Creating Cobblestone Ground in Substance Designer | Javier Perez

[Music] hey guys and welcome to creating a cobblestone ground floor and substance designer video tutorial my name is javier perez and i'll be instructed through this course a little bit about myself i've been in the industry about 10 years now and i'm currently the lead material artist at playstation studios visual arts in this lesson we'll be going over the graph from start to finish and covering techniques thought processes and general understanding of how the material was made i hope you enjoy this one and look forward to sharing my experiences with you so let's get started [Music] so the first thing i'm going to do is i'm actually going to start a brand new substance file and name it accordingly i'm going to make sure i save that to my desktop or wherever just in case if substance crashes i'll at least have some auto saves that can always help with any of my lost work um to begin with our forest ground i'm actually going to start with um a couple different noises uh preferably the clouds too and this is where i basically start connecting all my outputs so i basically want to see what we have going on the 3d viewport i make sure to connect my normal my ambient occlusion and my height just so we can get a sense of what's going on in the scene before continuing anymore i make sure to expand it or scale it twice just so we can get a little bit more variation in the dirt once this happens though i do notice that it tiles so i make sure to throw in a make tile photo grayscale just to break that up and get our tiling back so we don't have those crazy seams in there i then take a blur high quality grayscale and then just warp it so you can get some variation continuing forward i'm still looking to get some more variation within the dirt so again i'm utilizing some more clouds and the same methods that i did with the original shapes i'm just going in with the transforms and scaling it um up by two and again here i'm just playing with the make uh it tile photo grayscale so you could bring back the tiling because once we scaled it up it actually broke the tiling and this is just bringing it back i'm looking for some more interesting shapes in the form so this actually helps me get some larger sweeps in there that i'm looking for to end it off i just add a sharpen and then i'm going to just encompass that in a frame so we keep our graph nice and clean and name it initial mud next up i'm going to add some other forms into this initial mud i'm looking for some directional almost sweeps across the surface so for that i'm going to take a purlin noise the one same kind of noise that we've been using in the beginning i'm just gonna run it through uh different levels some multi-directional warp grayscales and some slow blur so you can get some interesting shapes here again i always add a blur at the end just to get it a little bit softer so the the shapes aren't as aggressive and here i'm just blending it into my original dirt i'm messing with the 3d viewport to kind of see what we're getting and i'm liking the shapes that are coming out through here again continuing to frame everything and naming it accordingly next up i'm going to add a second directional mud here same kind of properties that we did with the original i'm just doing a purlin noise a directional warp grayscale and i'm blending it on top you'll notice here that we're starting to get a little bit larger forms here and it's just helping us break up the surface continuing with that i'm taking that exact same output and i'm doing a slope blur into itself we start getting this really cool stepping effect on some of the areas of the dirt i don't really like how aggressive it is so i i made sure to add a histogram range and then blend it into itself that way it gives me a little bit more control and i can mess up the opacity if needed i go ahead and move my outputs just so i could have a little bit more space here continuing on i'm going to do some larger sweeps again it's more or less you'll kind of get the sense i'm doing the same things over and over again in almost a layered fashion i'm doing the same purlin noise multi-directional warp and then blending that into itself i change the scale every time just so we could get larger forms and just get some more interesting form factor into the actual dirt again this is where i'm actually adding a little bit more gran granularity into it i get a moisture noise which is a little bit more has a little bit more noise to it so we're not necessarily focusing on the larger shapes now we're getting more into just the finer details here i don't want to plug that in directly and blend it on top so i'm actually grabbing our last blend and i'm running it through a few different filters histogram selects a few clouds and using that to create a mask that will be used with our blend and opacity that way it's not being blended at all evenly across the surface there's some areas that are more opaque than others making sure to frame everything and continuing on again here is another surface noise variation same sort of deal i am just changing the actual noise that's being applied to this i like having different variations of my noise when i'm actually creating materials so i don't necessarily like using the same one uh here same kind of idea where i'm grabbing our last blend and i am actually adding a nice noise on top of it what i wanted to do here was i had some hot spots previously that were pure white that didn't have any sort of noise you can kind of see there how it went from this flat white into having a little bit of more grayscale variation in there once i'm happy with just how the forms are working on the dirt it's time to start adding some pebbles onto the surface so to start off with my pebbles i'm actually going to use a cube 3d and i'm going to get a few different of these stones that way they're either rotated or scaled differently and then i'm going to actually plug them into a tile sampler here so here i'm just messing with some of the scaling and making sure they all feel a little bit different so they're not all the same sort of stone that are going to be applied everywhere just trying to get some sort of variation here cool this is where i'm actually plugging in the tile sampler and i'm going to use the pattern input and change the pattern input amount to three because that's how many variations we made here and here i'm just going in through the parameters and changing a few things trying to get more irregularity to them just more randomness to them some random rotation a little bit of random scale and just making them feel a little bit different here next up um i like the shape but they're a little bit too cube-like so i'm going in with another shape and i'm just going to overlay it on top of it to get a little bit more rounder you can kind of see the before and after there next up i'm going to just clamp that grayscale and this is where we're starting to get our actual rock shapes up here uh i do an auto levels to get the blacks in there and then we actually have our rocks now here i'm trying to get a little bit more unique elements into these guys so i'm going with the gradient and then leveling this out just so we could blend it on top and break up these surfaces a little bit more messing with the levels here trying to find something that i know will break these up in a nice way cool once i get that i'm actually going to use a threshold so i can get a mask out of this eventually this mass will be used to overlay things on top of them while only affecting the rocks i throw in auto levels just so the levels of the rocks will be you know just in a good value range and then i add a bevel with that mass that i just created and blend it on top of our rocks we get a little softer edge on it that way the normal map reads a little bit better here uh i love using the flood fill so i actually added a flood filled a random gradient to just get some sort of regularity into the actual angles of the rocks next up i'm trying to add a little bit more of just some finer details and some finer i guess undulation here so this is where i'm taking uh clouds and then running it through um a warp so that the rocks get uh slightly warped here changing the scale of that actual clouds and then just blurring it slightly so it's not as intense once i actually plug it into the warp and you can see the before and after we get like some sharper cuts into some just more undulation in there next up i want to add some cuts into these rocks so i'm going to do that by using a cells and then just doing a slope or grayscale with the clouds to break out that proceduralness of the actual cells so we get something that's a little bit more broken up and i'm going to use the rocks output as a directional warp input just so the the cracks know exactly where to go and i'm gonna blend it on top of each other i'm going back and grabbing that mask i created earlier that way those cracks only affect the rocks that are being applied there once i have all four rocks i'm actually