Create a Woven Bamboo Herringbone Texture in Substance Designer

[Music] hey everyone it's jeremy seiner and today we're going to make a woven bamboo texture commonly found on baskets or chairs it's a quick fun little texture that takes a couple of nodes and some tile generator magic without further ado let's get started okay so here's an example of what we're going to be making today you see we have our bamboo woven pattern here and i'm just going to tile this twice here so i'm just going to have a tiling and two so you can get a better idea of how this texture is going to be utilized so let's get started i'm going to go to file new substance i'm going to choose pbr metallic roughness as our template and let's create a name going to call this bamboo weave and i'll just call tutorial for this case so size mode absolute and then we're going to have our width at 2k 16 bits per channel and hit ok so i'm going to switch over to opengl and let's get started in creating the first of the two tiles that we're going to weave together so first off i'm going to create a gradient linear 2 and it starts off like this and you can see really what it is it's kind of like a pipe and if you're looking at this from the top down with the height view you see that we have the top part here which is the brightest and then it curves down on both sides to create this nice round tile that we're going to create so what i want to do though is go to the rotation parameter and choose 90 degrees so next up to shape this tile to be a bit more flat with some rounded edges i'm going to add a curve node and you can see we get our curve here and i'm going to do is double click to make a point in the middle and then just bring this up to the top left and then take our bendy handles here and just drag so it becomes this nice round smooth profile that we're getting here and i can just adjust this we can adjust this later on if we'd like i'm just going to do something kind of like that now to add a little bit of detail to our tile let's bring in an anisotropic noise and we're just going to blend these two together with a blend node so spacebar blend let's put the noise in the foreground and the curve in the background and we're going to set this blending mode to multiply and then i can just dial down this opacity a little bit we can see our base shape showing through with our anisotropic noise and i think i want something like .22 now i want to add just a tiny bit more detail to the simple tile just to vary things up a little bit more so i'm just going to move things over and i'm going to bring in a directional noise so directional noise one is a good option at that and this is what our directional noise looks like i'm doing that because they both have these horizontal lines they're both kind of similar in the same family as it were and that's going to make it easy to blend them together so let's blend them another blend node i'm going to put the previous blend in the background and the directional noise into the foreground and so again we're going to change this blend mode to multiply and let's dial down the opacity to let the rest shine through we just want a tiny bit of detail 0.23 for that one and that's everything we need for our first tile so i'm going to frame this up here by selecting all the nodes hitting space bar typing in frame and i'm just going to call this simple tile all right so let's create the more complex tile with the grooves to make it look a bit more interesting so i'm going to grab another anisotropic noise and so with this noise we're going to create these deeper grooves to diversify this tile and give it some distinguishing features so i'm going to change the x and y amount here so we can change this by dragging it to the left and right i think i'm going to decrease it to 3 and then heavily decrease this y amount this way i can create thicker lines that i can isolate to make those grooves so 115 looks good you can see we're getting some defined pockets of thicker lines here and now i want to use a directional warp to push these lines into a more wavy shape so spacebar directional warp and let's plug the anisotropic noise into the input of the directional warp and we're going to drive this directional warp with a purlin noise so spacebar purlin noise and we can plug that into the intensity input of our directional warp and if i double click the purlin noise i'm going to decrease the scale to give us larger shapes that are going to push and pull these strands in our noise i'm going to go with 4 and now let's double click the directional warp and i'm going to change the warp angle so we can see what we're doing here i'm going to move it down to -57 degrees and we can adjust our intensity i don't think i need it as intense so something a little less and so now they're a bit wavier than before so let's isolate some of these lines using a histogram scan and then we can then blur them and use another histogram scan to expand these lines into larger grooves and i'll show you what i mean now so i'm going to click on my directional warp hit spacebar and bring in a histogram scan and now if i bring up this position we can start to isolate those larger lines that i was talking about so we don't need a very high position something like .09 and we're going to keep the contrast down at zero and the reason i'm doing that is if i zoom in here if i increase the contrast we can use this contrast slider to create a black and white binary mask but in this case i want to keep those gradients in those extra grayscale values so i'm just going to keep the contrast at zero now i'm going to blur it so spacebar blur so the regular blur node is really good for boxy shapes like these lines and that's why i'm using it instead of the blur high quality grayscale so i'm