Create a Realistic 3D Muddy Dirt Road w/ Javier Perez | Part 1

hey guys my name is javier perez and i'm currently a senior material artist at playstation's visual arts service group i've been in the industry for about nine years now in this lesson we'll be going over how to create a muddy dirt road in substance designer we'll be covering techniques thought processes and general understanding of how this material was made so let's get started so to begin i'm just going to start up a brand new graph and name it accordingly just dirt road recording i start off by dropping in a pbr material node and then create the outputs from said node this will give me the correct outputs that i'll need so i can get the 3d viewport connected to these outputs so here i'm just creating some preliminary values i just connect basic colors grayscale and then the correct nodes to the corresponding outputs so for example the normal has a normal node ambient occlusion has an ambient occlusion node and it's all connected to the single one uniform color i make sure my material is set correctly make sure tessellation is on and direct x is off as we are working opengl so to begin the material i'm actually going to start off with the initial dirt mounds on this guy and to begin i basically just throw in a clouds too and then i do a transform uh to scale it up slightly so we can get some larger shapes rather than the minuscule ones from the original clouds too uh when i do tile it though upwards um we get some seams so that's me bringing in the make tile photo and i just messed with some settings to break that up a bit i'm then going to warp that output within itself and a blur so i just take that um output i blur it and then i just connect it into the gradient input of the warp i'm going to do that i'm going to do another warp but this time a directional with a different clouds and a different blur this way it gives us some nice streaking in the dirt and then i bring in a histogram range to just level out the um the height map so in case we start bringing in more things into the height map which we are it doesn't um you know get out of uh the range of the values so next up uh let's actually get the road indentations in there so to start i'm just gonna do um a shape and i'm just gonna tile it twice to get so we get two rectangular shapes here i'm gonna mess with the edges of that guy by slow blurring it with the clouds and i'm just going to do a slight blur so we could get rid of some of the stepping that's going on from the slope blur i'm going to then bring in a histogram so we could clamp those values so we just get the black and whites then i'm going to add a non-uniform blur to get some nice subtle gradients going in there next up i want to blur some kind of noise over that indentation so i'm just taking a purlin noise directional warping it and then blending onto the original shape of the the tracks uh next up i'm going to do a directional warp on that guy and we're going to actually take a directional noise setting it to some values that i found that i liked doing a non-uniform and then blurring it just to get something a little bit more subtle not harsh and that's what we connect our directional warp in there so now we're starting to get some nice undulation on the indentations there i'm gonna take another directional warp and this time just use a regular purlin noise to again just get some more stridation and then some more directionality to these guys lastly i'm going to do a final blur high ski high quality grayscale and then just blurring that on top of the original dirt mounds that we have so now you can kind of see we have these indentations so it looks like there's been some kind of driving over or something like that next up i'm going to take a uniform color and i'm just going to plug that into a height blend with our original output and this is going to level out the blacks a little bit so you'll notice how they went from these dark darker values to just some somewhere in the middle with the grays um i'm gonna do some directional mud here so i'm just gonna do a purlin noise gonna level it out to get some of those blacks coming through i'm gonna do a directional blur then a directional warp then i'm gonna do a slope blur grayscale get these nice chunky shapes in here and then we're going to do a blur high quality grayscale to just subtly um get rid of the harshness of that guy we're then going to take that uh result and they're just going to blend it on top of our mounts so here i'm just making sure i'm naming everything i'm continuing through the graph we're going to add some more streaks here i'm just going to take a crystal 2 do a non-uniform and then just rotate it 90 degrees so it keeps the same direction as what we currently have in our 3d viewport so now we're getting some nice streaks going on and just continuing to name everything next up uh this is where we start adding our actual overlays here so something's kind of subtle so i'm just taking a moisture noise but i don't want it to affect the entire um output there so what i'm doing is i'm taking our last result and i'm just doing a histogram select and then blending that with the clouds and that's going to give us a nice mass so we could plug into our opacity into that blend next up this is where we're actually going to add some cracks on this guy so to do the cracks i'm doing a tile generator and what i'm trying to get here is just some subtle speckles some so i'm doing like some disc shapes and we're getting like just very light speckles here so really small spheres and what that's going to be plugged into is a distance and a histogram scan so when you plug those two guys in we can actually start getting some kind of like what you would get in the cell shapes but this gives me a little bit more control of what i'm doing we're then going to warp