Create Sci-Fi Circuit Board / Computer Chip Patterns in Substance Designer

we've got a really cool texture to make today this video is all about making sci-fi circuit board computer chip patterns while also showing how you can create really complex patterns with just a few nodes we also talk about how you can select individual pieces and apply specific actions to each of them let's get started [Music] okay so we're in substance designer let's create a new graph here and i'm going to use the pbr metallic roughness template and let's start with the graph name i'm going to call this sci-fi circuit so we're going to set this to absolute and i'm going to change the width to 4k we got a lot of detail going on so i want to get that going straight off the bat and 16 bits per channel is good so let's hit ok and right away what i want to do is create what i call my final blend node and it kind of ties all of these outputs together and makes it easy to work on the height information right away so i'm gonna hit space bar add a blend and i'm gonna pipe this into the normal conversion node then i'm going to delete my ambient occlusions uniform color there and create a ambient occlusion put that into the output and put our blend in there don't worry about it yelling at you it's just looking it right now it's thinking that it needs color information but we're going to feed in some grayscale information in a second down here at the height let's remove that uniform color and put our final blend into that height output as well so overall right now it is looking like this so i'm going to right click on this final blend and just add a comment and call it final blend just so we can keep track of that so to start making these patterns let's hit spacebar and add a tile random node and you can see where we can get the idea of these base shapes for the circuitry we've got these random tiles and it's sort of giving you that overview of a city or a microchip in which we have these different divisions and it has a bunch of great parameters that we can adjust so let's pump in our tile random into the foreground of our final blend and we can see what's going on in our 3d view so while we have some height information here i'm going to go into the materials tab in our 3d view go to default and and under the shader properties i'm going to go to tessellation and i'm just going to put this up to 24 seems to work well for my machine if that's too much you can just dial that back and then i'm going to increase the scale and as i increase the scale we're going to see some real height happening here on this 3d cube if you don't have a 3d cube you can go to scene and choose rounded cube here great so i've got my scale around 5.25 for now but i know i'm going to adjust that later but so that we can see some height information that's looking pretty good double clicking on the tile random let's look at some of these properties i'm going to slide over this a little bit so we have some more room so i'm going to keep the x and y amount around 4. i'm going to scroll down to the size parameters and i'm going to decrease the random x from 0.5 to zero and i'm going to increase the random y all the way up to one and now one of the features that distinguishes this tile random node is this interstice property and you can see the mode says relative to largest brick and what we can do is we can increase and decrease the amount and what that does is just adds or subtracts the amount of space between each of these blocks or bricks as it calls them so starting off here i actually don't want that much of a space between each block so i'm going to lower this down 0.3 for now that's good then like most parameters in substance designer just because the slider is all the way at the top doesn't mean you can't go higher or lower than what it has set by default so for the scale i do want to increase this a bit because you can notice as i decrease or increase this scale we can't go any wider so let's increase this to something like 2 and you can see that's too much now because we've lost all of our definition so if i bring this down just a bit now you can start to see some of these fine lines connecting these shapes so i'm going to leave this here at about 1.09 after the tile random i'm going to add a mirror grayscale and doing this helps with repeating patterns and also getting some uniformity going on so we have a mirror grayscale here default where it mirrors across the x-axis i'm going to move these over a little bit select the connection between the mirror grayscale and the final blend and add a bevel node so i'm going to zoom in a bit so we can see what we're doing so if i decrease this distance a little bit you can see that the bevel node is really good at making paneling for a lot of sci-fi looking textures so if i bring this down to something like 0.7 this is starting to look like some sort of paneling either on some machine or some walls i'm going to go to my materials and go to edit that's the same thing as going into the shader and choosing tessellation and i'm just going to increase the scale just a little bit so we can see what's going on so i'm going to increase that and you can see we sort of have this cool paneling effect going on with this bevel node so instead of having a positive value in which the bevel is occurring outside of the shape you can also decrease this value into the negative and the bevel is going to occur on the inside of the shape so as you see as i do that now the shapes are beveling inside preserving the amount of space around them and we're getting this really cool effect so something like negative point zero four is looking good here so by adding this bevel node we've added some grayscale values to our black and white mirror grayscaled image and what this does is allow us to use a curve node to adjust these grayscale values to add even more detail and to talk about the curve node in one of my earlier videos where we make this picture frame utility node i'm gonna link it in the top right but