Create STUNNING Tile Patterns in Adobe Substance Designer w/ Javier Perez | NVIDIA Studio Session

hey guys my name is javier perez i'm currently a senior material artist at playstation visual arts service group out here in san diego california i've been in the gaming industry for about nine years now and in this lesson i'm going to be going over how to create different tiling patterns inside of substance designer i'm not necessarily going to show you guys how to create a full on material but just go over some of the tips and tricks i use within the tile sampler nodes to get some of those challenging intricate patterns that you guys might have some challenges creating so let's get started so first things first i'm just going to start a brand new substance and just choose one of these templates i'm just going to do pvr metallic roughness just for simplicity i'm just going to go ahead and save this to the desktop in case of any crashes or anything like that so let's just do tiling patterns cool all right so the first thing i'd kind of want to go over is the tile sampler or let's do the tile generator first off so the tile generator is a small node inside a substance designer that typically everyone uses to create their tiling patterns um it has a few different inputs and it has a bunch of different parameters that we can play with so i kind of just want to go over those with you guys a little bit so first off let's actually connect this into our normal and our height map that way we can kind of see the different things that it it's doing so by default uh substance height is actually turned off so we have to go into the materials default definitions go into our graph and then tessellation we're going to turn up the tessellation factor and then move the scale up and now you can see that the tessellation is in fact working here now the one thing you'll notice is that we're not getting too much ao information and that's because we also have to plug this guy into our ambient occlusion but to do that we actually have to create an ambient occlusion node first so we're just going to plug this guy in here and then plug this guy in here all right cool so we're ready to go pretty much so by default the tile generator starts you guys off with some basic tiling squares which is um pretty useful sometimes if you wanted to create some nice bricks here we have a bunch of different options that we can play with so we can do squares if we want so those are a little bit more tighter so you'll notice that as soon as we change it from brick to square this turns completely blank and that's because the scale of these guys is actually a little too high so if we go down to 0.75 you'll notice that we start getting those back now the reason there's a difference between the square and the brick that's because the brick actually has a subtle bevel so if we go back into our brick default you'll see these squares have a subtle bevel and it's giving us kind of a softer fall off on these bricks so i'm just going to go back into our square and kind of talk about them a little bit more so as you saw there we have the ability to square scale these guys up and down as much as we need to we can kind of push them together or push them out as much as we want we can scale them randomly so we have different scale here and some are bigger than others we can offset the position so usually in brick patterns on the real world the the patterns of bricks aren't necessarily on top of each other in some cases they are but mostly you see them kind of offset it a little bit with each different layer as they're putting the cement down so let's actually go ahead and um do that super quickly so if we want to take these guys and turn them more into like a brick shape um what i would do is let's actually take off the scale random that way they're all uniform and on this guy we're going to start taking down i believe it's the x amount that way yeah so if we actually take the x amount down um it's going to be scaling them proportionally from left to right and that's because substance wants to keep the tiling pattern consistent so um that's why every time you lower the number of bricks you'll notice that they keep stretching outwards and that's because if we press spacebar in the 2d view substance designer is constantly trying to keep the pattern tiling so that's why it's not breaking the tiling and we have these nice continuous patterns going so now that we've actually just scaled these guys down uh or sorry uh just into bigger shapes now we can go back into the offset and we could freely move these guys so now we have just a typical kind of pattern that you see in most buildings so let's actually add some luminance random in here and what luminous random does is it's giving us different grayscale values within our height map that is telling the shader um where or how deep or how how far out the bricks are actually being extruded from the surface so with the white um with the lighter kind of more uh white areas the bricks are being extruded um kind of outwards and with the darker areas they're going inwards so what if we wanted to do something a little bit more interesting with these bricks or make kind of a different pattern so let's go ahead and try some kind of cool tricks that we can do here so for this next pattern i just want to go back into the tile generator and make sure certain numbers are okay because it might give us some weird effects if certain values aren't set to certain um