going to use a cropped grayscale and individually select each rock this way now that we have these four rocks we can actually plug this guy into a shape splatter and we can splatter all over the material so here i'm actually changing a little bit of the sizing here once i had all that stuff cropped out i still wanted to edit the rocks just slightly that way they get a little bit more uniqueness to them and they change shape a little bit so i'm just scaling them in and out to a shape that i'm i'm liking here again framing everything and making sure everything is nice and clean so next up this is actually where i'm going to add the shape splatter the shape splatter is similar to the tile sampler except it actually takes into consideration all the different forms within your material so this is actually going to work really well because we have those nice big swoops of dirt we have the nice more granular dirt looking stuff so it's going to almost overlay around the material but also rotate and scale in a sense that makes um in a way that makes sense for your material so the rocks are kind of gonna they're gonna feel like they have been there for a while and they're not just gonna be laid on top of them like all randomly here um i'm just messing with a few of the parameters here to try to get something i like um so here we go we start getting them all over the place and they kind of feel a little they kind of feel pretty good right there but i'm just not liking how many are actually there so i'm going down at the very bottom where the masking is happening and i'm just bumping that up a little bit so we get some of those just hidden ever so slightly again going into my normal map and we can kind of see the forms and everything i always like looking at the normal map to make sure we're going in the right direction here cool what i do next is i'm actually going to take that exact same shape splatter with the connected output so same rocks and same almost ideas and principles but i'm almost just changing the output numbers so we get something that's a little bit more granular so um the ones before are are pretty small but i'm actually going even smaller for this guy so i'm just messing with some of the parameters here and i'm gonna be plugging this guy in so we can kind of see what we got going on so right there we kind of see the difference there our our sand is getting super or sorry our dirt is getting super more grainy here and this is kind of the effect we were looking for i just wanted the dirt to feel a little bit more micro detailed when you get up close to it here again making sure to frame everything and name it accordingly that way our graph stays nice and organized next up i like how the dirt is looking i like how all the rocks or stones are kind of being blended on top of it but i want a little bit of more breakup to the surface so here i'm actually going to create almost there's this smaller graph within this bigger graph here so this is a completely different node network you can always save into your other graphs if you need to but what i'm looking here is more or less taking the same principles that we have been using with the stones and everything and i'm just basically trying to find a shape that i will eventually tile and then overlay on top of my current mud or dirt that'll give it some nice surface break up so here i'm kind of just thinking i'm looking for more of a square almost oval shape and i'm just adding a bunch of different noises that'll break this up a little bit the reason being is because once i tile it i want it to just feel different with every single stone that's being tiled if that makes sense so here i'm just adding some slope blurs some purlin noises and just getting a nice breakup within the edges um again some more directional warps i like using warps and directional warps being careful with directional warps might push it a little bit off center of the actual image here so make sure to mess with the intensity and don't go too intense on it um i like where this is going i want some more directionality to it or some more directional noise to it so i go in with the crystals because it has that more verticality to it and i'm just going in and messing with it one thing you'll notice is that i tend to do a lot of almost edits to to a noise that i bring in i don't necessarily like just leaving it as is a lot of the times um especially stuff that is very i guess noticeable to a basic substance user so like i wouldn't want someone that could tell like oh you know you're using um crystal noise here or something like that i always like uh editing it and making it feel a little bit more unique i think that's what helps break up the whole proceduralness of just substance designer in general again here's some more breakup of the actual surface of this single shape and stone doing some transforms um making sure it tiles so every time i tile up or scale up one of these cloud noises i noticed that the the tiling breaks so again i'm constantly using that make it tile photo grayscale and making sure that we don't get any of those seam lines that'll actually break our material here bringing up the samples the intensity and just i'm trying to get something that looks a little bit more interesting um here this is uh where i'm actually going to add uh some more breakup onto that actual shape and i'm doing that with clouds too a more same of the transformation the make it tile and then i'm doing a histogram scan here to clamp those valleys from the clouds to get almost a black and white mask i do a blur because i don't want those black and white masks to be just very the edges to be so harsh i want a nice like blend or a nice offset to them so that's why i get those i add the blur so it just blends in a little bit better i then take a slow blur with a different noise and then i'm getting those chipped edges around that new mask i created and this is what i'm actually going to blend on top of that original shape that i have there so here i'm just blending it playing around with the opacity see how much and all that work now that i've made that one single shape this is where it's gonna more or less come into play finally um this is where we're actually going to plug it into a tile sampler and tile it and change the randomness of it the position the scaling of it just to help break it up and you can kind of see here it's getting pretty almost in the white value but once we actually add some of the other noises moving forward you're going to be able to see it a little bit better so again just trying to make something that's a little bit more random it's kind of hard to tell but essentially i'm using that one single like oval shape and i'm just tiling it all over the place to get something that's a little bit random and um obscure there i took that original noise that i used to overlay it and then i did another blend and then here i'm doing a shadows to really push those forms uh i like using the shadows and then using that as a mask to almost overlay and push the forms a little bit i do that a lot of times with like cliffs or anything like that so i'm just using that same kind of method here once we have all that we can finally um add some more noise here so we've been working on the larger forms for this so i'm just going to add some of that more grainy grainy stuff to it um doing some blends again taking clouds doing some fractal sums and just blending it so you can get something a little bit different blending that with that new mask that we created here and again just continuing on blending more noises and trying to get something that's a little bit more unique and doesn't feel as procedural here again uh keep in mind we still actually haven't blended this to our original dirt here so again this is just more seeing the different shapes and the different valleys that are working here so this is actually where we're blending this in but before we blend it into our dirt again i'm using that same method where i do an invert grayscale and then a histogram scan that way this gives me a little bit control of where this new noise that i'm bringing in is being applied to you can always go back and mess with the mask and kind of get different results and here you see me looking at the results here you go from having um the dirt kind of being all over and the same almost granularity to it but with that new noise mask i created we got some nice almost chiseled chipping on some of the rock surfaces i saw some of it in the reference that i was looking at so i thought it was a cool little addition um i know it's a lot for like this small little tidbit but you can always go back into the mask and change it like if you want it to show up a little bit more or all over the place here i'm actually grabbing the stones that we used earlier because i'm gonna re-add them again at different sizes here so i'm just grabbing the connection points and i'm actually going to do a little bit more variation to these so they don't feel exactly the same as they did before so what i'm doing here is i'm actually