also down below if you want to check that one out we talk about some functions and some really cool stuff there so gonna make some more room after this bevel and i'm gonna add that curve node so let's make some room here and so this is where we can define the curve and almost sculpt it as if we're looking at it from a side angle so if we take a look keep an eye i'm going to zoom in over here on our shapes and then take a look at the 2d view while i do this as well so i'm going to double click to add a point here and move the bottom all the way in and that's going to sharpen up the lower values the darker values and just bring this sort of up and over maybe i'll keep this one down and then add another point and bring that up when you select these points you have these options here so i can choose to make this a sharp curve or maybe or round it off like that just adjust these points while i'm looking at the 2d and the 3d view and seeing how it's altering things i'm going to move around here a bit so i can get an angle that i'm comfortable with let's add another point bring that up maybe this will start going down let's see we're getting a defined lip here bring this up and i think i've gone too far up here so i'm just going to select all of these and bring those down and over readjust and then i know i really want to add one more point and bring it further down so i can add this sort of cage or bigger lip around there looks a bit more sci-fi and then what i could do is just sort of space these out depending on how i like them let's make this point sharp great so you can see this is the profile that we've created and it looks very cool don't forget to save okay so we've made this really cool pattern with our curve now what i want to do is blend in a shape that's going to help this tile and splatter around better and i'll show you what i mean by that in a second so we're going to continue to make some room to show you what i mean by that i'm going to change my scene to a plane high-res so here's a high-res plane and what you can see is that this particular texture as it stands extends all the way to the end of our map and what i want to do is actually chop off a bit around the border so that when this tile is around we don't have any issues so this will make a lot more sense as we go along so i'm going to add a blend here and it's going to take everything off of our plane i'm going to set this blend mode to min darken again shouldn't see anything what i'm going to do now is click onto the graph and hit space bar and add a shape node and put that into the foreground of that blend so everything's back and notice if i go into this shape node double click on it and take the scale and decrease it it's going to start chopping off the ends of our pattern giving us some space here so i'm going to set this scale something not not too cut off but just enough 0.96 is fine just want to add that extra little lip around the texture i can double click you can see what this looks like in the 2d view and i'll hit spacebar and you can see how this is starting to tile and finally to put these base shapes together we're going to add a tile sampler and so this automatically put the connection into the background input because that is the default input for tile sampler but i'm going to hold shift and left click and bring this up to pattern input 1. right now you can't see that pattern so let's double click the tile sampler scroll down to the pattern section and choose pattern input now this might look a bit strange and pretty cool but let's zoom in and we can see we've got here we can see that our tile sampler is cloning our pattern a bunch of times in this grid let's adjust what's happening here in the instance parameters so let's severely decrease the x and y amount of tiles that we have here i'm going to choose let's go 8 by 8 and i'm going to go all the way down to the bottom actually so we can see what's going on here and there's this parameter called color parameterization mode and we have it set to color input and we don't have a color input right now so let's change this to column index now nothing's happened but that's because we need to drag this slider for the color parameterization multiplier and bring that all the way to the right to 1. so in the 2d view you can see based on each column we've got a different shade of gray and that translates to our height by making each of these columns a bit taller as we go along so that's pretty cool but now what we really want to do is randomize this and scale them up a bit so they can create these complex sci-fi shapes so with the tile sampler selected i'm going to scroll back up and i'm going to increase the scale property so as i do that these shapes are going to start running together and that's actually giving us a pretty cool pattern you can see we're getting these different sort of panels going on here so i'm going to increase it to something like let's say 2.49 looks great and then the magic really happens here we go to the position random and i'm just going to move the position random slowly and you can see what's happening here i'm gonna switch back to the rounded cube so i could definitely do this all day this is where you can really art direct and customize and create the type of pattern that you're looking for okay so i think i'm happy with how that pattern looks right now and so one more thing that you could do is you could adjust this under position you can go to the offset and you can drag this in and skew the tiles just a bit more if you want to i've got a habit of just making this offset 0.5 but it's totally up to you and so yeah this is the pattern that we have right now so to finish up this base shape i'm going to move everything over one last time here i'm going to say one last time a bunch so next up i want to add some visual rest to this texture as cool as it is i think it's looking a little overly busy so to narrow it down a little i'm going to add a levels node to focus in on what i want for my base shapes so after