certain numbers so the one thing i want to make sure is that the offset is set to 0.5 because once we layer on another brick i want to make sure that it lines correctly the other thing is that i'm looking for is powers of 2 on the x and y so for this example i'm just going to do a 4 and oh that was way too much a four and eight so let's actually duplicate this guy and what i'm doing with this tile generator specifically is we're gonna make this into a mask that we'll be able to use it to plug into a blend between this tile generator and another one that we create so for this guy i'm just going to go down into our luminance random and take that off and the other thing i'd like to do is i'm going to go back into the scale and i'm actually going to want to get rid of these gaps so it might look a little strange but i'll show you guys what happens so once we have the one it's essentially saying that these are pretty much next to each other that's why we can't see anything now if we go into the color options inside of the tile generator we do have a few cool buttons that can create different masks within the tile generator so we have checkered mask we have a horizontal mask and we have a vertical mask and the vertical mask is what we're going to use for this uh little example now i'm going to do is i'm going to bring in a blend node i'm just going to plug this guy on top and i'm going to use a transform node and i'm just going to plug this guy in and what i'm going to do is i'm going to rotate it 90 degrees and just put it as a background now let's actually plug in our mask and see what happens so there you go now we have a kind of different pattern so it's not just a straight vertical pattern now the reason that i'm just going to talk about a little reasonings on why we did certain things on the tile generator so you'll notice that i set this back to the original one if we had left those small little gaps so let's go back to like the 0.95 that we had you can kind of see that the underlying uh pattern is getting shown a little bit so we wanted to avoid that as much as possible and also if we did like if we did something like we offseted this guy that wasn't a 0.5 you can kind of see the results that it'll give us so let's just do like i don't know 0.52 just so you can kind of see what's going on again we're getting just some weird intersections that we're not necessarily looking for so that's one cool pattern that we can um do within just using the tile generator on its own so for this next one let's take the same principle that we did here where we created a tile generator and let's try to use that to our advantage and create a different tile generator or sorry a different mask that we can use to create a different pattern so what i'm going to do is i'm going to just use bring in another tile generator and for this guy i'm actually going to use uh i talked about some of the few masks that we could use under the color options well this one i'm going to use a checker mask so what i want to do is i'm going to make this one kind of similar in size so a 4x4 kind of an even pattern but with this guy again if we left the bevels on we're going to have some weird artifacts so i'm just going to change that back to square and i'm going to turn on the checker mask so this is going to do one every other kind of like a checker pattern would so what i'm going to do now is i'm going to go back into this actually let's actually just grab this guy so i'm just going to edit the one we currently have so we can do here is let's actually bring this guy up and what i'm going to do is i'm going to leave the luminance on but with the offset i'm just going to bring that back so there is absolutely no offset so with this guy um now the way it is right now we can actually uh plug this guy in and do the same kind of scenario that we did here so let's do a blend let's plug this guy in let's do a transform let's just plug this guy in here and then plug this guy into the mask and kind of see what it'll give us oh i forgot to rotate this guy so let's rotate this guy and see what it gives us so there you go now we have another cool pattern that we can plug in so it's essentially using the same principle um we're just using a transform node and a mass to kind of give us some different results and the cool thing about this guy is that we can actually go into the original tile generator and we can start messing with the y amount so let's do like a 10 and see what happens we start getting some kind of interesting almost not even patterns so if we want to do like 11 we can do 12. you guys can just play around with a different pattern so now we have something that's a little bit more even but if we didn't want to you know if we want to do a 10 we could get something that's not as even a little bit more interesting now within the actual tile generator you're not limited to what is included in the presets i talked a little bit earlier how there is a pattern input and the pattern input is pretty powerful as it's a way that you can plug in any shape that you make so i'm actually gonna delete the one this one so i'm just gonna bring in a brand new one and i'm just going to do another tile generator and before i do anything within the tile generator i'm actually just going to create a basic shape so we can do something like i don't know one of uh let's just do a square and let's just do 0.75 on this guy cool and what we can do with this guy is we can do a transform node i'm just going