that result to just break up the edges a little bit and then we're going to do another uh warp to break that up even more so this time with a moisture noise to get some finer details in there cool once we have that we're just going to do an edge detect so we can get the edges and only focus on those and from there we're going to do a flood fill and then the flood filter gradient to give us all these different gradients at different angles next i'm just going to plug that into a blend i'm going to plug it into the background the opacity and what i'm going to do here is i'm going to take a moisture noise blended with the crystals and this is going to give us some nice um it'll it'll overlay overlay on top of the original gradients and once we have that um when we add a histogram scan as we're doing here it'll actually give us some more cracks that we'll be able to overlay um as we continue through the graph so here i'm actually just messing with the crystals to see where we can actually start um kind of bringing in those different gradients that you see here messing with them some valleys making sure everything is looking good again i'm doing another edge detect and what we're going to do is we're going to take that result and plug it in with the first edge detect that we had earlier so you can see now that we actually have like two sets of cracks we have some smaller cracks the larger cracks and what we're doing here is we're actually just bringing another flood fill doing another flood photo gradient and then blending those two together we're going to then do a slope blur grayscale within a purlin noise just to break up the edges slightly and then we're going to do a histogram scan and just bring the blacks and whites we're going to do another histogram scan with a flood fill and what this flood fill is going to do is we're going to actually plug in two flood photo gradients this way we're going to get we're gonna basically do the same thing that we did earlier where we blended the this result onto the output that we had with the histogram scan and this is just gonna give us some more variety in the shapes and the gradients once we have that we're going to break up those edges a little bit with a slope blur grayscale and lastly just do a non-uniform blur grayscale to break up those edges even more so what we're going to do with that guy is now that we have these cracks we want to blend it into our current output so but before that i don't want these cracks to overlay on top of the whole thing so what you see me doing here is just creating a subtle mask it's just inverting the output that we have doing a histogram scan and just blending it in itself and that's going to be plugged into the opacity i plug it in here and i notice that i'm actually on the wrong blend mode so make sure to put add sub and just lower the opacity slightly here i'm just kind of rotating the 3d report making sure everything is looking good i do actually go back to the beginning of the graph and just tweak something slightly to get the result i'm looking for here next up like before we're just going to add some more surface noise i'm just taking a dirt high passing it grayscale and then just blending that on top of our current result this gives us a little kind of finer detail that you can kind of see here and making sure i'm naming everything accordingly moving the outputs out of the way because this next part is going to be kind of big so we're actually going to start on the tire track so before we're doing the indentations this is the actual shape of the track so it actually looks like some tires have gone through this dirt mound and what i'm doing here is i'm just taking some shapes transforming them into um what can look like tire tracks pretty much i took a tile generator did a safe transform so you could get those diagonal striations and i'm just blending those within itself so then we start getting those kind of directionality on the tire tracks i'm doing that a second time on the inner piece of the tire track so we have these kind of larger rectangles on the edges but we're also getting this skinnier rectangle on the inner as you can see here so this is looking a little um too perfect uh the current result um i'm actually just tweaking some values here to to get it to my liking so now that we have that um i'm just gonna do a non-uniform uh blur grayscale with a purlin noise and this is just gonna break those edges up a little bit because they were looking too perfect so we want these tire tracks to look a little bit worn and what i'm doing here is i'm just doing a grunge uh overlay so i'm doing uh you can pick any grunge you want doing a non-uniform blur and then blending that on top of the tire tracks to break it up even more i'm going to plug this result into a tile generator which will tile the actual tracks a little bit we i just get around like six of them and then i'm plugging that into a transform because i want to be able to move it into place when i actually blend it onto our current dirt mount but before we do that we are actually going to break that up even more so with some of the mass that we're getting from the height map as it stands right now so again i'm just doing an amber grayscale histograming select and then i'm doing a multiply here so now you can kind of see that we're introducing some of those mounds and it's breaking up the tire tracks so when we actually blend it onto the initial or the material as we have it now it's not those tracks aren't going to be perfect they're they're going to have some spotty like splotches so um just like you would see in the real world so here i'm actually plugging this guy into the blend and then i just use a plasma to break up the blending a little bit so now you can kind of see that we have some really nice break up but they're still the type the tracks