the tile sampler i'm going to select that connection hit space bar and add levels and so levels is great because it does everything that a histogram scan would do or a contrast and brightness node would do but with a bit more fine control and we can see our histogram here so really all i want to do and i'm going to keep an eye on my 2d view here is i'm just going to bring this top left triangle over to the right and you can see how it's narrowing down our shapes and it's really defining which of these patterns we want to keep and which ones we want to sink into nothingness as a guide if you're following along i'm going to bring this triangle right above this line here the third to the right i think that's going to be fine for me and so you can see it's gotten rid of some of our patterns here but that's good because we're going to add some smaller micro detailing here so to keep organized i'm going to select the nodes that we've created so far before our final blend there hit spacebar and frame them up and i'm just going to call this base shapes so next up i want to create these cool wiry cages and micro details and add this into the mix with our sci-fi circuit board texture that we're creating so first thing i'm going to do is add a histogram select so i'm not going to select anything at all i'm just going to hit spacebar histogram select now histogram select is going to be our mvp for this whole material it allows us to narrow down a particular range in our histogram so that we can easily select different patterns and this lets us create some masks in a very selective and refined way i'm going to select the levels that comes out of our base shapes frame there so i'm going to put that into the input of our histogram select i'm going to double click on it so that we can see in the 2d view and check out what this does so i'm going to zoom out here and watch as i drag this position you can see that we're just going through the histogram and through this particular range that we have set by default we can see where all these patterns lie in their grayscale values and so what i think i'm going to end up doing is dragging this position slider all the way to the right so we have a value of 1 and we get these particular patterns and they're what i want to work with next so leaving everything else by default i'm going to add an edge detect after our histogram select and so let's take the edge around this and bring that all the way to zero and notice what's going on here we're starting to get that circuit board like pattern so to refine that a bit i'm just going to bring the edge width down something like 1.29 looks good and now it's really starting to look like a circuit board so after the edge detect let's add a bevel and i'm not going to use this bevel to chamfer the edges of my extrusions instead i'm going to use its smoothing option so i'm just going to double click this slider here and that's an easy way to select this value on your keyboard and then just type in 0 and hit enter so really what i want to do and if i zoom in here you can see it's just use this smoothing option that it has and it creates these really cool artifacts as you smooth so i'm going to drag the smoothing just a little bit to the right and you can start to see it's creating these really cool shapes so if i drag this back a little more we're getting this square like angular pattern as we start to smooth these edges so i think what i want to do is leave this at around 0.55 that's looking pretty good so now i want to start blending on what we've done to these shapes onto the rest of our material so i'm going to select the connection between the levels and the final blend here and add another blend i'm going to set this blend to min darken and i'm going to take the result of our bevel here and take the height output and put that into the foreground of our blend so i'm going to double click the blend keep the opacity at 1 and it's going to zoom in here and just take a look at what we've done so you can see these are the shapes that we've created with that new edge detect and bevel that we've done we've added these sort of wiry cage shapes and that just adds a tiny bit more detail to the mix so i'm going to zoom out a bit in my graph make some more room by just taking our outputs over and just dragging this over here i like to create this sort of blend line so i'll create like a component and add a blend up here and just keep bringing this on so it kind of mimics the idea of adding layers on this timeline sort of effect and that'll make more sense as we go along but it keeps me organized and it might keep you organized too so let's move this down and so the next component that i want to create is this micro wiring it's really cool and really easy to set up and it's going to add some really awesome detail to this blank space that we have in our texture so i'm going to take this histogram select that's coming out of our levels node and i'm going to drag another connection off of it and let go i'm going to type in blur now i'm not using a high quality blur and i'll show you why let's dial in a value here bring down the intensity quite a bit and so this is the result that we get with our blur if i took out a blur high quality and take this down to a similar value the blur high quality has a much smoother blur whereas the regular blur has this angular artifact-y sort of look and that's really cool and that really matches what we're going for with this particular texture so i just wanted to illustrate the difference between the regular blur and the blur high quality each have their own purpose and uses in the texturing process but today we're going to go with this regular blur so i'm just going to delete the blur high quality grayscale and we have this one after the blur i'm going to add a quantize grayscale and we've used this a couple times before but i'm just going to adjust the quantize amount so that we can get just a couple different shades of gray here i think i'm going to stick with six here and that