just doing a non-uniform uniform blur grayscale it's a little blur but it gives you a little bit more control of the fall off on the edges so it's almost giving you some control of how soft and how bubbly these rock surfaces are going to look based on from what they were originally created so when i originally authored them in the front to be used on these smaller pebbles i wanted these larger surfaces for these guys so what i'm doing here is i'm adding just a little bit more granularity to them i'm adding just a moisture noise and blending that on top of it that way we get a little bit more surface detail on these rocks and because i've also did that blur it's almost gonna be like a pillowy but also we're gonna have some more surface detail so i wanted them basically to feel different from the original rocks that we tiled their stones that we told earlier while still using the same shape so i'm basically you know i'm trying to find ways to continue to reuse what i use previous like in the beginning of the graph just in this like smarter way i want them to just change a little bit but still feel like they're from the same biome here um here i i'm doing the same thing shape splatter and i'm going through the different parameters to try to get something that's a little bit more unique you can kind of see the different results we're getting here just by messing with a few of the parameters just by looking this i'm sure you guys can get ideas of like cool different materials you can come up with here because this is looking cool in and of itself like if i needed to make a more rocky dirt ground or something with some softer stones or something so it might be a cool riverbed or something but for this particular instance i was just looking for a few of them um scattered across um it just felt a little bit more natural and have them all over the surface like that so i just went with a few and in the shape splatter i made sure to mess with the masking valley there next up this is where we are actually going to add our scans into the graph um i've already had a folder on the side on my second monitor with a few different scans that i've downloaded from substance source that i'd like to use so here i'm actually using um i think it's white grit common white grit 03 and these are just small little pebbles i'm not using them straight out as they are um in a sense of i'm not using like the color maps and all that stuff quite yet i'm more so going to split these off that way i have a little bit more control of what i'm doing with these so for this instance because i'm still working with the high information i'm basically going to split these out for a couple different variations using the atlas splitter and basically atlas splitter is just going to uh take an atlas and you could choose and change the different settings to pinpoint which rock you're using here it's kind of more of a random sense you could actually choose which one you want but i kind of just did random here um but what i'm doing here is i'm just getting the height information for all these different scans and even though it's a scan i still wanted to add a little bit of my own flare to them so again i'm doing the same moisture noise that i did on those previous rocks that i did earlier so using the same method here doing a blend with a threshold mask that way the the moisture noise only affects the rock and not the black background so in a sense this is like a nice way of being able to use scans but still being able to you know use whatever substance tools that at your disposal to try to get some more variation you're not bound to just straight up using the scan as is and that's what i like about using substance to you know do any sort of materials with scanning work here using the the same shape splatter that we've used previous i'm kind of just doing the same method and throughout the tutorial you'll notice that i kind of keep going back to the shape splatter because i do like the way it tiles and puts the actual objects across the surface so it just makes it feel a little bit more natural here here i plugged in the shape splatter a little early just so i can kind of see what's going on here and i'm kind of liking it but there's a little bit too many rocks here so i'm just going to bring up the mass random one thing that i realized during this is i actually did want these scans to more or less show up around the exterior of the previous medium stones so what i'm doing here is i'm getting some of the information from the previous shape splatter that i use those stones that i created and what i'm doing here is i'm running through a different set of nodes so flood fill to grayscale blurring it blending with itself and what this is doing is it's going to give me a mask and you'll notice that the white areas are basically surrounding the previous rocks i did so when i plug it into the shape splatter these smaller new scanned stones are actually just going to show up around the exterior of the scans or the stones that i previously did here so i just wanted to make it feel a little bit more natural in a sense so we got the larger shapes in the middle with the stones but i wanted some surrounding smaller stones you can kind of see it here as i'm looking at it in the normal it's kind of giving us a cool little effect here so making sure to look at it in the opengl 3dv port making sure everything is looking good same kind of idea here i'm going in and this time i'm actually going to do some almost smaller stones here so continuing on to do the exact same process i just did previously again i'm just kind of running it through the same methods using the atlas splitter the from one of the dirty rock pebbles o3 scans that i found and for this guy i believe i did actually just plug it in straight into the shape splatter i didn't do any edits uh to this one too much just because i liked the forms it was giving me and i didn't feel like i needed to do too much one other thing that i felt like i didn't really um want to do too much is because i think in the end here i actually only have them like scattered maybe one or three or something like i i basically take down the masking pretty low here so it's only showing me like maybe one or two or three on the final material so i'm kind of just messing with the height values here they're they're feeling a little bit flat and that's because i needed to mess with the height scale and the high offset so here this is actually looking pretty cool they're kind of almost dug deep into this dirt material but i still felt like they were too many for what i was looking for here so i'm gonna keep messing with some of these parameters and actually bring up the random scale and that's where you kind of see them going down to maybe like one or two that are showing up on the actual final material there again making sure to frame everything and looking at the 3d viewport and making sure everything is nice and neat continuing forward more of the scans uh pretty much this is same sort of method using uh bringing in any sort of scan that i like and then using the atlas splitter to break that up in any way um i like so this instance um we're done with any of the stone work as far as as far as adding it to the dirt so i wanted a little bit more different details here so i'm doing some twigs again same kind of idea i'm going to plug these guys into another shape splatter and i'm gonna mess with some of the values here so they kind of just splatter all over the place um the cool thing about these twigs is that i even though the scan is like the name is twigs i almost used them in a in a in a sense that they were almost pine needles like they they i ended up scaling them so small that they on the surface they just felt like more more or less like pine needles than anything else so it almost gave me that that feeling of like a forest ground or something really quickly um here you can kind of see i've already scattered them all over the place and i'm just messing with the height and scale values to make sure they are aren't protruding too much again this is one of those instances where i like how this was looking but again it was just too many um for what i was looking for for the forest ground so i'm actually going to mess with the mask random and make sure some of those are actually disappeared a little bit here so again you can always go back to any of these because the shape splatter is non-destructive you can up the amount or you know take more away i'm looking at the normal here and making sure everything is feeling good looking at different shapes just to kind of see how the lighting is affecting it and this pretty much sums up your dirt material so if you wanted to you could actually more or less like make this a one-off material and you know start creating um different variations but for this instance as you saw in the renders we're actually going to do a stone floor so this is going to be the beginning of our stone floor so to do that we're just going to do a tile random to begin here i'm just messing with some of the values to