are still there so we just wanted a nice representation but we didn't want them to be perfect in uniform some subtle storytelling i go into the outputs and mess with the ambient occlusion slightly just so it can kind of get a better view of this guy in the 3d viewport again i'm just moving stuff out of the way and this is where we're actually going to start adding in our grass on this guy so here i'm actually um just creating the single strand of grass that will be tiling all over this material it's just a shape transforming it squashing it down trapezoid adding a gradient and just adding a stem in here with another shape blending it onto itself so we got that nice stem in the center and here i'm just going to do a directional warp because i don't want this strand to be just perfect up and down i'm doing a purlin noise with the directional warp and this is just going to give us some nice just breaking up the shape a little bit so it's basically not just straight up and down i do this three times to get um just different variations of the same uh strand of grass so um and i make sure to move the directional warp settings a little bit so each time we get something different so sometimes it could be lean to the left or right could be more curly etc now with these strands of grass what i'm going to do is i'm actually going to plug these guys into a shape splatter what this shape slider does is similar to tile sampler it tiles the object that you plug in however you want but with the shape splatter it conforms to the height map that you have plugged in so i plugged in the our current result that we have right now into the background and um and then here you see me creating a mask because i don't want the grass showing up everywhere on the um on the material so i'm just messing with the the histogram scan here because i only want the grass to show up more so on the edges and not where the tire tracks would be because realistically like where uh a car would go over or a truck or whatever um the grass would probably be dead in those areas so that's mostly where the mud is and stuff like that so here i'm just creating a mask that is actually plugged into the mask random of the shape splatter and that basically tells it where you want this grass to show up more in places the uh and then others here i'm just going through the settings of the shape splatter you can either you know follow along and use the same values that i am or feel free to just kind of play around and see what results you get the the numbers i'm plugging in here um i found that worked pretty well for the result i was looking for and it's just kind of overlaying the grass on certain areas and making sure it's conforming to set um to set dirt and here is where we're actually using that mass random map multiplier so that's taking into account that mass we just created and once we have that i'm just going to move the up the connection points and see how it's looking making sure we can start seeing the grass start up populating in there a little bit it's kind of hard to tell with the gray scale or the gray value on the 3d viewport but later on once we start adding the color it's it's going to look a lot better next up um kind of moving on here just general generally we're going to be basically doing the same thing we're just taking these new shapes and creating new kind of details that will be splattering across the material similar to how you saw the grass variations we're basically doing the same thing but here i'm actually just creating a clover shape so i'm taking um just an oval shape doing a trapezoid a pinch at the bottom and just adding some gradients and then doing the stem with uh similar to how we did on the grass with the shape uh warping that slightly with a purlin noise and then blending it onto that original shape again adding gradients so the height map reads it correctly when we actually add it on this guy here you see me just blending this guy in so it kind of tapers off at the bottom and here i'm just rotating it slightly and then i'm going to do a mirror grayscale here so we get almost that heart shape and that's similar to the shapes that you would see on clover leaves and then once we have that shape looking pretty good we're going to plug that into a splatter circular and what this does is it it basically tiles the shape that you plugged in in a circular fashion so here you see me messing with the different uh components different settings parameters to get a result i'm looking for so i was basically looking for something that looks like a four-leaf clover or in this case a three-leaf clover and so we have that we just want to start breaking those edges up similar to how we did on the grass we just want to do some warps to get those edges kind of just warping a little bit so they're not perfectly straight and brand new once we have that i'm just going to do a levels on all these guys because i i had a feeling that the these darker ranges that these clovers were weren't gonna necessarily work the best on how for how the height map is currently set up once we have that this is where we're actually plugging into the shape splatter again similar to how we did with the the grass we are just plugging in those results and then we're taking a mask similar to how we did on the grass and it's it's basically the same mass that we use on the grass it's plugged into the same area where it's the mass random and this is essentially going to tell it where to put those clovers um again i didn't want the clovers to be where the the dirt and indentations and the tire tracks would be i just wanted them to kind of sit on the higher peaks of the material so around the edges of where those tracks are again making moving the connections making sure everything is looking good i noticed that i missed some parameter changes here so once i