Create Realistic Material Cracks in Adobe Substance Designer w/ Javier Perez | NVIDIA Studio Session

hey guys my name is javier perez and i'm currently a senior material artist at playstation visual arts service group i've been in the industry for about nine years now and in this lesson we'll be covering how to create cracks within substance designer i'm not necessarily going to show you guys how to create a full-on material but more so how to create different crack variations that you can overlay within your textures to give it some nice uniqueness and that nice worn effect so let's get started so to begin i just have substance designer here open and what i'm going to do is i'm actually going to create a new substance so i'm just going to pick something metallic in roughness and i'm just going to name this cracks demo cool now to begin what i usually like to do is just bring in a a solid uniform color and change it to just a grayscale value and then i'm going to start plugging this guy into the nodes i know that i'll be using i'm going to leave the metallic and roughness the same but i'm actually going to bring in an ambient occlusion node for the ambient occlusion plug this guy in and then plug this guy in delete this guy just replace it here and also plug this guy into the height the reason i do this is that all my inputs will be going to here and i don't want to mess with the color the roughness and the metallic so far but any shape or any kind of pattern i plug into here it's gonna um conjugate into the normal the amine occlusion and the height so i also like to turn on my opengl for this set it to something like 20 and then as far as the material make sure to go into the edit and make sure directx is off cool so let's just bring in um tiling pattern just to make sure everything is good to go so i'm just going to bring in just a tile generator plug this thing in and we should be seeing this so one last thing i'd like to do is just turn on my tessellation because by default in substance is off so bring this guy up like this let's see what the cool looks like the normal strength is just how i like it right now all right okay so there's a few different ways that i like to create cracks within substance designer i'm going to show you kind of the more simple version and then i'm gonna go into a more kind of advanced that gives you a little bit more chunkiness and almost looks like broken concrete but it can still be used to overlay over break patterns so to begin i like to bring in a tile sampler and with this guy we are just going to create little specks of like black and white discs that will then be plugged into a distance node so but we can actually create the kind of the same effect and i'll show you guys that after doing this so what i like to do is just change this to a disk and i'm going to go all the way down here at the bottom and i'm going to turn on color randomization and just to get some randomization within the different disks and then i'm actually going to take the scale of these guys down to like 25 maybe even less so like maybe 0.1 i just want pretty much little speckles so from here i'm going to go into the position and i'm going to do position random that way we get kind of just random uh they're all over the place and then from here depending on how much cracks you want this can be kind of changed on the fly so for right now i'm just gonna do half on the mass random and see where that gets us so from here i'm going to do a levels it can be a levels or a histogram scan whatever works for you but basically what we want to do here is we want to take actually take away all the grayscale values that we added within the color random in the tile sampler and we just want to bring in the whites so let's actually bring these guys in as much as we can then we're going to bring in the distance node we're going to plug the original tile sampler as a source input and then the leveled kind of just white pure white speckles into the mass input from here we're going gonna make sure it's on grayscale changes to only source and then bring this up to maximum distance now you'll notice that we have quite a few different cracks all similar sizes what we can do here is if we go back into our tile sampler we'll start messing with some of the different um parameters within this guy so like i was talking about earlier we can bump up the mass random and we'll start getting some bigger shapes because if we go back into our tile sampler you'll notice that there's going to be more gaps in between each one of these guys one other thing that we can do is within the tile sampler right now currently all our disks are the same size so what we can do is we can do a scale these guys up and then do a scale random kind of just give them a little bit more variation so now you kind of see here we have some bigger discs this might be a little bit overkill so i'm just going to bring this down we don't want something too crazy so this is pretty okay but now we have just a little bit more variation on here and um the next thing we want to do with this guy is we can do an edge detect now there are a few little a few things i would like to talk to you about before moving forward with these guys so i'm just going to send this to edge with two things that we can do with these guys so you might like these shapes but there's also a way we can squash them down while still keeping the tiling so if we actually go into our distance here and double click on it and if we actually bring down the pixel size either the width or the height we can actually get some pretty cool interesting results by bringing these guys down and we can either get like almost like the cracks are almost flattened and kind of stretched left or right the cool thing about just messing with the pixel size is that it actually keeps the tiling consistent throughout the material so that's in case you want to do that but for now i'm just going to leave it as is and i talked to you guys earlier about how we can kind of get the same result uh different very uh with a different way that's just by bringing in the cells uh i think