try to get something that's a little bit random here so just moving the different shapes here and this might seem a little weird and it's kind of just random like this doesn't really seem like you're doing anything but once we actually bring in this distance node you'll actually see what we got going on here we're starting to get some of those really interesting rock effects here or sorry stone shapes if anything else so i'm actually disconnecting the dirt here and i wanted to just straight up connect the this very basic forms that way we can kind of see what i'm actually doing with the height information rather than just you guys staring at the dirt the entire time so i made uh the decision to just plug this guy in and see what's going on as we're building the stones so we won't necessarily see the dirt here we're basically just straight up working on the on the the stones uh by themselves so um basically what i'm doing here is i liked some of the values that i was getting for the different stone shapes but some were coming out too dark and i just wanted to edit them ever so slightly so basically ran it through a gradient map and colored a mask that way i can pinpoint which specific stones i'm looking for and then do value adjustments that way um plugging that in and then i'm going back with the original shapes and doing an edge detect here this is where we're actually going to get those nice bevels and this is where we're going to finally start seeing some of the actual stone shapes come into fruition here so there's they'll start look stop looking like those weird uh panels that you see right now gonna blend those on with itself and then lower the opacity and now you can kind of see we're starting to get our basis of our stone shapes here so making sure everything is framed and making sure everything is named accordingly so throughout the process of actually creating these stones we are going to use a lot of different flood fills and a lot of different variations to the flood fill so i made sure to name this one main flood fill because i throughout the tutorial you'll see me going back to this one quite frequently and i want to make sure that this is the one i'm going back to so one thing with the actual material in the end is that i didn't actually leave all the stones in the final material early on i wanted some of them to be almost like gone like they were not there it just felt a little bit more natural so here i'm using the flood fill to create a mask that i will eventually use to subtract from our current stones here that way we get a little randomness to where these stones are so some have stayed and the other ones looked like they were never there to begin with so you know storytelling more so than anything as if like you know over time the stones just either disappear chipped away or however you want um the cool thing about this though is that if you ever wanted to like bring back all the stones because substance again non-destructive you can always go back and change these valleys and you can actually just completely take up off this specific portion and not use it so so here um i'm using the flood fill to like the biggest advantage here is i love using the angle gradient that way we get some nice interesting normal information out of it so what i'm doing here is i'm taking that flood fill that i talked earlier about the main one and i'm running it through five i believe i believe it's five different uh flood-filled gradients and i'm blending them all into each other so once we blend them through min and then darken you'll notice we start getting those cut planes on the actual shapes it almost gives it um i kind of describe it as almost like when you're cutting the planes off in zbrush or something like that uh once i have those shapes i do a levels and then i start breaking up the surface with some slope blur grayscales and we go from you know you can kind of see what's going on there here you'll notice that i actually took that noise and lowered it as far as like the output size it just gives you a little bit more variation into the slope blur grayscale play around with the output sizes of your noises because you'll be you'll find out you'll get a lot more variation in that sense but once i blend that in you can kind of see what we went from we went from having those like pretty basic shapes and now we're starting to get some forms and some interesting rocky surface uh undulation there these next couple of slopeler grayscales are essentially just detailing of that we're taking the same slope blur grayscale and just breaking up the surface even more so so we're doing some edge breakups we're doing some micro edge breakups and some undulation i thought this one was extra cool we got those nice stridations almost on like the horizontal planes so again and that's because i took the clouds too and again messing with the output sizes here um even though your material like final is a 2048 by 2048 always make sure to play around with these noises because they are going to give you different results at smaller output sizes so you're not always bound to like using a noise at a 2048 by 2048 or what whatever size you're working for again um just going in messing with those values uh here uh i'm pretty happy with the larger forms so this is where i'm actually going to start bringing in some of the smaller surface noise and it's a little bit similar to how we've already authored the dirt in a sense where i always like working with the larger forms and then slowly work my way into the medium and then the more uh grainy or micro detailing here it's just easier to kind of see that um just building up in a sense so you know it's almost like working in photoshop you start with the bigger shapes and you're layering on more and more as you go forward so i basically just did a cells doing some slow blur gray scales and doing some transforms to break up the surface um this next part is actually interesting because um it was kind of like a happy accident i basically got a flood fill and then i did a vector warp and these inputs were actually plugged in by accident but i really liked the noise that it was giving me it was nothing like i had ever seen really like when messing with substance so here you can see me adding it and you kind of see that really weird shapes and noise but it added so much surface i just liked how it ended up turning out but i did lower the opacity because it was a little strong but it was that it was one of those instances of just like substance designer just plugging in and seeing the different things that'll happen just happy little accidents um quoting bob ross there um but yeah i tend to find a lot of the times there's been instances where um i plug something in random that i don't think will end up working out for my graph but it it somehow gives me something that's completely unique um essentially so that was just one of those instances there uh but here is actually me doing what i actually wanted to do i want to do a vector warp grayscale just so i can move and shift the actual noise around here a little bit so i'm going in doing an inboard grayscale after i've shifted the noise depending on the tile so vector warp grayscale takes into account where the shape is but it breaks up your noise so what i don't want essentially is whenever i plug in a noise i don't want it to go from side basically continue from one tile to another i want it to be a little bit more unique and almost feel more organic in a sense so each tile feels a little bit different taking those surface noises and making sure it's all clean and i frame it and i name it accordingly here cool so what i'm doing here is i'm just using that same method that i talked about earlier with the shadows and i'm just doing an invert and this is where i exaggerate some of those shapes you can kind of see i plug it in before and after just so you can kind of see what the shapes are doing so we're getting some interesting shapes here some of the planes you'll notice that i have a little bit of those high planes here so i'm trying to find ways to break that up and uh this is one of those instances of like taking something you've already done and just messing with it a little bit to try to get something else so that shadow mask i just created i basically ran it through a safe transform grayscale and i rotated it slightly i'm running it through a histogram doing a slow blur to break up those edges and this is essentially going to be used as some cracks so once i have those nice shapes i'm going to just blend it on top of it out of subtract and kind of see we start getting those nice little chips there make sure it's framed and uh named accordingly so i'm happy with everything i've done so far but i am doing a levels here just so some of those white peaks aren't as intense so we're when working with high information a lot of the times um i tell my students you know don't go to the max of black or white that way you can still have the ability to add certain things so whenever you have a white value in your height map you're