just going to adjust this intensity it's a little bit too much now so i'm going to bring it way down keeping an eye on my 2d view 2.97 is what i have there and then i'm just going to add another histogram scan and now if i bring up this position you can see we can really thicken up those grooves or those lines that we had just by bringing up this position slider so i'm going to keep it pretty high maybe something like .83 and now if i look between the two that's what we had before and here's what we have afterwards and this is a great way to inflate your shapes so because of how i want to blend this in the next step i'm going to invert everything with an invert grayscale and now to use a blend node so i'm going to put the invert grayscale into the background and then what i'm going to blend on top of this is a standard anisotropic noise so i'll just bring that into the foreground and now if i double click the blend and bring down the opacity we're just going to fade in those extra deep grooves and so that's why i inverted it i wanted the white color that we got from inverting things to blend on top by using this copy blend mode and just an opacity slider to keep things light but then add this dark groove information into the picture here so let's just adjust this opacity a little bit more 0.43 and then i want to add that detail that we had before with the directional noise so i'm just going to select the directional noise and that blend hit copy just come over here and paste it in i can get rid of that extra connection and so now i'm just going to put the blend that we have here where we've brought in our invert gray scale and anisotropic noise and put that into the background and then i can adjust the opacity maybe bring it up a little bit so we can see it more 0.33 and so we just need to include the base shape of our tile now so i'm just going to copy the same gradient linear 2 and curve node paste this on and we'll add another blend take our noise and information here in the foreground and our base shape into the background set this to multiply and just bring down our information okay so now we have this component let's frame this up i'm going to call this groove tile let's organize this a little bit and hit save this next part is where the magic happens so we're going to take these two bamboo tiles and make them interweave with one another in a herringbone pattern i want to thank javier perez for this tip aka mesh modeler go check out his tutorials on art station learning and also his awesome series with nvidia creators okay so i'm going to click on my graph and bring in a tile generator and so now let's adjust the properties here let's go to pattern and choose image input and i'm going to increase the pattern input number slider to 2. and this gives us two pattern input connectors here in our graph so i'm going to take the simple tile this last blend put it into pattern one and our groove tile let's put that last blend into pattern two and so now we come to how many times we want to tile these and this is really important what we need to do is set the x and y amount to powers of 2 meaning 4 8 16 etc so i'm going to set my x amount to 4 by 8 and this will make the tiles a lot wider than they are tall and now if we go down to position and we go to offset we can just drag this so that we get to 0.5 so now it's evenly distributed if i hit space bar to tile or 2d view you can see it's repeating really well and so to give these tiles a little more diversity i'm going to scroll down to color and bring up the luminance random here you can see that all these tiles are now getting different grayscale values in the luminance range and so i just want a little bit not too much 0.4 looks good and now if we zoom in here we can see that our tiles are kind of running into each other and we're getting this harsh seam here so let's give it a little bit of space we can do that by going to our tile generator and going to the inner stice x and y parameters we can take this interstice y and you can see how it squishes down our tiles and so we don't need to do it by much a really small number like .02 and that's looking good and so that's our horizontal tiles now we can easily create our vertical ones with a safe transform so if i click our tile generator hit space bar and bring in a safe transform grayscale and just bring this down here i can go to the rotation property and i can just either hold shift and drag here and i can snap this to 45 degrees safe transform automatically snaps to 45 degrees anyway so i'm just going to snap this to 90 degrees you can see we now have a vertical set so now is where the magic comes in i'm going to bring in a blend node and i'm going to take the original tile generator with our horizontal tiles and put that into the foreground and then take the safe transform with our vertical ones into the background but now we need to create a mask that tells this blend where to show the horizontal tiles and where to reveal the vertical ones and we can put that into the opacity input here so to create that mask we're going to duplicate our original tile generator here so you can either hit ctrl c ctrl v to copy and paste or you can hit ctrl d to duplicate it and so we don't need any of these connectors we just need to make sure that it's the exact same parameters and size as our tile generator we're just going to make some changes to it to get rid of some of those specific values that we don't need so i'm going to double click on our new tile generator here and i'm going to go to pattern and choose square and then i want to get rid of the luminance values that we added in so down to the color parameters and just remove the luminance random and then we still have some of these gaps here so let's get rid of those as well