asked or once i moved the mask random map multiplier up a little bit you'll notice that the clovers kind of started moving away because before they were just covering the entire thing but because we want the mask that we created to influence what's going on that's uh one of the parts that we were missing there so moving along um i'm on this part um it's basically if you saw the original cliff video earlier on in the series um we're doing the same thing where we're we're creating a clump of grass in this case that we're going to tile the same way with the shape splatter but before i add it to the shape splatter instead of having a single strand like we did with the original grass earlier on we're doing uh a smaller clump here and what we're doing here is uh we plugged in a few different inputs so we did a shape we did invert grayscale normal we're plugging those into the inputs of the tile sampler and this is just going to influence some of the parameters that i'm messing with here and what i'm looking for is a nice circular clump of grass that will be able to tile all around our material with the shape splatter once i have one that i once i have one that is looking good i duplicate it two more times and then i just go into each tile sampler and then mess with the value slightly so we can get different clumps every time so again just um just messing with the valleys just slightly to get somewhat different results because i don't want all the clumps of grass to look necessarily the same but this is going gonna be even more so when we actually plug into the um the shape splatter because there's some settings in this shape splatter that we can kind of miss uh with the size random the scale random so if we just do these ever so slightly the shape slider will help us even more so so here just making sure each clump is looking different and again i'm just plugging in values that i felt worked for me i'm just referencing uh graph off screen so feel free to play with uh whatever you guys want make something cool so here this is where i'm actually plugging in these um these grass patches into our um current material so again just plugging those guys in there and then making sure the current material is set to the background which is that top input connection on the shape splatter and again i'm looking for another mask that will help me to kind of tell the shape splatter where you want these grass patches to be again it's just a matter of using inverts or histogram selects it's basically a black and white mask so here i'm actually just messing with the the parameters again trying to get a result i like it's easy to see in the 2db port than it is on the 3d again because of the grayscale value that we have going on here so if you guys are having trouble um i would recommend early on uh i would kind of block in just preliminary colors i don't have to be anything crazy so if you want to have like darker values or just preliminary colors feel free to do that if you guys are having trouble to see what's going on in the actual material i double click on the normal kind of see what's going on making sure everything is reading accordingly and here i just do a quick save don't want to lose any of my work again making sure everything is looking good in 3d viewport and we're just going to keep continuing on here so the next thing that i'm going to tile is we're basically doing the same pine needles that we did on the cliff so one thing we can do here is we can either create this from scratch as you see me doing here or we can just go back into our cliff material that we did um in the last video and we're just we can just copy that graph if we'd like whatever suits you guys uh best i i wanted to show you guys how i did it again so again it's just um basically using a gradient transforming it 90 degrees and then we're utilizing the curve node um to kind of tell the silhouette how it's going to look uh we're we then take a histogram scan to get a nice black and white shape and then that's when we begin kind of warping in adding our overlays here once we have those this is where we're actually just rotating these pieces because i want them to feel like those kind of two strands that you would find falling from just any sort of tree or those pine needles i use a height blend to blend those two together and then because they're still sort of kind of perfect and straight i then do a directional warp but this time instead of using a purlin noise i just use a a paraboloid shape and then move it with a transform into place this gives us kind of a nice opportunity to control where the curve is happening whereas in a purlin noise it's just kind of random and sporadic so again um this is kind of this gonna be kind of the big topic in the video is we're using the shame the same uh shape splatter so the same method that we're adding the cloves the grass the uh the grass patches is the same way we're just continuing to lay on this material similar to how you would in photoshop just overlaying things the shape splatter is a good one because if you notice in the 3d viewport it's kind of conforming to the shape of the mounds it's just not like straight up and down it's actually if the mound is kind of curved the shape is kind of curving with it so it's it's following that shape so now that we have these guys we have the grass we have the clovers lots organic stuff um we're actually going to start adding some stones in here um so to create those stones i'm just doing some cube 3ds and i'm just inputting some values that i thought worked for me i did three variations because we're going to plug this guy into a tile sampler and we're going to change the tile sampler to just uh two amounts so 2x2 what this will do is it'll just give me a quick way to do any sort of edits if we need to down the line so once we have that we're actually