gives us a couple of gray values to play with after the quantize i'm going to add another edge detect and bring the edge around this back down to zero and then dial down that edge width so we've we've just added a few more wires to our circuit board pattern i'm going to stick with a very small edge width here and then after the edge detect now i'm going to use my blur high quality grayscale and take that intensity very far down because what the edge detect does is it really aliases our lines here we've got these jagged edges and i know from experience that if we just use the edge detect we have these aliased lines we're going to get this tearing effect and it's not very pleasing to the eye so what i'm going to do is take the blur high quality grayscale and just drag down the intensity to something really small how about something like point two and that really smooths these edges a bit more and then we can refine it some more by after the blur high quality grayscale focus it in with a histogram scan i'm gonna bring up the contrast a bit and then just bring up this position and so now we can refine that almost a mask in a way 0.22 is good for the position there and i'll just show you the difference so here's the edge detect and here's everything with the histogram scan and the blur just smooths out that detail so now we don't have those aliased edges and then after the histogram scan let's add an invert grayscale i'll zoom out you can see what our pattern looks like very cool and to see what we're doing let's hook this up to our final blend so now we've got a really cool wiry circuity pattern going on here but we're not done because now we're going to use a tile sampler and multiply this pattern all over the place so for now i'm going to reconnect the blend that we had before the one that has our base shapes with these cages that we've made and i'm just going to attach that back in so i'm going to click off and add a tile sampler and then i'm going to pump in our invert grayscale into the pattern 1 input and enable it by going into pattern input under pattern and we're creating some bigger wires this time so we're actually going to be doing a similar operation to what we did with our base shapes in fact we're going to do it twice more one for bigger wires and once for a smaller micro detail so right now we're working on the bigger wires so in the tile sampler i'm going to decrease the x and y amounts that we get a little less of these instances in our grid and you don't always have to make these the same value so i'm going to choose about 5 for the x amount and i'm going to keep 7 for the y amount now if we scroll down a bit i'm going to go to the rotation random now the rotation random under the pattern settings rotates these patterns at 90 degrees so you can see as i drag this up and you look in the 2d view over here it's only rotating them by 90 degree increments so yeah i'm gonna set this to 1 here and then scroll down a bit look at the scale parameter and let's just bring this up and you really you don't need to do it too much i think i'm going to use something like 2.3 yeah something like 2.33 and now i've got a really complex set of wires here just with a couple of sliders in the tile sampler but i'm going to direct this just a little bit more by going to the scale random and i'm going to adjust this a bit and this is where you can really start to have fun with these shapes let's zoom out and see what we have here and then definitely going to go to the position random slider and see what we can do with that all right now that's looking really cool so let's blend this on to see what we're doing what i'm going to do is just click on my graph and add a blend and i'm going to set it to subtract and i know that in the background i'm going to want my tile sampler so i'm going to put the tile sampler into the background here and now what i want to do is subtract the shapes that we have here so that we're left with all this extra space and that's where these wires can fill in the detail so let's go back into our graph and we've got this blend here that has the the cages that we've been working on and our base shapes and so i'm going to drag off another connection from this blend so i'm just going to drag it off over here and i'm going to look for a histogram scan and i definitely use histogram scans a lot in all my videos it's perfect for making masks like this so i'm going to drag the contrast up to 1 and i'm going to drag up the position something along the lines of 0.7 looks good yeah we're getting a majority of those shapes here and so now if i put this histogram scan into the foreground of our blend that's doing a subtract operation we're now subtracting this histogram scan shape from these wires like so now we could just blend on this shape onto the rest of our blend stack here but i think there's a better way to do that i'm going to use a height blend and height blends make it easy to stack different height components on top of one another so i'm going to click on my graph hit space bar and type in height blend so height blend has a couple options we have the height top the height bottom and this optional mask here what i want to do is put the blend that we've been using back here the one that has the cages and the main shapes i'm going to put that into the height top because i want this to sit on top of the wires that i've created so therefore i'm going to take the blend that has our wires and put that into the height bottom so double click on this and this is what we're getting in our view now to see what we're doing in 3d i'm just going to replace the foreground from our final blend with this blended height output from our height blend and our wires are way too intense you can see that they are they have an equal amount of height with our main base shapes and that's not what we want so i'm going to double click the height blend and to bring the height top further higher i'm going to increase the height offset and what that does is it brings everything below