just back to our inner size x and y and remove the inner size y by bringing it to zero and now here's the really cool trick go all the way down to the bottom and click vertical mask and we get this really cool pattern and so now watch if i double click the blend and connect the tile generator into the opacity input we now have our herringbone weave pattern here very cool so let's take a look at what we've made so far in our 3d view so what i'm going to do here is i want to hook up this blend to a bunch of these outputs and an easy way that i like to do that is by creating what i call a final blend so i'm just going to make a new blend i'm going to connect it to the normal conversion node i'm also going to connect it directly to the height output here and get rid of this uniform color and this uniform color as well those are from our template and so we need to supply some ambient occlusion information so substance designer has a built-in ambient occlusion conversion node where it takes our height information and gives us that ambient occlusion so let's connect that to the output for our ambient occlusion and then connect our blend to that conversion node and so now all we need to do to hook up all of these parameters is take the blend that we have here with our tiles and connect to the foreground of our final blend and now we can see what's going on in our 3d view let's add some height and tessellation into our 3d view so we can see what's going on with real height information so i'm going to go to materials default physically metallic roughness and tessellation and then i'm going to bring up the tessellation factor to 16 and just bring up the scale a little bit see we're adding some real height there that's looking good and i'm noticing that our ambient occlusion is a bit strong so i'm going to double click that new ambient occlusion node that we made and this is where we adjusted the height depth slider here so i'm going to bring it down to .06 that looks fine and to see our height information better if we hit ctrl shift and right click in the 3d view we can rotate the light and see what's going on and then also rotate the model itself now if you wanted to you can tile your texture on the model that you're looking at as many times as you'd like and this won't change the map that you're creating but it will give you a chance to visualize how you might use it in the future using other programs on different geometry so if i go to my materials default and edit i can scroll all the way down here and go to the global settings we have this tiling slider i'm just going to put two and so i think this is more of the scale of how i'm going to use this texture so i'm going to visualize it this way so i wanted to include an option for this pattern to be rotated 45 degrees as it does give off a cool effect and some objects such as baskets and chairs have it this way so what i'm going to do is i'm going to move over our final blend and our outputs just to make some space and what i can do is after this blend here fit space bar and bring in a safe transform this just makes it really easy to add a 45 degree rotation so i'll have to do is click this rotation wheel and hold shift and snap it to 45 degrees and so now you have this variation of our woven bamboo pattern for now i'm going to snap this back to zero and then what i'm going to do is just select this node and frame it up and i'm going to call this rotation option just so we can remember that's where we can do that now as i'm looking at our texture i'm noticing it's very shiny it's definitely looking really shiny and unrealistic to the kind of material that we're making so let's focus on our roughness so first what i want to do is focus on these grooves and notches and then we can vary up the overall roughness with some noise okay so to isolate those notches i'm going to branch off a connection from that rotation option or the safe transform grayscale and let go and then i'm going to bring in a normal map now this normal node converts our height information into that normal information and the reason why we need that is because we're going to be using a curvature smooth node and that node requires a normal input so i can connect that there and the curvature smooth node now isolates our normal information and detects where we have those turns and sharp edges and bumps in our texture and so i talk a bit more about the curvature smooth and the different curvature nodes in another video where we create our grass field texture which is pretty cool there's three different kinds of nodes that substance designer has and we go into more detail with what substance designer offers and where they can be used so check out that video if you want to see something like that i can link it up here in the top right and also in the description down below so we've got our character smooth and the way roughness works is if i go over to our roughness output here it has a uniform color that's driving this from our template and the darker the values the shinier the material will be so you can see it's really shiny now that i've darkened the information if i bring it back to a lighter value we don't have any reflection at all so with the curvature smooth node you can see that the holes or gaps in between our bamboo tiles are darker and those are going to be shinier and that's not exactly what i want so i'm going to invert our curvature smooth with an invert grayscale node and so now we can see we have that opposite and the cracks are going to be less shiny now to really add some punch to our roughness that we're selecting from our grooves i'm going to bring in an auto levels node and so now we've leveled out the histogram and we're getting really solid values here so what i'm going to do now then is i'm just