essentially telling it like this is the topmost height so when you go into blend modes and you try to set something on add it's actually not going to add it because you've already maxed out the peak white value on that so just something to know always make sure to work in your gray scales and try to you know auto levels or add a levels to bring those tones down ever so slightly here i am actually adding some stone scratches by using a substance's scratch generator uh i tend to use a scratch generator a lot when working on hard surface stuff but uh it's always fun to use it on stone surfaces um you can always mess with the distortion and mess with the intensity so you can kind of see there i bumped it up just slightly just so i can kind of see what's going on there but um i made sure to lower the intensity so it doesn't feel too uh weird there cool so next up i'm going to add some pitting to these so we've worked on a lot of again just more directional noise surface noise but um based on the reference i was looking at there were some almost small little crevices and pitting on these actual stones so i'm taking a dirt and i'm scaling it up and i'm just doing a levels and then running that through a tile generator so i'm getting even more i'm basically tangling it way more but with the tile generator i at least have a little bit more control as to like changing the grayscale value of it or changing the rotation of it so i get a little bit more variation kind of see my me zooming in there and seeing what we get there uh one thing to know is i did add a bevel just because i didn't want those pitting to be such sharp edges and it just gives it just a softer little um bevel to the normal map just reads it a little bit better when you have just softer edges there so that's why i did that there continuing on this is where we're starting to we're going to start to get a little bit more detail here because i'm actually starting to add more the surface noise so similar to how in the dirt we again we talked about the large forms this is me going in and adding the moisture noise messing with some of the values there and then leveling and then blending into itself so you can kind of see we're starting to get a lot more surface noise on these actual stones and from here on i'm just going to continue with that trend so i'm actually getting some more noise and but doing some more directionality to it so basically trying to find ways to add more surface noise but in more unique and interesting ways here i'm just messing with a few different values making sure everything is framed and named accordingly so here i'm just moving everything out of the way and looking at the whole stone i'm moving it out of the way just because i know eventually i'm going to add it on onto the dirt so i'm just preparing myself for that keeping the graph nice and organized um so these specific noises that i'm going to be adding next are actually i call them unique only because for these guys i don't actually apply them across the whole surface i'm actually going to go back to those flood fields that we discussed earlier and try them and try to get mass out of them that way the these specific noises are only going to be applied to certain random stones throughout the material so here you can see i'm going back and trying to find which flood fill i want to use and i'm just going to use a flood filter random grayscale and i'm just going to make a mask out of that so i'm just going to grab that and then use my histogram select so i can make a black and white mask and then just blurring it ever so slightly and then this is basically gonna you'll notice right there the the noise is only applied to one of those stones so the nice thing about the histogram select is that i can go back and change the range of it if i want to apply it to more but the purpose of these noises are again just makes some of them feel unique and different from all the rest of the stones so i'm doing the same thing here again with a different surface noise so i believe earlier it was just fractal sum with levels here i'm just doing a fractal sum 2 with a high pass grayscale giving me a little bit different variation but still feels like it's coming from the same family so again same kind of method here i'm going back and looking at the flood fill and trying to see if i can create another mask out of this one so on this guy i did end up just grabbing the flood fill and creating a new mask something that works for this specific noise here cool just making sure everything is nice and organized and there we can see once i plugged it in you can kind of see which ones it's um gravitating towards but already like this one in particular it definitely made you definitely feel once you look at the material like some of those stones have a little bit more graininess to the other ones and i think that's what i like about this because all the stones are starting to feel they have the same large shapes but i think with the the smaller micro detailing it's where you get a lot of the uniqueness and separation in those elements so taking the same idea here um from when we added the pitting i'm kind of basically doing the same thing but for these guys i wanted some larger pits so i wanted almost like larger cutouts same kind of scenario where i i still want him to feel like um they're little speckles on the actual stones but i do want them like you can see here almost looks like grated cheese but i just wanted them to be a little bit bigger and again i made sure to lower the opacity so it's not as intense here always looking at the normal map to see what kind of information we're getting here and again here i'm just gonna do some more uh pitting here to the rocks but again i'm doing the whole unique so it's only going to be applied to a few of these stones based on the flood fill that i am using here this time i did something a little bit different i ran these uh noise and shapes through a flood fill mapper this this kind of just gave me a little bit more variation to how to use these noises and how they are applied to the surface so i could actually plug in the flood fill directly to this one and kind of control the rotation and the actual strength of the noise and here you can kind of see me just messing with the opacity so it doesn't uh come out too strong on there cool just circling the material here making sure everything is all good so one thing throughout the whole stone creation that i was missing i felt like were um based on the reference i was looking at a lot of the times where a lot of these stones felt like they were cut almost in a sense of layering so almost like some of them were some of the pieces were chunked off if that makes sense so like if there was like a nice clean cut on one of these rocks you'll notice just by staring here uh directly on the on the 3d viewport um a lot of them feel like they're on the same plane we do have some almost angle variations but i wanted some of the rocks to feel like um over time they were just broken off so here i'm actually going to begin the process of creating a brand new again similar to how we were creating the smaller graph to break up the dirt this is one of those instances i'm creating another smaller utility graph that i will eventually be adding onto our main stone shape so what i'm doing here is i basically took a shape a square shape and run it through some different um gradients and different noise just so we can get a nice breakup you'll start seeing that i'm using the same methods that i did when i was creating that um dirt breakup and that one shape i'm putting all my efforts into creating this one specific shape because i know down the line i'm going to tile it and that's how we're going to get our nice surface break up if any of you guys seen my previous tutorials um this is the exact same method that i used to create one of my cliff materials um so it's a nice way to get like larger forms um and i just felt like if i did it this way it'll be really easy to cut into those stone slabs later on so similar to how we were creating that stuff for the dirt is i'm taking that shape and i'm just running it through different purlin noises different directional noises messing with different um angles just trying to get a nice breakup of this one specific shape because i know it's going to be tiled like crazy so going in and just warping it adding some crystal noises um ever ever so subtly here trying to get some nice variation here and um yeah breaking this up a little bit changing some of those levels so here i'm adding some i guess more angled variation into this guy so one thing that i like to do a lot of the times is you notice how i added that that almost directional noise onto it but i almost i blended it into itself again so i like that ability to blend it within itself because it gives me the option of messing with the opacity it just gives me a little bit control of how much strength i want on these cuts so it's it's a nice little trick there um so you can control the opacity of that stuff so here is we're actually