it further down in the height scale we're going to look at the top of our cube and watch how i adjust the height offset and if i bring this far enough to the right the wires start to sink further into the ground so now we're getting something a bit more like this and that actually might be a bit too much so i'm going to dial back the height offset just a tiny bit so you can see our texture is coming along quite well so far but we're not quite done yet not with these wires anyway what i want to do is fill in these extra gaps with a bit more micro detail and to do that we're going to do the same exact thing this time we're just going to use smaller wires so let's zoom out look at what our graph looks like so far we've got our height blend and i'm going to continue that height line that height timeline that we've been doing and then i'm just going to bring our final blend and our outputs further over to the right so that we have more room to work and i'm going to zoom in here to where our first tile sampler was and i'm just going to create a new tile sampler and as the input i'm going to use the same invert grayscale that we used for the first tile sampler so i'm going to pipe that into the pattern 1 input double click the sampler and then change the pattern to pattern input and so because we want smaller wires this time i'm going to keep the x and y amount a bit higher so that we actually get a smaller result so i'm going to increase the x amount to 21's good and then decrease the y amount to 7 like we had before and that's going to add some further detail and break up the uniformity a little bit so like before i'm going to scroll down to pattern and bring up the rotation random and then scroll down a bit more to the size parameters and increase that scale again adjust the scale random and then my favorite part the position random so now we see we have these really fine wires and lines that we can blend in underneath the larger wires and lines and that's going to be done again with another height blend so after the first height blend that we have here and before our final blend i'm going to select this connection hit spacebar and do a height blend and by default it's going to put our first height blend into the height bottom i'm just going to shift click and move that into the height top and then for the height bottom let's grab our tile sampler and put that into the height bottom input and you can see it freaks out a bit now let's crank up the height offset almost to the point where you can't really see it in the 2d view 0.99 and then if we go to our 3d view and i ctrl shift right click to move the light and alt right click to zoom in hope you can see that we've got a very small hint of some extra wiring going on underneath the surface here so i'm going to select all these nodes here none of the blends at the top but all the ones that are building the cages and the wires and things like that i'm going to frame those up and i'll just call it wires and now our graph is looking like this we've got our base shapes they're blending in those cages and the wires with those two height blends into our final blend so what if we wanted to do something in particular to some of these squares maybe we could turn some of these pieces into microchips by adding some lasered in text and some connector pins up next i'd like to show you how to select some of these shapes procedurally and then apply some specific changes to them in order to target specific blocks we need to choose a part of the process that makes it easy to isolate them i'm going to scroll in here and i'm going to choose this histogram scan because it has already isolated our shapes into these black and white islands and so to be clear on which node this is this is the histogram scan that goes into the invert grayscale and then goes into those two tile samplers that create our wires so i'm going to drag off a connection from that histogram scan and i'm going to let go somewhere down here and then i'm going to search for the flood fill node so the flood fill node takes those black and white islands and understands that each of those islands are a separate piece and then we can therefore isolate those and do different things to them now that substance designer knows that each of these different islands are different pieces we can use the family of flood fill nodes to target them and do different things to them so after this flood fill node i'm going to click it hit space bar type in flood fill and use flood fill to be box size this node chooses a shade of gray based on the bounding box size of its particular island that it's looking at this is great because it will allow us to select that grayscale value using our mvp the histogram select so after that flood fill to be box size i'm going to hit space bar and get our histogram select and just like before we can scroll through that position and see all of those different grayscale values based on the bounding box size of those islands to make it easier to select i'm going to drag the contrast all the way up to 1 and i'm going to bring the range all the way down to 0.01 because 0 just brings it to full white so .01 and then now we can go through the position and we can select all of our pieces here which is really cool so i'm looking for there just those specific squares because they're just the right size and we can turn those into microchips pretty easily so the idea is now to add some text onto each of these different microchips so now that we've got these particular pieces selected here this histogram select i'm going to add another flood fill node and so now with that information i'm going to hit space bar and type in flood fill and find the flood fill mapper grayscale and this is the node that allows us to apply patterns and shapes to each individual island that we have with our flood fill so we've put the b box output of the flood fill node into the flood philip b box and if i bring this over you can see we have a range of inputs here and just like our tile sampler