going to zoom in so you can see the difference and i'm going to go and connect my auto levels here to the roughness and remove that uniform color and you can see we're getting some more realistic roughness information here just based on that groove and notch information that we created in our height and you can see this better if i go to the render and choose iray ira is going to give us a better depiction of what our roughness values are and so now you can really see what that roughness is doing with those grooves and information we've supplied it so i'm going to hop back into opengl and so now let's create some varied roughness with a noise and first what i want to do is isolate our tiles and to do that we're going to create a simple black and white mask so i'm going to go back to this transform that we have for a rotation option and we're going to reference this a couple times because it has all of our combined height information into it so i'm going to branch off another connection here and i'm going to bring in a histogram scan so if i bring up the position you can see we are selecting our tiles and i'm not bringing this all the way up to the top because i want this mask to kind of chop out some of these end grooves this height information here around the corners of our tiles so what i can do is just bring up the position a little bit how about point eight two and then i can bring up the contrast because we need to tighten this up if it's gonna be a mask so point eight two and maybe i'll just extend this position a little more point nine two so we've got our tiles masked out here pretty cleanly and what i can do after the histogram scan is supply a flood fill node and that takes all these black and white islands that we made and it recognizes that these are all separate shapes which is really cool very powerful feature in substance designer and with that you get the whole family of flood fill nodes so after you put the flood fill node hit space bar type in flood fill you can see you have all these nodes that uses all that flood fill information and so i'm going to choose the flood fill to random grayscale node and now all of our tiles have their own separate luminance value taken from our mask that we made through flood fill into the flood filter random grayscale and now we can use this information to drive a directional warp so let's bring in that directional warp and let's make a little bit of room here i'm just going to take our final blend in our outputs and move them over here and what i want to warp here is a clouds to noise so let's rearrange things a little bit so this makes more sense i'm just going to bring the clouds to above so that we connect it into our directional warp into the input things flow pretty neatly and now the intensity input is what we're driving with our flood filter random grayscale here and so now if i double click the directional warp and i adjust the intensity we look in our 2d view we're just offsetting that clouds to noise by these random grayscale values so let's increase this intensity to something really high like 200 and so now we can really push and pull this so it doesn't look like we just stamped a clouds2 noise on top of our roughness information just on top of our texture so now what i want to do is blend these two roughness noise and values together so let's hit space bar bring in a blend and let's put our directional warp into the background and let's put our auto levels into the foreground i'm going to keep this blend set to copy and copy really just takes the top and you just set the opacity of that top layer over the bottom layer and so i'm just going to fade this in a little bit 0.48 and now let's attach that blend to our roughness to see what we're doing and there we go we can start to see we're getting some of that really interesting detail in our highlights there and so to refine this information even further i'm going to select that connection between our roughness blend and our roughness output select it hit space bar and bring in a levels node and now we can choose overall how shiny this is with all that information still intact so i can take this top middle triangle and i can drag this to the left or drag this to the right it's brightening and darkening the overall image so if i bring this to the right we're going to get a lot shinier information i think i'm just going to keep it a little more to the left and we can again dial this in even better by going into iray and now i can really see what i'm doing and so if you'd like to copy in the value that i'm choosing here with this middle triangle you can go to this area here where you've got these sliders this values button click that and i'm adjusting the level in mid and you can copy in this long number here and so now we're getting a much better roughness channel than we had before with just the blanket flat default template that we had so like the rest of our components i'm going to select all the nodes that we just made frame them up and call it roughness and i usually like to color code these kind of things so i'm just going to choose a dark value and then bring up the file just a tiny bit and move it up here so we've created the height and the roughness now let's apply a quick color map to really make our texture pop so before we jump into our color information i'm just going to make some more room here i'm going to take our base color and normal outputs information and just drag this up here so we have more space and then i'm going to bring the roughness one just so it matches up here with our roughness information and now we have a bit more room up here to deal with our albedo color information so first off i'm going to create another clouds too and i'm using clouds 2 a lot i find that's a really useful noise