it's cells one and we're just gonna bring up disorder bring up the scale and we're gonna do the same thing just bring in an edge detect and bring this guy in here edge around this tolerance and i'm actually just going to scale this even more so so you can kind of see that we have somewhat similar kind of um results but with this tile sampler to levels to distance node i feel like it gives you a little bit more control and it can give you a different varying size within the actual um cell pattern that you can actually mess with and just give you different sizes within each different one cool so whichever one you want to use we're just going to move forward from here i'm just going to move this to the side and from here what i like to do is just do a slope blur grayscale on this guy so i'm just going to bring in a slope blur plug this guy in and what i personally like to do is just put in a purlin noise this is one of my favorite noises within substance designer but feel free to use whichever noise you guys like this is just going to give us kind of some chipping along the edges of these guys so we just want to bring this all as much down as possible and change this to min so we start getting a little bit of chipping here and there so nothing too intense but we start bringing up a little bit we can kind of get some nice chipping effect here we can mess with the scale we can get some more chipping like that i'm going to do the same thing just do another slow blur grayscale this time i'm going to do another perlite noise so here i'm just going to duplicate it and with this guy i'm actually going to bring the the scale of it way higher something like this so with the scale being way higher we actually have to move down the intensity quite a bit i'm just going to change this again to max and now we're starting to get even more kind of just kind of more smaller cracks in there so what we can do here is you know it's up to you guys whatever you feel is right for the material you're working on we again these are all kind of these numbers aren't locked in place so we can after we've applied it to our material we can always go back and mess with this one thing i did notice that i'm not a big fan of is how thick these actual cracks are so what i like to do is just go back down here and then bring them as close as possible we can so that's pretty cool next up i'm gonna do one last sloppler grayscale on here i'm just gonna bring this guy in and with this one i'm gonna bring in a clouds for this one so let's just do a cloud let's try let's try a three for now or actually maybe just a clouds one so let's do class one this is gonna because this is so granular as opposed to kind of the different white and black valleys um this one is gonna give us a more intense kind of cracks or chipping so you'll see as soon as i plug it in i'm just gonna bring up the samples bring down the intensity you can kind of see that we're getting way more chipping on these guys i'm going to set this to min and just keep this intensity just mess with it as much as you want i might bring in the levels now to see if we can flatten those out a bit so it's not too intense so just bring this guy you can also just have it appear on certain areas so you can see now that it's not going all over the place but more so just in certain areas so just play around with something like that looks pretty pretty nice just in a few little areas what we can do here now is essentially we can plug this in right now and kind of see what result it gets but i'll just plug this in right now just so you can guys kind of get a sense of what's happening and from there we'll kind of keep refining it so i'm gonna do a blend i'm gonna blend this as the bottom i'm gonna blend this as a top and i'm just gonna set this to multiply this guy in here so already we're getting a pretty cool result here actually the only problem is is how we talked about in the last video where i discussed the flood fill this would be a perfect opportunity to utilize that new flood fill um that we learned from the last video so right now all the cracks are pretty consistent and going across the entire material what we want to do is kind of break it up and give it some randomization and also we might want to mask it out so it doesn't show up in certain areas so let's go ahead and do that what we want to do is bring in a flood fill again all we need is one because uh the other nodes will do the rest of the work for us i'm actually going to bring in a let's do a random color this is going to be for the vector warp and i'm also going to bring in flood fill to random grayscale and this is going to be the mass i will be using so i'm just going to move these guys to the side and from here i'm going to bring in a vector warp grayscale that way we can still plug in the color i'm going to plug this guy into here already you can see our cracks instantly have just changed positions they're kind of more randomized so let's plug in and see what happens so nice now we have some nice chipping and we got some nice something that's feeling a little bit more natural i'm actually going to bring down the scale of the tessellation just so we can kind of get a better look at what's going on here now i do like what's going on except for the fact that i wish it wasn't all over the place so what i'm to do with this random grayscale is i'm going to do a histogram select i'm just going to bring the contrast up and then we can start messing with the range so maybe we only want it like maybe like that's pretty good just plug this guy in it's only going to show up on a few pieces so now we have pretty much some subway tiles with some nice edge chipping and cracking so we can end it off here but let's continue and see what else kind of stuff we can do with this guy so one thing we can do is we can actually do a blend on this guy and maybe we want to have some like smaller cracks coming in from the other maybe we want like smaller crack coming within the middle of these bigger cracks so what we can do here is we can actually just take a transform plug this guy in and i'm just gonna