to rotate it and i'm going to do a blend on this guy on this guy and i'm just going to do an add so i like this pattern that it's given me here but i don't like these edges so what i'm going to do is i'm going to take this down to 0.5 hopefully that gets rid of it cool and what we can do here is now that we have this guy we can actually use a transform and let's get it as close to the edges as possible so let's maybe like right there cool and we can do is add a edge detect which is just going to give me just the basic shape or basic edge shape around here i'm going to take down the randomness because i don't want those kind of weird artifacting lines there and then we can start bringing it into a tile generator so once we have it inside the tile generator what we can do from here is instead of choosing one of these guys we can actually go to image input so now that we've actually plugged in this image input you can kind of see the pattern that it's creating so if we take this down to i don't know maybe 4x4 cool you can kind of see that we're getting a really intricate pattern just by creating something um as simple as blending two different shapes together um this might not be the best for if you guys were creating normal maps so let's actually take this down even more so let's do a two by two now one way i would kind of um ex uh give these um edges a nice little bevel is i would just bring in the bevel node and i'm gonna show you guys the difference between what's going on here so first off let's actually uh plug this guy in so i'm going to take this guy and just plug it in and if we go into the normal node you can kind of see that we're getting this kind of like aliasing on these guys because it's so sharp and the normal map is trying to figure out what to do but if we plug this this into a bevel node and we just kind of gave it just a little bit more information so maybe something just like maybe even that would be good enough so let's just plug this guy in here and let's go back into the normal node already we're getting a more kind of defined shape and that could be pushed even further if we kind of bumped this up even more so let's do like a 0.2 or sorry let's do negative 0.01 yeah there we go maybe a four yeah that's nice now one thing i am noticing is that they're not necessarily touching right as much as i'd like them to so what we can do is the great thing about substance designer is that it's non-destructive so even though you have this connection going we can go back and i believe it's this transform node that if we just scale it up just a little bit more so let's actually go back in here let's scale it up even more so like can kind of see the values there we go cool so it's just uh needed a little bit more scaling and now we have a nice tiling pattern cool so so far i've shown you guys how to create different patterns with using a mask we've created patterns using some transformation nodes with the shapes and just kind of moving those into place uh but what if we want to do something a little bit more advanced and that's where the tile sampler node comes in the reason i showed you guys the tile random at first is it takes a lot less time to compute things so you see as soon as i um like let's let's just do this for example i'm just going to bring in a tile generator so you'll notice that the compute times on both of these are pretty different so on this guy we have .88 milliseconds and even though i got this nice nvidia rtx um the tile sampler is still at a pretty high pretty high in milliseconds i mean it's milliseconds but it's still computing quite a bit of information so i noticed that a lot of people you tend to use tile samplers for everything but we want to make sure that we're keeping within um we want to make sure that our graphs are running nice and smoothly and a lot of the times if you're not using any of these inputs you should always go with a tile generator to create your different patterns so the tile sampler in itself ha is pretty much the same as a tile generator in the way that it has the same parameters that we can play with but you'll notice on this guy we have a bunch of different inputs as opposed to the tile generator which only had one so the cool thing about these different inputs is that they actually do different things depending on what you plug in so we have a vector we have rotation displacement background etc so let's go ahead and create an interesting pattern using the tile sampler so what the funny thing we could do with this guy is we can actually plug in a tile generator within a tile sampler so what i'm going to do is i'm just going to first make a pattern kind of something simplistic so let's just do like i don't know a 10 by 10 works or maybe something smaller eight by eight uh sure that works and with this guy i'm just again going to use it as a mask but with the interesting thing with the tile sampler is you don't actually have to bring in blend nodes and do kind of the same procedure that we're doing with these guys so let's just go ahead and do that what i want to do is i just want to have vertical uh black and white lines here so what i'm going to do is i'm going to make sure that both of these have the same amount on the x valley so i have an 8 here so i'm going to do is i'm just going to make sure my x value is good here so i'm just going to do x there and i'm just going to set this to 1. i'm going to set this to a square and what i'm going to do is i'm going to do the