let's get our background mask bring that into the opacity and feed in the same height data from our shapes platter so we've got all of that information going on here so to add some color into the mix here let's add a gradient map node and the gradient map node is amazing because it Maps all of our height grayscale values to a color gradient so if I go into this gradient editor and I pick something let's add a key here in the bottom and maybe it will make something sort of a dark brown and then the light can be some sort of lighter brown now to make this a lot easier we're gonna pick a gradient from a reference image that I found online so let's click pick gradient I've got my images here and we'll just drag across and select a couple keys here you can adjust the precision for how much detail you're looking for from that pick that you got and you can play around with this and really get the kind of mud color that you're looking for so I've commented these two blend layers here so here's my ground detail and I have my gradient map and you can see I've gone for more of a brownish dark color scheme and now let's bring this gradient map into our albedo base color output to see what we're really doing in our 3d view so here's our base color output and let's get rid of this default uniform color that comes with the template and let's bring in our base color you know you can really see what's going on here our ground has more of a brownish dark color going on leaves are getting colored because we haven't masked them out yet and added their own colors yet but that is what we're gonna be doing next let's grab our leaf mask let's add another gradient map and let's do the exact same thing let's pick our colors from our images so you can see I've got a very simple gradient here Marquis doesn't necessarily mean a more desired amount of detail and like I said before we're going for a sort of half stylized half realistic interpretation of leaves here so I've just created some small keys here that I've picked from a reference image of a leaf and applied it to this gradient map and so now let's combine these two so I got a blend node in the background I've got my search gradient map in the foreground I've got my leaves and for the mask to interpolate the two I'm gonna get that leaf or leaves mask and bring that into the opacity and finally I'm gonna shift click to borrow that output that's going into our base color you can see our leaf texture is now being imposed on our ground texture finally we're gonna have to do the same thing for our pebbles so remember earlier when we made that pebbles mask now we're going to start needing to use it over here let's create a new blend and grab our shape splatter height and bring that into our foreground and then to mask off those rocks let's grab our pebbles mask and put it into the opacity we can comment this and call it pebble detail and let's add another gradient map and for these keys and colors I've made an even simpler gradients here with just a small darker key here and a couple light ones providing this kind of an output so let's blend those together as the opacity let's use that pebbles mask that we've been using so now our pebbles have a bunch more detail here let's give us a frame our colors looking good but everything is so smooth in uniform we really need to dial in some more roughness especially when it comes to our leaves so let's do that now I'm gonna make some room here and to create just this global roughness starting point there's a really good node and it's called the fractal some base and it's got a couple of parameters here that are really cool so right away we can dial in our roughness you can see what that's doing it's creating much more of a static like texture so I'll just adjust the roughness a little bit and the global opacity kind of dials in the overall light and dark levels of this noise so we have these min and Max levels and this is really adjusting the minimum and maximum level of detail so if I bring this level down you can see it gets a lot blurrier and increases in detail if I bring it up I'm actually gonna keep it at default which is one and eleven so really what I'm thinking here is that leaves are porous you know they have pores if you zoom in far enough on a leaf you're gonna see all these cells so that's kind of what I'm going for with this sort of fractal some base approach so to isolate the leaves I'm gonna have to grab that handy leaves mask that we have first off let's get a blend and let's put the fractal Sun base into the foreground and grab our all leaves mask here and make that our opacity then up next I'm going to use the height mask that we created for our ground and use those values as a roughness map so let's go all the way back get our muddy ground and I'm gonna take another output out of this blend and I'm gonna create a new blend to isolate just the ground let's get our background mask you can also call this ground mask if that makes it easier put that in the opacity and you noticed it's a bit flip-flopped here and that's because we have our ground height in our background so all you really need to do is shift click and borrow that map and bring it into the foreground and now we're getting the desired result with our blend so what I mean is we have our blend here which has just the ground layer that's coming into the foreground of our blend and in the opacity input of our blend we've got our background mask and this is gonna affect our roughness because we already have a lot of interesting values here coming from that ground layer what we need to do now is blend our leaves that have this noise and our background so we get a blend node let's make the background our background and our leaves our foreground and let's change it to add and here's we got last but not least let's plug in our roughness into our roughness output and instead of deleting this I'm actually to keep this uniform color for later now if we look at under material you see we're getting a bit of variance with our roughness but overall it's just a bit too rough and so that's why I kept this uniform color around so let's use this uniform color and multiply it by our roughness to add an overall sense of a more wet and shiny appearance to our material so I'm going to create a blend here I'm going to select this connection out of blend and I'll just bring it up here for now and take this uniform color put