actually we can either do one or two things we can actually bring it scale it in or scale it uh lower so i'm gonna do scale up just to see what kind of results we get and i'm gonna actually do a let's see we're going to do a multiply that way we're getting even more cracks so we have like these nice big cracks but we also have the smaller cracks so it's actually maybe we want to lower down the opacity too so that way we get kind of different effects as far as like how the crap how deep the cracks are as opposed to these so let's put this guy in so right now you can kind of see the effect that it gave us we're getting just some more variation within the cracks which is nice so let me just plug that guy in and because i'm using nvidia's rtx i can quickly keep iterating on these cracks and still have a nice and fast 3d view where i can see my results and not have any downtime while i mess with these different parameters now maybe this is the effect you want or maybe you're still looking for more some more variation one thing i did notice is that all the kind of crack lines feel like the same width so let's try to break that up a little bit so i'm just going to delete this guy we're actually going to go back to here so i'm going to duplicate this edge detect and what i'm going to do here is i'm gonna these currently are both the same uh edge width because i duplicated one let's actually bring the edge width up on one of them slightly now let's blend and to break this up i'm just actually going to use a perlin noise with uh kind of a high sc or a low scale so like this and let's see what kind of results we get before plugging in so i'm not seeing too much we kind of see something something kind of what we want let's actually mess with the blend modes and see if we're seeing what we're looking for here so i i think i i see something so we're getting some that are a little bit thicker but i think we need to push this guy a little bit more that way we can see what we are looking for so let's actually go down here and start messing with the different blend modes what we can do here is let's do a copy let's bring in a levels now we can level this guy out and let's see what we got so let's actually bring the blacks in there we go bring in the whites there we go now as you can see we're getting um some thinner and some larger here but let's actually bring these guys down just to smidge like right here now we're getting some interesting um shapes here but you'll notice that we have like kind of this weird gradient we could fix that easily by just going to here doing a histogram scan contrast yeah just like that maybe bring down the contrast just a bit cool and let's plug into there are already like slope blur gray scales and see what effect this is giving us cool we'll go down the line and see kind of what's going on here so you can see we're getting some thicker cracks and some kind of skinnier cracks and it's this is all just because we have all these slope blur gray scales already set up which is nice we didn't have to do any new work besides just making this um this kind of setup right here i'm not liking the smaller cracks within the bigger crack so i'm just going to take that off right now kind of see what we get i'm gonna bring in a histogram scan i believe so that's what i'm looking for oh that was actually histogram range i'm gonna try to get this kind of to something around like here then i'm going to do a levels i'm just going to bring this a little bit yeah so i did this histogram scan right here just to level it out and then with the levels i can bring it in and as you can see we're we're able to kind of crunch down the smaller cracks and define them differently from the larger cracks so let's actually plug this guy in a little bit and see what happens so there we go not only do we have these larger cracks but we also have these smaller cracks as well let's actually on this blend let's bring it down so they're not completely into the because we're using we're using completely black so it's getting really dug into these into these guys so not necessarily what we would want most of the time cool so that's feeling pretty good one last thing that we can do with this guy to get even some more variation and just introduce more of what we are doing in the flood fill is we can actually see we might be able to use a flood fill here so let's do a flood fill and see if this breaks or not so perfect actually did not break which is what we're looking for from here we can do a flood fill to gradient i'm going to plug this guy in set the angle variation that way we get different gradients and what i'm going to do here so i'm just going to blend this on top of this guy i'm going to do a multiply maybe set it a little low and then this is what we're going to plug into our into our main guy so if we go into our normal we'll see what's happening here so let's actually bump this guy back up here yeah there we go now we're getting these nice grayscale values into it so you can see when i move the light over you can see that we're getting different normal angles because we've added the different gradients and the different grayscale values within the tiles we'll go back into the normal you can't see it too much here on this normal maybe if we bumped it up to something a little bit more ridiculous like 50 or something yeah you can kind of see the different shades of normal that we're getting and also when we move the light across in the 3d view you can see that we're getting that kind of chipped tile effect which is really nice so not only are we adding uh kind of chipping within our small tiles but we're also getting some nice undulation on the surface so it's not all flat which is really nice so that about that about sums up this kind of first way of creating cracks that um i want to go over next up i'm going to do another variation of cracks that is just a little bit more advanced and kind of give you guys a completely different result than what we got here all right so for these guys let's just move out of the way a little bit and what i want to do is let's actually grab the first