going to um do our tiling before we actually plug this into our um splatter circular uh i took that last rock but i just rotated it uh 180 that way i get another variation if you wanted to you could do this variation like two or three times so if you want to do like 190 degrees one 180 um whatever you want so the more variation you had into you add into the splatter circular the more unique your shapes are going to come out to be so just something to keep in mind so i'm going to plug this in and you can kind of see that this is starting to almost look like a cliff shape like i mentioned before a similar method that i use when i'm creating my cliff stuff and cliff demos so uh if you wanted to learn more about that stuff make sure to check those out cool so now that i have this main shape i'm actually going to bring our final stones how they were previously and this is where i'm going to do some blending here so i'm just going to frame this making sure everything is named accordingly and then i'm i'm gonna bring in that blend and then i'm gonna just change the um i'm gonna change the opacity and blend mode but first um similar to how we were choosing specifically where we wanted this noise i'm doing the same sort of method here i wanted those cuts to only appear on certain rocks or just the opacity to be a little bit widespread between the stones so with all these different gray values that i have here those cuts are going to come in at different opacities so you kind of see it there and then i'm going to plug it in just to kind of see what we got going here i added levels just so i can control that a little even more so and there we go so you can kind of see we had that we had a little bit there so you went from that flatness and now we're starting to get a little bit more almost like war worn and tearing there onto those rocks so they're getting a little bit more compact and we're getting a little larger surface variation there so we're not done here we're actually going to use those exact same shapes that we plugged into that first shape splatter but we're just going to do a second variation again always like using the stuff we've created and try to plug them into different tile samplers different shape splatters it's okay to plug them into the same um generator but it's always cool to you know change the parameters and see what kind of different results you can get here so here i'm just messing with a bunch of the different size values the scale values so we can get something that's a little bit more unique compared to the one we just created here these values i'm just sampling them from the finished graph so again feel free to play with these numbers you'll notice with these in particular i can't kind of almost went for like a directional streaking on these so it almost looks like juror um like uh semi-angled cuts or something like that and we're gonna get a better interpretation once we actually add it to the stones so here i'm doing that method that i've talked throughout the tutorial is taking the shadows and then using that note to really push the values here and you can kind of see what happened there is once i added those shadows it really pushed in those forms a little bit i did a histogram range that way i could bring the values back and then i did a vector warp so it changes the noise per stone there so i just use one of the flood fill color maps and with the vector warp and then just moves it all over the place there so here this is where i'm actually blending this stuff in kind of get a sense of what's going on and i'm just going to go back into the beginning of our graph to get one of the masks that will be used when i actually blend this guy in here so doing another flood fill blood photo gradient and i'm just gonna grab this and plug it all the way out there so again i just don't want it to plug in straight into these i do always want to change the um the mask here and you might ask yourself like oh why don't you just grab one of the because i've been doing this throughout the tutorial is grabbing like flood fills grabbing random gradients every time i create a random gradient um flood fill i get different results so that's why i always do different ones and there you can actually see it plugged in we start getting a lot more surface variation it definitely doesn't feel like it's on the same plane one thing to note here is i did want to add almost like a softness to these stones so i did a non-uniform blur grayscale and then blend it into itself so i'm messing with the opacity here but you can kind of get a sense of the results you could get if you were to up the opacity a little bit there so just something to try out with your guys's materials here so moving forward uh i want to push the idea of those almost uh stacked cuts so what i'm doing here is i'm taking a flood fill uh from earlier and i'm doing a levels and i'm just getting some random shapes and these are actually gonna be overlaid on top of our current stones so they're gonna they're gonna feel like they've been stacked in a sense but i'm trying to make them feel like they've been cut and i want to make them feel like they've been sitting on top of the actual stones this whole time but over time they've just either been used up or worn or you know just natural cuts within the organic surfaces here so here i'm just creating some different shapes and trying to get something that works doing a bunch of different blends and blurs and sloppers try to get some breakup onto the surface of those cuts because once i add them i want them to feel like they're coming from the same plane or um say the same stone but different planes if that makes sense so here once i add those and you can kind of see what's going on here um it looks like they've been on like i'm liking some of these cuts here but i do notice that like that looks pretty cool here i do notice that if i push it too much it'll start getting a little weird so i try to find an opacity that works for what i'm going for and then i just do a frame and look over my normal and make sure it's all looking good so i would say we're almost done with the rock forms i just wanted to add one final thing uh because down the line i knew i wanted to add moss over this this specific material um i wanted to add uh i think it's lycan onto these guys so um i'm just going to do a grunge map here and i'm going to run it through a tile generator and i'm just messing with the different results here just trying to find some values that'll work here messing with the x and y's i'm basically taking that grunge and using the tile generator to break it up and make it feel a little bit more random once i find the mask that i like i do a blur and i do a grunge on top of it to subtract some of it away so it's not all uniform i use just a different grunge to break that up slightly so here i've done this method before in some past tutorials on how to overlay things to feel like they've been compressed onto the surface so what i'm doing with the like in here i'm plugging that into a mask but i'm blurring the material into itself so wherever the lichen is going to be finally added it's actually doing a pre blurred there that way when i do the blend mode on an ad it just overlays nice and evenly on top of the surface and we won't get any weird artifacting there so it's a nice way to add different elements so you could use that for leaves or anything like that but yeah i do that quite a bit there and now um the moment you all been waiting for here um we've gone ahead and finished pretty much all the stone tiles here so i'm just moving it out of the way and i'm plugging the stones on top and i'm grabbing my final output for the dirt and i'm plugging it into a height blend so height blend is really nice because it's going to take both elements going to take into consideration all your different values it's going to naturally blend them together based on the different values that you've um created throughout the entire material so just going through here making sure everything looks good so we got a nice breakup of dirt we got some of the dirt is bleeding onto to the stone tiles which is really nice and this is the correct the great way of um you know the non-destructiveness that i was talking about earlier um so i like the i liked how everything was looking but i i just wanted a different sort of layout with these stones so what i did was go all the way to the very beginning of where we did our distance work on our stones and just broke that up there so getting right back into it we're going to start integrating some more of our scans that we've been doing throughout this whole tutorial so for this instance we're going to do some grass clumping um we've been doing a lot of the scanning stuff on the actual dirt so i'm i'm gonna add these guys mostly on the dirt again but i do want some of them to just trickle into um being on top of the stone so here i'm just splitting up like i usually did earlier in the demo with the atlas splitter and i'm actually going in and plugging these guys into a shape splatter