it in the foreground and now let's just I'll just set it to multiply and this lets us really dial in the overall roughness values that we're getting so I'm going to sort of increase it a little bit that's a bit better you can see the variation in roughness that we're getting on our leaves and you can see sort of the wet ground and mud that we're getting here and if you can also adjust this uniform color if it's too light or too dark just gonna adjust the opacity of this a bit more and for now I'm thinking that's looking pretty good we can always adjust this later so let's keep things organized here and we can add another frame so this is what our graph is looking like so far so we've got our different components we've got our leaf which is made up of smaller components we've got our pebbles we've got our ground and then we're scattering the leaf onto our base ground height here we've created a few masks and we've created an albedo base color and roughness map next let's add water so now I've got a basic material going and this could be where the tutorial ends but I didn't want to stop there because there's this really amazing node in substance designer that lets you add water to any material you know those advertisements on TV where they say just add water well it's almost as easy as that so if I hit space bar and type in water level you see we've got this massive node here with all these inputs and outputs and this is going to require us to sort of reorganize how we have our graph as it is if you take a closer look at the water level node you see that it's inputs are all of the main outputs that we have for our regular material and we've already got all of these generated so let's use them what I'm gonna do I'm gonna take our outputs and select them like this and I'm gonna move them over so that we have a separation between these nodes which are going straight into our main outputs and we can start hooking them up into our water level node so if we start from the top down and we have base color well we're gonna have to grab the base color that we're piping straight into our output node but to organize this a bit better I'm just going to create a new blend this blend it's literally just copying what we have from our blend here that's going from our albedo and into our final base color output I'm just gonna line this up right here and take this output pump it into the base color up next is normal and we have our normal right here so let's pump that into the normal slot we have our roughness blend already that's being multiplied by our uniform color so let's bump that into roughness we're not really using metallic but I'm just gonna pump it in anyway so we've got our metallic uniform color which is no metallic value so it's black we'll take our ambient occlusion and make sure you pump it into the AO input and not the height and then at the bottom we're gonna have to grab this overall combined height that we've created just for some context I'm just gonna drag this out here and you can see it's coming straight from our shape splatter height so while it's going into a bunch of other maps let's also branch off another output and put it into our height input for our water level now this is the incredible power of the water level node so let's pump our water level outputs into our final outputs here base color to base color normal to normal roughness metallic ambient occlusion and height are in different orders not sure why it's like that in a template and look what we get by default really cool does a lot of this work for us now you can see we do need to make quite a bit of an adjustment because right now it looks like our ground has been flooded so right away let's double click on our water level and we have a lot of amazing parameters that we can adjust so let's go from the top down water level seems obvious bring it down we can decrease the amount of water that we get so if you only want a couple of puddles we can keep it at a low value and you can see we've got just a couple of puddles here and to really illustrate this further I'm going to go to my materials and edit and bring up the height scale just a tiny bit so I'm gonna set my water level to something like point yeah point three six and this leaf has been really bugging me and what I really want to do is adjust kind of how we have things scattered because remember this is all procedural so I'm gonna go back to my shape splatter node can you go to the position and I'm just gonna adjust the position random just a little bit and you can see that leaf is now conform to the background a bit better so if that happens to you you know what to do now okay back to the water level parameters I'm gonna double click we've got so much control here over the water itself so here's the water darkness I'm going to keep it a bit more of a darker water now the edges wetness so if I bring this down the edges of the water are going to be a bit less wet a bit less reflective so something that really illustrates that is if you watch this leaf here and I bring the wetness up you can see it starts to get a little more reflective great so I'm going to set it there for now then you can change the distance of how much this witness is affecting things that are breaking out of the water I do want to make sure that there is a separation between the roughness of our leaves that we created and the water so I'm gonna keep this wetness distance pretty low 0.1 and if we take a look at that you'll see what's going on here I'm noticing an artifact that's going on with our stem and I think that has something to do with the slope blur that we added earlier so let's go back and you can see this water node and the roughness are really bringing out sort of all the imperfections that we're getting so if I go back to our leaf and find the slope blur greyscale that we added and if I decrease the intensity yeah let's find the right balance here you can see right here that's that's what's really causing the artifacting and like I said we're going to be viewing this material from about here so as long as you can't really see it we'll just dial it in so moving on with our parameters for our water level node you're getting a lot of really awesome effects here for free with this water-level note and one of them is this sludge you can see we're getting kind of a sludgy light sort of tan brown color and that's coming from this sludge color so