set of nodes that we use for our original cracks because i i'm going to use the same method to create our initial shapes but for these guys i want more of larger shapes to begin with because as the graph progresses we're gonna keep adding smaller and smaller graphs or cracks so let's just go back into this distance and we're actually gonna we're actually gonna um take down the amount of x and y so maybe 8 or 8 sounds pretty good let's see what this gives us yeah this gives us a pretty good starting point here so what i want to do here is i'm just going to do a directional warp we're going to try a few directional warps just to see what the kind of results are and then i'm going to do a moisture on here so again this is just a moisture noise but feel free you guys can use again any one of these grunges like we can actually bring in the clouds if we want the these kinds of nodes aren't set in stone um we we can go back and change them anytime so let's just plug this guy here currently and kind of see what we get all right we're getting something cool i want to try another directional warp here i'm going to do the multi-directional let's just see what kind of results this one gets just plug in this let's do kind of like in this feeling here i'm actually going to go with the multi-directional just something subtle here okay uh next up i'm just going to do an edge detect and we're starting to get some nice jagginess here i'm going to bring this down and i'm going to get something kind of thin again we'll probably go back and mess with the thickness a little later next up we're going to do a flood fill and we're going to start bringing we're going to use the floodville to get our gradients back so let's just do flood fill to gradient and we're just going to set this guy to be different variation angles and we're just gonna hold off for now for here next up i want to bring in a crystals one i'm gonna bring up the disorder and i'm gonna bring the scale up really high until we get something like this i'm just going to mess with a different random seed and what i want to do with this guy is i actually want to bring the same noise that we use and just kind of overlay it a little bit that way we get some noise so let's kind of go through different maybe multiply would be kind of good just get some some subtle noise in there so keep that as it is right now and let's go from here so from here i'm just going to do a blend here and i'm actually going to bring this guy down here actually plug it in the opacity as well and bring this guy in here so now you'll see that we're getting these crystals coming through almost overlaid on this guy so we're getting that effect and what we're going to do here is we're going to do a histogram scan and what this histogram scan is gonna what this histogram scan is gonna do is we're actually gonna start taking away we're gonna open up some gaps here so if you notice like here here and here we're getting some interesting shapes here now let's actually do an edge detect and you'll see what's going to happen here so bring this around this down let's actually bring it up just slightly you can see that we're getting these almost smaller shapes coming through which is really nice so let's actually if we kept it kind of low here that's interesting let's actually play with a different let's go back on this blend and maybe we can set this up okay let's actually set that there i'm not sure if we need the opacity here so let's actually disconnect this for a second okay let's try to mess with this guy a little bit maybe we can get some more variation in here so something like that and maybe we can mess with the random c to give us a little bit more shapes to our liking so like that i'm just gonna go different blend modes and see different results we could get so that was on copy so let's just go down the list and see subtract might work because i'm liking these gaps that we're getting here maybe we can open these up just a little bit more cool all right cool so let's continue from here and what with these shapes we're actually going to bring in our original shapes back so i'm just going to do a blend take this guy up here i'm gonna hit alt to create a cut and then we're just gonna bring this guy back and there we go now with those kind of weird cracks that we had now because we brought back the old original cracks those are being connected and now we're getting even smaller cracks coming in so it's essentially it's essentially taking these larger shapes and cutting them in half so what this kind of process does is we're essentially going to keep layering the same kind of thing we're doing and we're just going to continue on to break these to even smaller pieces so what we can do here is we can actually do a flood fill i'm just going to bring this guy over here i'm going to lower him over here and then we're going to do a flood fill to gradient we're going to introduce just the same kind of setup here we're going to do the angle variation we're going to do a blend here and then we're also going to bring in this guy i'm just going to put a dot node here for cleanliness and again we're just doing the same thing what we did basically what we did on this guy where we overlaid this dude we're gonna do the same thing it's kind of uh it's almost like we're repeating the steps and we're kind of just layering on within the graph so i'm gonna go back in here let's do a subtract and we're bringing in some of this so let's do another histogram scan here let's do contrast position again we're gonna get those broken up patterns and what we're gonna do here is again just do an edge detect see what kind of crazy shapes we get here so we're getting some interesting shapes here we're going to do a blend set this on top here and then we're just going to bring actually sorry i'm going to bring this original guy let's just kind of there we go yeah so now our shapes are kind of breaking up even more so one thing i'm not a big fan of is just overall the size of these guys so what we can do is just go back into this very first edge detect or actually it's happening every time