we have a pattern one input so let's put some text into that pattern one input so i'm going to click off my graph here type in text and i'm going to come up with a fake brand name here micro industries and let's bring down the font size and let's take that output of the text into the pattern one input in the flood fill mapper double click that and now you see that our text is being placed on top of where all those shapes are now don't really want them to be horizontal like that so if i double click the flood fill mapper we've got some parameters that we can adjust for instance the rotation so if you click on this rotation wheel and hold shift you can snap it to 90 degrees you can see they've all turned sideways here and to see better what's going on let's start adding this into our graph so i'm going to go all the way up to the top here and i'm not going to put this into the height information i'm actually just going to put it into the base color so that it looks like it's just resting on our particular micro chips so we've got this base color output here and we've got this uniform color so i'm going to keep this uniform color because i just want to blend on this new text so between the uniform color and the base color output i'm going to hit space bar and add a blend and then if we go back and we take the output of our flood fill mapper grayscale and i'm just holding down left click and using the scroll wheel to click and drag and scroll and navigate here if i bring this into the foreground of this blend you can see we've got a problem here and that's because our flood fill mapper grayscale is giving in grayscale data and we need to deal with color data here so what we can do is select this troublesome line hit space bar and just add a gradient map and that's going to convert it to color information and i'm just going to drag this up here to keep things organized and then you can see what it's done here and now it's it's made everything dark and the text white and so i kind of want to invert that so after the gradient map we can use an invert color and then because we don't want everything to be white we have this opacity mask in our blend and we already have a mask for that and that's coming from our flood fill mapper so i'm going to drag another connection and bring that to this new blend with the uniform color into the opacity so now you can see we have our laser on text here blending in with our uniform color so overall we've got that flood fill mapper node coming into this gradient map that's getting inverted into the foreground of a blend the uniform color into the background and then using again that flood fill mapper grayscale as an opacity mask to blend these together just where the text is and so now that i'm looking at it it's looking okay but i think i want to adjust where this text is being placed on each of these shapes so i can go back to our flood fill mapper grayscale go to those parameters and we should have something like an offset here we go i'm going to change the position offset on the x and i'm just going to slide over the text over to something like right about there so it looks like it's being placed right on the edge there of each of our microchips if i zoom out here you can see now we're getting a bit more of that detail but there's even more to do now i want to start creating some of those familiar connector pins around the border of our microchip and so to do that we need to isolate the vertical and the horizontal space of each chip and i'm going to show you how to do that now so back down here where we've sort of got our micro chip nodes going on here i'm going to find where we've isolated those chips so we've got our flood fill node our b box size and then we have this histogram select now i'm just going to make a tiny bit of room here and after this histogram select i'm going to branch off a new connection i'm going to add a directional blur and so you can see what it's done here based on this angle and intensity it's blurred out these shapes so right now i actually want to look at the vertical space so i'm going to click on the angle and like before hold shift so it's going to snap to 90 degrees here the intent is looking fine and now we have this sort of gradient looking option which is pretty neat in itself i could probably use that in another material and now to isolate the space that's going on around the microchip i'm going to get a blend here plug the directional blur into the background and get our histogram we've been using into the foreground and i'm going to change this blend to a subtract so now we just have those extra gradients and then after that blend i'm going to add a histogram scan crank up the contrast to one and then bring up the position and so now we're just selecting the areas on the top and bottom of that shape i can choose how long i want these connector pins to be just by changing this position value here so 0.68 is fine for me there and now we just need to do the same thing to the horizontal space so i'm just going to select the directional blur this blend and the histogram scan and hit ctrl d to duplicate them and then i'm going to double click our second blur and bring it back to zero in this case degrees and keep the intensity the same so now we've got the horizontal space vertical horizontal so now we've just created two different masks and what we're going to overlay with those masks are some lines so hit spacebar and to get some lines we need to search for stripes stripes is a great way to get lines like this and it comes in with the lines being set to a diagonal but if we take this shift property and bring it all the way to the left you can see we now have horizontal lines i'm going to heavily increase the amount of stripes that we have in fact i'm going to type in a value like 300 that should be fine you can see we've got those stripes and i'm going to keep the width at 0.5 softness and shift is good there so we've got horizontal stripes but now we need some vertical ones as well so i'm going to