horizontal note vertical yeah cool now from here i'm going to go back into this guy and what i want to do with the shape of the pattern here is i want to make these guys look a little bit more like bricks so what i'm going to do is i'm going to go into the sizing options and i'm just going to bring these down a little bit something like here and i'm going to go into the rotation and do something like 0.15 so cool and from here i kind of want to get these guys as close to each other as possible so maybe something like this let's actually scale these guys scale these guys up getting a weird kind of let's actually move the rotation here i think i was looking for a 2.12 cool and i want to get these as close as possible if i can so fiddling around and make the pattern work uh not every time you kind of plug in some numbers it's going to be perfect so it's just almost like a testing ground to see where we can get the closest so with these guys i still want to get the this gap kind of taken away and almost similar in this fashion so what we can do here is let's actually uh bump this to two uh something something a lot of users new users don't always unders or get right off the bat when learning substance is that sometimes these parameters you can actually plug in certain numbers and it's not arbitrary to how far the slider goes so feel free to play around with plugging in some numbers for yourself sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't so just keep that in mind so i just again i'm playing with these guys let's do like maybe point 19. yeah that works pretty well now now that we have this cool pattern going like uh almost a horizontal brick pattern what i'm going to do is i'm going to plug this guy into our rotation map input now what i want to do with this guy because i plugged into the rotation map input i'm going to look for our rotation kind of parameters so we do have a slider here called rotation map multiplier and if we start bringing this guy up it's essentially going to take the mass that we plug in into the input into effect so if you'll notice uh here let me just tone this down so wherever there is a white area it's starting to rotate whereas wherever there's a black area in the mask it's staying completely the same so it's essentially saying why we do what this parameter is intended to and black we do not so what i'm going to do with this guy is i basically want to get them pretty similar so like maybe right like 0.25 cool so maybe you like this pattern on its own so let's actually just plug this guy in and you think okay that's an interesting pattern so there might be instances where things like that happen happy accidents but this isn't necessarily where i want to go with this pattern i want these tiles to be more lined up so i want to move the newly rotated ones upward a little bit so to do that if we go into the tile sampler parameters under i believe it is position we have this displacement map input and if we move that up and down nothing is happening and that's because we don't currently have anything plugged into the displacement map input so the cool thing about the tile sampler is that we can keep creating different masks to plug into each one of these different inputs and get some pretty interesting crazy results or we can just keep using the same mask and it in so for this instance i'm just going to use the same mask and plug it in and if we go back into our position we now have the displacement map intensity so if we just move this guy left or right the angle in which these guys are moving is dependent on this displacement angle so if we set this to something like 0.25 let's see 0.25 that's gonna set this guy uh in the vertical kind of area and now that we start moving this guy you can kind of see our newest rotated bricks are moving up and down now one thing i noticed as soon as i start messing with this is that it looks like somewhere within our values something is messed up so we're getting a little bit of some odd intersection so let's go and try to troubleshoot that really quick so what i would like to do first is i'm just going to turn both of these guys off so that way we can go back and look at our um tiling patterns so so far it looks pretty good so it looks like it's something to do with this guy so if we go back into our rotation map multiplier maybe we can mess with something so maybe i just went a little bit too far off here so there we go i just changed it to a 0.25 it was at a two six and uh just take no something as small as almost a point one percentage it's going to really mess up your graph and might kind of give you a headache so always uh you know keep in mind those values and make sure to just look at the different um if you're trying to troubleshoot something make sure to look at your values and make sure something isn't off so let's do a 0.25 and now that i have it at 0.25 i notice i do want to displace it just a little bit higher so maybe do 32 might be too much we can actually go into point three one five so maybe three two there we go so now we have a clean tiling uh herringbone pattern that we're able to um texture uh the other interesting thing is that you might be wondering oh um that we could have easily done that if we just um used a transform note on this guy well if we bring in a transform note to this guy and then just do a rotation like this if we take the space bar and see the tiling you'll notice that the tiling is completely broken that's because this transform 2d