we bring in an edge detect so let's go back in here we are getting some nice variation but it's just too wide for what i'm like so these are cool we're getting some we're getting some nice thin cracks but we also have these larger cracks so it's giving us a really cool effect here so let's actually bring this guy down yeah that looks pretty good maybe even more so on these guys okay let's actually take this edge detect and bring it down just a bit see what we got just by messing with the different edge detects and give us some different variations so that's looking pretty cool we might have we're gonna break a flood fill here so i'm actually gonna see where that guy is popping up looks like here so let's actually bring this guy up a little bit maybe we can mess with the position there we go i just know that subtle mark is going to break one of our flood fills later on which i do not want so moving forward we're just going to do another flood fill we're going to bring in our flood filter gradient to give us those nice different angles within our shapes to blend here and let's actually just do multiply we're gonna set this to random angles so angle variation cool next up i'm gonna do a slope blur grayscale and i'm just going to bring in kind of just another purlin noise we're going to break this guy up a little bit disorder intensity we're going to bring the samples up bring down the intensity we're just gonna start chipping away at some of these like larger areas once we have the chipping to our liking we're gonna bring in two different histogram scans for one of these we're just going to bring in let's actually bring down the contrast i just want to bring some of the whites back a little bit so maybe something around there i'm going to duplicate this and for this guy we're essentially just trying to get the original just black and white mask here we're gonna do a flood fill again and this is gonna be the last two i believe so we're gonna do a flood fail to gradient and do this twice actually so angle variation duplicate this guy and we're just going to move the random seed and i'm going to blend the first flood fill here so i'm just gonna set it like right here on multiply and i'm gonna do the same thing in the second flood fill i'm gonna multiply maybe let's do actually let's go back to the first one and do i'm just gonna go through the different ones yeah min darken and again let's do a min darken as well so like like we talked in the first video we're just introducing some more kind of cuts and it's almost like we're chipping away at this guy and that is pretty much it so let's plug this guy in and see what kind of result we get so i'm going to bring this guy all the way over and you're i'm going to plug it in without just on the tiling pattern just so you can kind of see what's going on so let me actually change this to just a plane so you can guys kind of visualize and let's actually bring up the tessellation here so there you go you can kind of see it's more like a broken concrete almost but the different sizes and shapes and the different kind of just a different cracking gives it a really nice effect so what we can do is kind of just go back and see where we're able to kind of do some more interesting stuff so maybe we want to ship this guy even more so maybe something like this gives us some more cool chipped effect and we could go back into any of these guys and just um mess with the different settings maybe we think these are a little too sharp so we can just go ahead and blur them but let's actually go ahead move this guy up here and i'm going to use the same vector warp and we're just going to switch it up here so i'm actually going to plug this guy and replace it cool and let's actually just plug this guy into our outputs see what kind of result we get our tessellation is a little high so we're going to bring this guy down and i actually want this showing up on a little bit more area so let's bring this guy up cool so now we're getting just some way more variation as far as our cracks uh i think a great way to utilize this one is let's actually kind of bring this down more so maybe like a five by five this will give us kind of like some nice yeah there we go now we can really see what's going on with these cracks we're getting just a lot more variation within the the actual tiles it's just something that's a little bit more aggressive than what we are originally doing so looks like ah yes okay cool let's change this guy to something like yeah add sub there we go so that's looking pretty cool again we can kind of we can probably take this even lower if we want to maybe uh by 2x2 maybe we want to break up like some different tiles or something like that so that's looking pretty cool let's go ahead and actually make a brick or actually just bring a tile random that'll give us some nice variation to look at plug this guy in yeah there we go yeah so we're getting just some nice undulation as far as like when the light hits it we're getting something that's pretty intense so what we can do is just bring down the opacity and there we go so those are pretty much uh the two basic ways that i like creating cracks within substance designer we have one that's a little more streamlined kind of just smaller cracks and we're able to just get some nice chipping some nice grayscale valleys so it can mess with the height we also have this more extreme aggressive version that brings in just more slanted angles and we're using the flood fill a little bit more and this is more so one to be used with a sidewalk if you want to crack something that was super distressed and i would say this um this the one i showed you guys in the beginning is one that you probably use on like bricks or something like that it all depends on what your use case is so i hope you guys enjoyed this lesson make sure to look out on the channel for more videos and i'll see you in the next one you

Channel: NVIDIA Studio

Views: 3,522

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

Id: 6q64khJqQxo

Length: 38min 34sec (2314 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 07 2020