going to overlay some more stuff onto this guy so i'm just doing a believe it's a paraboloid and just blending on top of each other and here's where we'll really start seeing the actual rock shapes coming through so we do a clamp and an auto levels and you can kind of see those shapes coming through next up we're doing a gradient transform and then the levels and this is almost in a way to me it's like we're we're kind of chipping away it's like a nice slash think of it as like a trim dynamic and z brush we're we're doing like a big planar shape and we're blending that on top of our current rocks and what this is doing is just kind of cutting away at some of the shapes next up i'm going to do a histogram scan and doing a bevel on that just so you'll notice here that we get a nice subtle edge um right where the rock beats the kind of the edge of this of the shape and then i'm gonna do a flood fill do a random gradient and then just overlay that on top of the current rocks what this will do will give us some nice shapes how kind of like what we did with the the dirt cracks gives us a nice angular variation and here i thought these rocks were looking a little too pristine so again just doing a warp and choosing any sort of noise that i i'm liking so it clouds and um here i'm actually going to add some undulation onto this guy so each kind of plane on the rock right now is pretty pretty flat we just want to break that up a little bit so again i just took some cells slope blurring them with the clouds warping that slightly and then inverting that result and then here you can actually see me doing an ad here and that kind of breaks up the surface of the rocks a little bit i make sure to go back to that original histogram and plug that into the opacity so it that um that kind of crack shapes that we have overlaid it only affects the rocks so now that we have these four rocks we want to crop these out to be just single rock shapes because we want to um as you see me doing here we just want to shape them a little bit differently we have a little bit more control on what we can do here instead of doing overlays and whatnot on all four of them at the same time here it just gives me a little bit more control so we can clearly shape it here and do whatever we want with these guys and again i'm just going to take another shape splatter and we're going to plug this get these guys into these rocks into that shape splatter and this is going to do exactly the same thing as the grass and everything else is that it's going to overlay on top of our material on this guy uh i wanted the again i'm doing the mass that we've been doing earlier where we we want the we want the thing that we're overlaying to be in specific areas so that's why i only want the rocks to again lay on top of just the higher valleys of this material and not where the tire tracks would be so here i'm just messing with the parameters finding something that i like i found that you know it looked really cool when we had a lot of rocks but it just wasn't working for what we wanted to achieve with this material so when we start getting to the mask random kind of parameters it's you'll notice that a lot of the rocks are getting kind of masked out you know a couple here and there worked pretty fine for the material and what i was trying to achieve we're gonna keep doing the same thing but we're gonna do medium and smaller rocks and i think that balances out having way too many larger rocks we can kind of fill in those gaps with some medium stones and some smaller stones so instead of creating brand new stones what we can do here is we're basically just taking the exact same results that we created with the stones and just plugging it into a new shape splatter and what i'm doing here is this mask is essentially going to tell that shape splatter i want these medium sized stones to appear around the exterior of the bigger stone so you you'll kind of get this nice um you'll have like a large stone in the middle and surrounded by these medium sized stones so it's a nice way to kind of show your large medium and smaller details but again i'm just going through the parameters and this is essentially just gonna um shape splatter these rocks over the entire material but because we have that mask we're able to control how much of them are showing up so you can kind of see in the 2d viewport as i'm messing with these parameters it's pretty sporadic there's a lot of them going on but once we start masking them out you we only get like one or two and that's pretty much all we need for this material so next up we're going to just do the final set of stones and these are just the um just the really fine detail ones so i think it gives the material nice breakup on the surface and instead of for this guy instead of just masking it to certain areas we're actually just gonna have it go all over the place because with these smaller ones i i felt that not only can they be on the higher peaks but they i feel like they would show up like you know where the tire tracks would be and what not so here i'm just creating the mask and plugging that guy in there making sure everything is looking good again throughout this whole just graph creation i'm making sure to frame everything and naming it accordingly because this is going to help tremendously finding things when we actually create our albedo color and our roughness because we're just going to grab the same connections and if everything is just spaghetti and we're just plugging randomly where it's going to be really difficult to find those connectors down the line so again making sure everything is looking good just messing with how much of those rocks are appearing and that's kind of our last connection here and that pretty much covers it for the whole height for this material next up we're actually going to dive into the