to use and sometimes it might get overused but i'm going to keep using it because having noises that are similar or in the same family kind of makes the whole material seem like it's all one piece it's all blending together better so i'll stick with the clouds too and i want to blend the clouds too with our tile information so let's get a blend i'm going to grab that connection again that we've been using from our safe transform gray scale and i'm just going to bring that into the background i'm going to take the clouds 2 put that in the foreground double-click the blend i'm going to change the blending mode to multiply and now let's adjust this opacity you can see we've really added some a little bit of wear and tear or just some extra information on top of our tiles just like we did with the roughness so 0.51 is good for the opacity and now to supply the information quickly we're going to use a gradient map so clicking on the blend spacebar gradient map and like a bunch of my other tutorials we can use this gradient editor and the pic gradient to get some colors so i'm just googling some bamboo weave textures patterns chairs things like that and i can just select it by choosing pick gradient and selecting over those colors so i've got some reference here i'm going to choose pick gradient and i'm going to choose a dark to light variant here so i'm just going to move this off screen for a second and let's preview what we did so i'm just going to close the gradient editor and connect the gradient map to the base color output and remove that gray template so here's what we get when we do something like that let's go to the gradient editor again and when you pick a gradient that has this many keys you start to get some extra information here so let's do this again i'm going to choose pick gradients i'm just going to sample the same image off screen here what i can do is go to the precision and just decrease this and so the solution here is to remove the extra lighter values so you can just select one of these keys and left click and drag up to remove them and we just want a smooth transition from dark to light over here so you see if i move this down and now i have the light side and the dark side and i can select all these keys by clicking and dragging and if i just move this over to the right we can darken our bamboo weave here and get a really nice warm natural color going on here and you can change the distance between the dark and the light really customize what kind of tile you're getting here and so we can go into our renderer and choose irae again and we can get a much better picture of what's happening here with our color information so i think what i want to do is widen this a little more i get like a nice natural tone okay so i've just messed with my gradient a little bit i have just four keys here kind of evenly spaced out and leaning towards the right we get this nice warm albedo color going on and so what i can do is i can close the gradient editor let's just frame this up to keep things organized and i'll call this albedo and i'll make this green kind of a dark green and that's pretty much our graph here so to review we have a couple tiles here the simple tile where we've used a gradient linear two that we've rotated kind of adjusted the curve of it so that it has a less round falloff you can again adjust this depending on what kind of tile you're going for and then we've added a couple noises like the anisotropic noise and the directional noise we did the same thing here but we just added a little more detail with our groove tile so we just have that noise we've isolated it with the histogram scan and blurred it and inflated it with another histogram scan let me just blend that on with the rest of our noises here and our base shape and then use the tile generator so we have our horizontal tile generator here and rotated it with the safe transform grayscale and then using some tile generator magic where we created this mask by using the awesome vertical mask button with that offset of our tiles put that into the opacity of a blend and we get our herringbone pattern we gave ourselves the option to rotate this 45 degrees so i can do that here and we're getting this pattern and we can turn it on and off and we focused on creating some really good roughness here which i'll go into irae we can see it a bit better and so we extracted the normal information used to curvature smooth node and adjusted those levels and blended on with some warped noise where we created a mask from our tiles and use the flood fill nodes to create this warp intensity map that we used with our directional warp blended those on used the levels and then just supplied some color information by using the gradient map to create our material here so there you have it now you can use that rotation option that we implemented to apply that 45 degree angle if you need it and don't forget to use that curve note to change how round or sharp your tiles are if you like this video please give it a thumbs up let me know that you like this kind of tutorial and that you'd like to see more tutorials like these and if you want to see more videos from me hit subscribe and hit the bell to be notified when i post new videos we're coming to the end of 2020 and i've got some fun ideas to texture the holidays so if you want to see more videos stick around subscribe thank you so much for watching i'm jeremy signer and i'll see you in the next video you

Channel: Jeremy Seiner

Views: 5,403

Keywords: Substance Designer tutorial, woven texture, texture tutorial, 3D texture tutorial, bamboo texture, PBR Texture, game art, how to make textures, procedural textures

Id: dA6NVq_RiIc

Length: 31min 50sec (1910 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 09 2020