doesn't know how to compute like this kind of 90 degree angle bricks so it's you'll notice that each brick at the tiling region it's one of it's going half and the other one aren't so the transform 2d is trying to keep it tiling but at the same time it's always going to break your tiling for this guy so there's sometimes instances where you actually have to manually do things like that so again in the tile sampler we also have the ability to just like we did in the tile generator where we can mess with the luminance but in in this case it's actually called color random so if we just bring this up a little bit now we have these different valleys within our bricks and our ranges so before i go i want to show you one other node that will help you guys create some cool interesting shapes that you can then plug into a tile generator and that one is the splatter circular and this one's cool because you know we can create some radial patterns so we can do some kind of cool stuff like this we have a bunch of different presets so for example let's take one of these i don't know let's actually plug this guy in over here so if we plugged in let's just take this random tile generator here this can kind of create some cool patterns or you know maybe you created a brick with a cool floral pattern on it you know or maybe you just find something interesting to utilize this guy with so it's always a fun way to plug um [Music] like different patterns in here and again the non-destructiveness of it like what if you wanted some bolts on each one of these i don't know it can be from like maybe not only can this be bricks but you can also make it metal panels if you'd like but let's actually go ahead and create um one more pattern with the splatter circular node so what i want to do is i'm just going to bring in a shape here and i'm just going to do a regular square but i'm going to actually rotate it 90 degrees so to get a diamond shape now uh you might be wondering uh this is always going to be tiling but what if you want to break the tiling on this guy well we can actually go into the settings for this transform 2d node and we could go the tiling mode set this to absolute and we can actually tell substance we can have it no tiling horizontal tiling vertical or h v which is always set so if we do no tiling now we have just a basic diamond but now we can actually go in and shape it to exactly what we need it so i'm just going to do something like here and i'm going to do another transform 2d node and what i want to do with this guy is i just want to squash it in half and then i want to offset it to the very top so point five i believe point five cool so now that i have this shape what i wanna do is i'm gonna plug this guy into the splatter circular so let's actually just plug this guy in and let's set the image input to that new diamond that we have here and what i'm going to do is i'm going to set the pattern amount to three from here we're just going to go into our parameters and try to get our desired look here so i want to move these guys in a little bit closer but i also want to scale up the size of just the overall shape so maybe something like that cool now i am noticing that we're getting some kind of weird um shape here and there might be do the fact of the transforms in the beginning so let's try to fix that a little bit so let's go back into this guy and it's gonna have this one selected but i'm gonna be able to move into this guy so okay it's doing something interesting so maybe it's this guy there we go it was this guy so i'm just gonna try to get something that i'm happy with cool and now that we have it in the splatter circular what i can do is just scale these up even more so and we'll go back and forth just to see the scale of these guys so maybe something like this cool a little bit too big actually so if there's a way to scale these guys up yeah that actually works and i want to rotate the whole pattern so yeah 0.25 cool this might be off a little bit but we will see maybe 90. yeah there we go so now we have this cool pattern and what we can do is just um plug it into a tile generator like we were doing earlier i accidentally chose a color note on accident so let's do a child generator grayscale and i'm just going to plug this guy in here and i'm going to change the image input and now we can do our usual just our offsets that we have been doing so let's do offset i think 0.5 or 0.5 there we go and then we can just scale this guy up like we usually do so something like there and then we can mess with the intersections here so something like that maybe negative one cool so let's plug this guy in see what we get nice we have this cool kind of sci-fi looking pattern and we're able to again just go in and start chipping away the edges start texturing it however we like so i hope you guys enjoyed the tutorial and learned something useful this was just a short little taste of what is achievable within the tile sampler node each one of these little kind of demos that i showed you can be interlinked and interchanged to create more and more complex shapes within the tile sampler node be on the lookout on nvidia's youtube page for more tutorials as i'll dive deeper in the material creation process within substance designer see you on the next one you

Channel: NVIDIA Studio

Views: 4,583

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

Id: RVsRF1UR7s0

Length: 32min 47sec (1967 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 28 2020