um the albedo here so to get that process started i'm just gonna take uh the final output of the height and we're plugging it into an ambient occlusion and then blending that on top of itself this is just going to give us some nice detail that the gradient maps are going to be able to read so this fractal sum is actually blending even more noise the more noise i found that we have in our output that we plug into our gradient map the more kind of colors and sampling that the gradient map will have to choose from so it gives us a better result here um these colors you see me grabbing i'm just sampling off screen from my final material and then i'm just using different hsls and levels to get um just different color variations just like we did on the cliff video i'm using the get slope node that can be downloaded from the substance share website and this is just going to give us a nice mask that we can start blending these two different hsls these levels to kind of break up the surface a little bit within the color so you can kind of see here now we have like some darker browns some lighter browns and it's just giving us a nice variation within the dirt so here i'm just plugging it in to kind of get a sense of what's going on and we're just going to continue on this trend of plugging in these hsls and um grabbing different connectors from early on in the graph so here i just went ahead early from like way in the beginning of the graph it's a mass that it broke up it basically is where the indentation happens so we have this darker value on the um lower level of the material and then this lighter valley on the top um level of the material i felt like it really helps kind of accentuate what is happening with the height map as you know i feel like darker values work better for recessed valleys and lighter colors um help for like peaks so again um just going through and grabbing mass tire tracks and then here is um here's where we're actually grabbing the the mass for the grass and what i did here was i actually used a shape splatter blend and what this um what this does is that you can actually input the the outputs of the shape splatter into this connector and it'll give you some nice mass that we can play with so here we're able to get the gradient map for the grass and then we're we can easily plug that into into what we currently have for the albedo again i'm going back just using a flood filled or random grayscale making sure it's just black and white and that's how we're able to tell this blend only have this color show up on this area so it's basically masking it out again this is kind of how i was describing early on where we're basically going back into our height map and finding these connection points where we're blending um these different things together and we're just creating these black and white masks to kind of tell the blend okay this is where i want this certain color here i basically just did a hsl and then use that same mask but this gives me a subtle variation within the grass so we went from this green to now you can kind of see we have this yellowish strands in there as well doing the same kind of thing that we did with the grass i use that shape splatter blend and i'm inputting those um those outputs from the shape splatter into the splatter data and then plugging in the original shapes so this is this essentially is giving us a gradient of our clover shapes and this is gonna again be the same thing where we're gonna keep doing the same thing as we continue on through the albedo so i'm gonna be doing it on the grass or sorry the clovers the grass patches and the rocks as well the pine needles so basically we're just kind of rinsing repeating just doing the same thing over and over you feel free to kind of copy the same hsl and the same gradients over it'll buy you some time and also get you the same colors more or less in the same range so that helps you out in the end because no color will kind of look different you'll kind of be sampling from the same values so it kind of helps when you're creating your albedo here so again just what i've been talking about earlier going back making sure getting a black and white mask and then using that to blend in these new colors until it's essentially telling it like okay this is where i want this color to show up and so forth so now we got those grass patches coming through and i wanted to do some more grass variation so again i'm just going back seeing where i can get another mask and here i'm just doing uh changing the position and range on the histogram select so we're essentially using the same mask but because we're changing the position in range it's giving us different strands that it's choosing which is really nice so that's a quick and easy way to get some variation in there here i'm just sampling off screen choosing the colors i like feel free to what i like to do is when i'm originally creating the color i grab something from like cg textures or any google reference and i just that's where i'm grabbing all the um the color swatches in the gradient node so here i'm doing the pine needles and again kind of how i talked about a little bit um just reusing the colors that you already have inside of your albedo so what you saw me doing there with the pine needles i basically went early on we had like this nice brown color for the dirt variation i just went ahead and grabbed it and just plugged into an hsl move the sliders slightly so we could get like either a darker lighter range in there and basically just use that to color in the pine needles so here this is where i'm doing uh basically the same process but i change the gradient map here to kind of be something a little bit a little bit more rocky and more um just darker so it's not on the same shades of brown so we can kind of see the differentiation um in the the mud and