so with this shape slide in particular usually i've kind of not messed too much with the masking but because i want these to show up in particular on the dirt and now that we've added the stones i am going to have to grab one of the masks from the height blend here so i'm actually just messing with the values here first so we can get something that is to my liking messing with the different height values um conforming some of these to the shapes and this is where i'm actually grabbing a mask from the height blend so the other great thing about using a height blend versus just a normal blend is that the height blend is actually going to create a mask for you which is really awesome because in the end it actually helps you pinpoint certain areas that you want so with this mask it actually broke up like the white areas are where the stones are and then the black area is with where the dirt is so this is going to come really in handy later on when we're doing our color pass as well cool so once i have all the grass planes there i wanted to add a little bit more detailing into the actual um dirt there um and i thought a great way would just be adding some roots not necessarily roots above the ground but i wanted to give the impression of like roots growing underneath the ground so there's some sort of undulation and you almost see the silhouette of the roots but just not completely um going through the ground there so i'm doing similar tricks that i did with the stones where i basically took a tile sampler and then a distance to get the shapes i'm looking for i broke that up with a purlin noise and then i'm going in with an edge detect here the edge detect pretty much gives me those really interesting root looking shapes but to make them feel a little bit more rounder like actual tree roots i use the non-uniform blur grayscale to give me those nice values there i didn't want them to be too i guess procedural or almost man-made looking so i threw in a slow blur and just broke that up ever so slightly here so again i'm going to actually grab the mask that i uh grab got earlier from the height blend but i'm going to do the same sort of treatment that i did when i was using the lychen where i'm going to do a pre-blur before i actually add in the roots here so i'm actually doing a little bit of changes to the masking here so the height blend gave me like an overall mass but i still wanted a pinpoint exactly where i wanted these roots um i wasn't really liking the results i was getting where the roots were kind of going all over the place in a sense like they're going in some areas of the material i didn't want so that's why you saw me adding the black value and using some of the blend crop features to really pinpoint where i wanted these guys in here so again doing that pre-blur that i talked to you about earlier uh when adding the lycan uh moss effect um and then here i'm actually uh doing the actual adding of it after doing the pre-blur here so here just some more uh blends and yeah there we go so um the nice thing about this is i wasn't really happy with the way this was looking in the sense of i wasn't liking the pattern so i'm gonna actually go back to the beginning of the tile sampler and mess with the shapes of this so uh here you can kind of see me going into the random seed and the random seed gives me a bunch of different random variations and that's the one i ended up going with um each one is going to be a little bit different so just play around with it cool so making sure to frame everything again keeping the graph nice and clean so again i'm gonna keep adding a few more i think this is the last actual scan that i used within the material so now that i had the roots um i wanted to give the impression of what i was talking about a little bit earlier was some of the roots growing out so i got this again substance source scan of a tree stump and i'm gonna use the height mask that i created earlier and using some of the newer masks that i use the blend crop features i'm going to be plugging this into the shape splatter with this one in particular i only split one of the roots because i honestly i think similar to how the stones were the larger stones at the beginning where i only did like one or two or something um i this one i just got one shape and use it only like twice throughout the material so here i actually end up with an issue here that uh you'll notice that i keep playing and messing with some of the valleys but it won't go away um it was actually my bad the the uh instead of plugging in the height map twice i accidentally grabbed the opacity mask so you'll notice that some of the roots just keep coming out really really flat it's not until like after i've messed with some of these valleys that they um i realized what was going on so one thing to know even though that oh i guess this is where i actually figured it out here uh one thing to note was um there were too many of the roots popping up where i didn't want them to so between some of the cracks and not necessarily in the area where i wanted them to be so i basically wanted the roots to only show up around um or sorry the stumps to only show up around the roots so this is me going in and adding a black value and using some of the blend crop features to again pinpoint where exactly i wanted these to show up so there that's pretty much um the one i think it's like one of the few scans that only used one in there so i wanted to give the impression of now that the roots are there there's actually some stumps that are protruding out right next to the tree roots so cool again going in making sure everything is named correctly and framing everything and this is where we're going to begin our color information so we got all of our high information we got everything blended in so let's start to add color to this guy so the first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to start adding color to the overall stones i'm going to pinpoint the stones first and then move on to the dirt so whenever i start my color pass i use the ambient occlusion and high pass grayscale almost as utilities the more information that these specific maps have the more the gradient map is going to have to play around with color sampling so basically the more information you could throw into um your height uh the more information that the gradient map will get out of it so i'm gonna start plugging this stuff in just so i can quickly see where our color is headed so i'm doing a lot of sampling off screen so i had a bunch of different reference images of different colors and i'm just using the color picker within the gradient map to get some different colors um early on i basically like blocking in the different colors and blending them in between each other with different masks and different blend modes to try to get something that's a little bit unique here so here i'm just playing with some of that stuff and early on i'm going to start grabbing mass again similar how we were grabbing mass for the flood fill when we were creating the stones i'm going to start utilizing those again for the color maps so this guy in particular has a bunch of different grayscale values so this is going to give me a nice variation of stone values so i'm using that hsl to bring some of the stone values uh up a little bit so you'll notice right there in the in the color and the albedo some of the stones have gone a little bit brighter while some either stay darker in the same place i take this hsl and do a little bit of value adjustments here a little go a little bit darker and again i'm doing um another pass but this time i'm doing almost like a little speck pass so i use the dirt 01 to get a really granular fine detailing into the albedo so um that's where that's doing that there and then um i do grab a a specific node from i believe it was substance shared called get slope get slope um works in a similar fashion as some of the matte caps do in zbrush where it gets you nice highlights so i love using this specific note it's not one that comes with substance so make sure you just download it if you're ever looking for it but i use it as a mask to plug into my highlights area and i can mess with the color from there so it gives me some nice clean um highlights right on the edges of the brick or any of the forms there so it just gives me that extra little detail i'm looking for on the on the stones there so here i'm just doing my basic grunge passes here um this is where i'm basically just adding some sort of different values and different noises onto the actual stones to break up the service the surface a little bit so here i'm messing with the grunge map and i'm doing the same thing that i did earlier with plugging in the the the grunge map into a tile sampler to break up the lichen i'm doing that same thing but i'm just using a shape splatter and here i'm doing a vector warp grayscale to break up the grunge so it only shows up or sorry so it shows up on different stones at different valleys here so now plugging this in kind of see what we got going on here so one thing i