branch off and get a safe transform grayscale and rotate this like before holding shift 90 degrees we have our two different stripes here and now let's start blending them together so clicking off in my graph space bar adding a blend and set to copy which is fine and then so for the vertical option let's put the vertical histogram scan into the opacity and the vertical lines or stripes into the foreground so now if i zoom out here that's where our lines are and let's do this the same way but with our horizontal so another blend take the histogram scan with the horizontal put that into the opacity and get the horizontal into the foreground and now we need to do is just add these two together so one more blend i'll put it doesn't matter which one goes in where but i'll put the vertical in the top horizontal on the background and then set the blending mode to add and there we go now i've got our shapes here so no matter where these chips are even if you adjust the random seed as long as there's a chip or a box that's this particular size it will add these pins around it now before we add that in i'm going to do one more thing and because i know that if we zoom in here these values are going to be a bit harsh just like before we need to soften these edges so that we don't get any tearing so what i'm going to do is select the blend that has both of these horizontal and vertical pins and add a bevel and the distance is way too high so i'm going to manually type in a number really small like .001 and yeah so that's done a little bit of anti-aliasing for us and then one more thing this this node was added in a later version of designer if you select the bevel hit space bar and type in fxaa as far as i understand it this is an algorithm used by game engines to further reduce aliasing and there's no parameters but it just adds a little bit more softness if i double click the bevel and then double click this new fxaa grayscale you can see it just softens it just a bit more so if you find yourself having some tearing issues i try adding a bevel and also this particular fxaa algorithm see if that fixes it for you and now to add this onto our blend stack let's make some more room i'm just going to drag these nodes over and i'm going to select the connection between our height blend the last height blend and our final blend so i'm just going to select that and add a regular blend here and so for this blend i'm going to change the blending mode i'm going to set it to max lighten and then find this fxaa grayscale and bring that into the foreground as the other blends are automatically in the background so there now you can see we've got our pins and they're looking a bit tall so let's adjust the opacity of this blend a little bit they're starting to come down in fact our height scale is a bit high so let's go back to materials in our 3d view hit edit and i'm just going to bring the scale down so that's looking a bit more realistic here that's better back into that blend that we were just adjusting the one with max lighten and we can dial in how much we want our pins here to be sticking out i'm going to choose something like .83 and there we go we've got some microchips on our circuit board here and so you can do this process this microchip process going on here where we've got the flood fill and to be box size where we've used the histogram select to select just this particular piece but you can select more pieces and change those pieces to your heart's content and really procedurally affect them just like we did with this microchip so you can add even more detail so like before i'm going to select these nodes and frame them up i think to make the process a bit easier to understand i'm going to select the flood fill and b box size nodes and hit space bar and frame them i'm just going to call this frame object isolation so then you can go back and see okay so i know we've isolated objects here now i can just add more histogram selects off of here and then i will take because we're just making microchips with these nodes i'll select these frame them up let's move that over a little bit call this microchip and so that is our graph you can see we've got this really cool highly detailed texture here with just a couple of nodes so i'm going to change the scene here go to sphere two tiles and if you want to look at this a little differently i'm gonna go to materials edit and scroll down to the bottom and we can adjust the tiling here just globally so i'm going to switch this to uh two we can take a look at this on a sphere and so yeah this is really just a jumping off point for you to create complex sci-fi patterns with just a couple of nodes and this is what our graph looks like it's we've got our base shapes adding in some wires and then we just added some extra detail here with the microchip there you have it by starting off with a simple pattern like the tile random node we can enhance it a little and then multiply it around to create something infinitely more complex having said that it is important to add visual rest to your textures so that the eye can decide on what to look at i hope you enjoyed this video as it is a jump off point in creating more complex patterns if you like this video hit the thumbs up it lets me know that you enjoyed this type of content and if you'd like to see more hit subscribe and hit the bell to be notified when i post new videos there are plenty of more tutorials to come so until then thanks for watching and i'll see you in the next video

Channel: Jeremy Seiner

Views: 4,015

Keywords: substance designer, how to, learn to, step by step, physically based, substance designer tutorial, substance designer beginner tutorial, substance designer stylized, substance designer metal, circuit texture, texture creation, texture making, tech patterns, tech texture, circuit board, wires, chips, computer chips, random pattern, pattern generation, substance adobe

Id: Jk9DSYvxrkQ

Length: 46min 23sec (2783 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 11 2020