the rocks here so i want it to be subtle but also like you could definitely tell like hey there's there's some rocks here and here i realized that something was looking really off in the 3d viewport and that it was that i did not turn off directx in the material so if you're getting some weird artifacting or something just doesn't look right make sure you're on the correct um normal mode so the normal map was getting authored in opengl and my material was set to directx so just make sure you're in the sorry correct rendering mode so here i'm just going through again doing the medium rocks this time constantly looking in in the 3d viewport and just rotating making sure everything is looking good again just grabbing the mask that i'll need for the small rocks this is going to be one of the kind of last color additions that i add to this guy as far as like grabbing stuff from the height map so here um again just grab the medium rock gradient map because i like the colors that i was choosing there so making some adjustments and then just blending it into the necessary uh locations plugging in the correct map masks that way it's only showing up where i needed to cool so that pretty much covers the the blocking of the colors for all the different um details that we added in here these kind of next thing is i'm doing just a dirt overlay and this is kind of um it's one of the final things i like to do on my material it kind of grounds it adds like some nice almost like variation into the dirt so you saw me pick just a uniform color there and the dirt note is a really nice way to get some variation and noise into your material and lastly i'm going to to take my normal map and create two different curvature cavity maps if you will and i'm using curvature smooth and curvature i believe it's sable and i'm just going to blend those on top of my color map it really i feel like it really brings out the shapes and it really brings out like the edge highlights of a lot of the details that i have going on the color map so again just making sure everything is looking good making sure to frame everything and here's i'm kind of just moving some stuff around because i know i'm gonna need some space for the roughness map and for the roughness map i basically take the final output that i had in the albedo and i just run it through a grayscale conversion to get a really quick um just really preliminary grayscale value i then take your levels and then kind of push that a little bit further just to get it in the correct values that i'm looking for and this is where i'm actually just bringing in the um my own values so like i i brought in that uniform grayscale color and again kind of similar to what we did with the albedo we're basically just grabbing the mass from the different details so i started out with the get slope that we did in in like the beginning of the albedo and here i'm just gonna start bringing the different details so it's very streamlined in the way you work in left to right you're basically just trying to find the same inputs and it's even easier now because all these inputs are in your albedo you know we're just kind of duplicating those connection points and moving them to their respective like um roughness value here so again making sure all these values are okay and you know messing with the uniform colors so for the roughness i like to stick to like you know just the gray scales keeping the whites or the blacks and then letting the blends uh or the blending mode do most of the heavy work so on the roughness you'll notice the grass patches are a lot rougher than just some of the mud in the dirt gives us a nice variation when the light hits it once we put this guy in the unreal or something so here just continue continuing on and i think this is where i'm actually adding the rocks on this guy so this is uh one of the final tweaks or sorry one of the final roughnesses so with the rocks you you see me doing like a darker valley here so i wanted the the rocks to be a little bit shinier almost have that wet feel and i just thought it looked cool when like the light hit the the nice shimmering rocks there so containing on always looking in the 3d report making sure everything is reading accordingly cool so one of the final tweaks on this material we could leave it as is right now but one of the cool things with substance is that it includes its own water level node which makes it super easy to get that water effect like it's rising or lowering so all you have to do is plug in your final outputs into this water level node and the outputs of the water level node you plug into the final outputs of the material so you can kind of see now we have like these puddles which is looking interesting almost looks like a river but once we start messing with the parameters we can really see the power of it we can kind of get it a little bit more subtle and a little bit more realistic to what we're looking for so i just wanted to have some subtle puddles um i found them to be kind of low based on the reference that i was looking at for just this material so push it up a little bit so feel free to play around with however you want and that pretty much covers this uh dirt road material um pretty much streamlined we kind of did the same processes over and over again it's just kind of creating your different details that you want to add and just using that shape splatter note it's super powerful note and i highly recommend you guys kind of take a look at it um i hope you guys learned something and next thing is we're gonna take this guy into unreal and create a nice road blueprint see you guys in the next one peace [Music] you

Channel: NVIDIA Studio

Views: 6,293

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

Id: 88tsuo7CI0Q

Length: 46min 5sec (2765 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 11 2020