if I make it something like blue you can see what's really going on here you can get some really awesome effects I'm gonna keep it by default though because it's fine it's natural but you can change the depth and the opacity of this sludge so I can really increase the amount so it looks like it's really dirty and then adjust the opacity in which how much it shows up so there's the depth which is how much sludge is showing up in our sort of fake depth that we're creating and then you can adjust the opacity so I'm gonna change our depth yet to something around here but I'm gonna bring down the opacity just a little bit so another thing I want to do I've trying to make a little bit more room here is I want to make a mask for just the water so if I double-click this mask output from our water level you see we get this really detailed grayscale mask and what I really want to do now is just flatten it so that I get a black and white mask remote so I'm gonna so I'm gonna left click off of it and drag and get that get that histogram scan node and bring up the position and then bring up the contrast and I can select how much of that water I'm looking for I think I'm just going to now start off with just the whole position but we'll see you later and the reason why I'm creating this is because take a look at our water right now the water is very still now depending on what kind of scene you're setting up you might want to throw in some movement or disturbance into the water and here's a quick way to do that to throw some interest into the material we're gonna create some ripples so let's grab a purlin noise bring the scale down then I'm gonna grab a blend and I'm gonna set it to add and the purlin noise is going to be the foreground and the background is going to be our histogram scan now if I double click that you'll see what's happening is because we're using ad the noise is being added to just the leaves so let's take that histogram scan and select that connection and let's just invert it using an invert greyscale so now if we look at our blend the ripples are only showing up in the water area and not on top of the leaves we're gonna take this final blend and we're going to connect a normal node to it and we're really just going to be affecting the normal values of our water so let's space out a little bit of our outputs here just to give ourselves some more room we've got our normal coming in let's move these over to our normal map I'm gonna add a dot node by holding alt and left clicking on a connection just move things out of the way here and you can't just add or blend in a normal map into another normal map we've got some specific notes for that so I'm gonna hit spacebar and grab a normal blend node excellent so really what I need is the normal that we're currently getting from our water level and put that in the background this is the normal background input and get our ripples and put them into the foreground and you'll see that nothing happened and that's because we need to change this use mask from true by default to false and you can sort of see we're getting these ripples up here and let's just pump this into our normal right away you can see we're getting these ripples in let me just dial down the opacity you really don't need that much in fact I'm gonna dial it down even more to about one ish and if you look at our reflection here's the flat water and here's what our ripples are doing and it's adding just a little bit of interest to our water really it just needs to be just a very subtle touch depending on what kind of material going for and to add just a tiny bit more detail let's go to our ambient occlusion and in order to really affect it we'll go and grab our ambient occlusion node here the one that's going into the water level in fact let's select these frame them up I'm gonna call them pre water Maps let's get that am be a clue Jean know that we're using and I want to increase the height depth this is really going to add some more of that depth and atmosphere to our material so you can see all of our pieces are coming together you can adjust how many pebbles you have by going back to your pebble tile sampler or you could also just go straight to your edge detect and if you decrease the edge width you can add a bunch more rocks if you'd like to change the roundness so you only get round your rocks you can also go to your shapes platter where you've put all of your leaves and we can scroll down here and go down to masking and we can clean up our leaves a bit we can just randomly mask away our leaves here you can add a couple you can add multiple variations by going into the pattern settings and adding a pattern input so you can put two or three as many as you like let's go and take a look at it on a few different surfaces so here's a rounded cylinder here it is on the rounded cube of course you can't do it without putting it on the sphere and here we go so there you have it today we worked on creating shapes and focusing them in by using blurs and histogram scans also using the shapes platter we've scattered our leaves across our custom-made dirt ground we then added water using the powerful water level node and we've even added some ripples to add some interest I'd like to thank everyone for subscribing to this channel so far we just crossed 500 subscribers and I am so incredibly grateful thank you it's so nice to see so many people interested in joining me in learning this amazing texture design and substance creation craft that being said if you're new here thanks for watching and if you like this video would you mind leaving me a thumbs up it lets me know that you liked this video and it really encourages me to create even more if you'd like to see more videos from me hit the subscribe button and hit the bell to be notified when I post new videos and when I go live I've got another live stream coming up later this week where we continue our sci-fi wall project the end goal is to create a sci-fi corridor using textures from substance designer and walking around and using Unreal Engine and there might even be some vr in there until then thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Jeremy Seiner

Views: 4,861

Keywords: Game art, texture art, texture creation, substance designer, leaves, pond, mud, dirt, pebbles, rocks

Id: ozZlHo-5Ek8

Length: 56min 24sec (3384 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 28 2020