like to do in my albedo pass i really like using a substance is a dirt node so the dirt node creates basically a mask once you have connected the normal your curvature smooth and ambient occlusion and it gives you a black and white mask to use as dirt for this instance though i inverted the dirt uh to get me uh a different mass that i can use as a moss mask so instead instead of the dirt going into the crevices because i inverted this specific mask it's actually going to highlight the um areas on top of the surfaces so because of that i'm actually putting the moss on top of the stones here so i'm going back into some of those colors that i originally gradient sampled and here you can see where this specific color is coming through here and now our our stones are getting more of that greenery and more that mossy look here so moving forward i'm just grabbing and naming everything making sure everything is nice and clean and i'm going to do another grunge pass here so taking a different noise and running it through a vector warp grayscale and just overlaying a a brighter color here just to try to get some sort of variation onto each stone so when i'm doing the color pass on these guys i basically want a similar i'm handling it similarly to how i was doing the noise on the stones where i'm taking the flood fills i'm taking the vector warps and i'm just offsetting them ever so slightly so every single stone gets some sort of uniqueness to them i want them to feel like they're coming from the same biome but also get some sort of uniqueness to each different stone here so again going back to some of those flood fills and here i'm actually doing a value pass so some stones are getting darker some stones are staying lighter and so forth here i noticed that at this point within the material i was noticing that there wasn't a lot of color variation happening so what i did was i went all the way back to the very beginning of one of the flood fills and i created a new mask and i just sampled some different colors from another reference image that gives me a little bit more organic colors so before there were all these like cools and grays with this one i kind of went with a more warmer tone to it so it breaks up um the surface and it brings in some of those warmer tones so i have a little bit of the rock still staying in the cooler tones but now with those new colors i sampled they're going in a little bit with um just some warmer tones there and this is where i went back grabbed the lycan mask leveled it out and now i'm actually using it to apply onto this material here so um on the gradient for the lichen i again just sampled something off screen on a reference image with colors that i liked and um yeah adding the blend here so i more or less am done with the um with the albedo for the stones um this is where i'm actually going to start bringing in the dirt here so with the dirt similar to how um i did the stones with those utilities where i grabbed the ambient occlusion and the high pass grayscale i'm gonna still use those but instead of actually connecting the final output of what we had for our height i actually went back and only connected the final output for our dirt so it's before our actual height blend that way i don't get any weird um any weird things coming into our dirt information that i don't want so i didn't essentially want the stone like shapes coming into our dirt colors or anything like that so i made sure to basically isolate just the dirt shapes and use those for our gradients here so similar methods here i'm just sampling off screen some of the colors i liked on some of the reference images and i'm basically blocking out my colors here um getting some more of them browner dirt or browner colors you'd see in dirt and just breaking that a little bit up um with some of the masks that i used to create some of the height variation so there you saw me go all the way back to the very beginning of the dirt and i grabbed one of the masks that i used to create some of those like larger forms in the dirt and i'm just using that as a mask to get some color variation with different hue values here making sure everything is named accordingly and framed because we want to make sure our graph is nice and neat here cool so this is where we're actually going to start bringing in a lot of the information from our scan data or i believe yeah our scan data so um from here i'm actually going back to our beginning of our stones and one thing that um you'll notice is that the shape splatter has a few different outputs um that we didn't utilize so this is where we're actually going to utilize those guys um we when we use the shape slider we're only worried about you know splattering the high information but the nice thing about the shape splatter is similar to how the height blend gives you a mask the shape slider also gives you a mask to tell you where exactly these stones apply were applied or whatever shape you splattered it gives you a nice mask to isolate those specific areas which is really awesome so now here um i'm basically adding just my color block ins for the different stones that i utilize at the very beginning i believe these are the stones that weren't scans these were just the ones that i authored within substance um using some of the earlier methods just using a basic color block in and continuing down the line there so going here just more of the stone work here i'm looking and trying to see which stones are next within the the color pass here um one thing you'll notice is that it's pretty it's pretty like um i'm doing the same things over and over again here where i'm actually copying the same um three sets of nodes there i'm doing the gradient map the blend and then the threshold because that's actually going to give me the mass that i need to set for the colors and i'm just continuing to doing this throughout the entire process of the der albedo it's pretty streamlined um and i almost like to think of it in a sense of again i'm going back to layering similar to how you would layer in photoshop so i like to build my albedo the same way i'm building my height map is i go back and i start adding the colors based on how i layered these guys within the height map so because i did the stones first the ones that i created in substance i did those colored blockings first and now this is where we're actually grabbing the color information from the actual stones from the scans now one thing to note here is that there's an extra added note here called shape splatter color blend where again we can actually grab the information from the shape splatter that tells us where these stones were laid out um in in particular and you can also correspond the pattern number to it so depending on which which rock you splattered it's actually going to know where the color information needs to align to be perfectly matched there so super nice um little method there just plugging all these guys in creating my mass and again streamline doing the exact same thing here over and over again i'm just doing an hsl because i do want to offset these colors ever so slightly in case that the scan data is is either too light or too bright like there i actually brought them in a little bit brighter so always again just because you have the the the scan and it comes with these specific colors they might not necessarily work for what you're looking for so i always like adding some sort of utilities with hsl to break that up and give you a little bit more control so here i'm just doing the twigs same sort of process here using that shape splatter uh blend color node getting the colors plugged in and then getting the mask and again just going from the bottom and then going all the way to the right side so i like to do that with my graphs is i'll grab the specific connection points and just bring them all the way down and all the way to the right it keeps my graphs nice and clean and it's just easier for me to read so here i'm i actually blended both of those elements together here so you can start seeing the source stuff coming together now combining the albedos here so here i'm actually going back and i'm going to grab some of these uh shape splatter nodes the blend ones just because i didn't want to reuse them or i didn't want to create new ones so i just went ahead and just copied those save some time but here's actually i'm doing the same method that i was doing with all the dirt stuff but now i'm doing the grass stuff and the reason i'm adding these elements after the fact is because just similar to how i added these elements after the fact of combining them after the height information i'm doing the same thing with the color map so um just going in and again making it i'm building the albedo similar to um building the height map i just want to make it one-to-one so if i basically blended something after i combine my elements i'm going to grab the colors after i combine my albedos so just working in a streamlined process just because it'll it'll make you less confused with how big your graph is getting and uh it just keeps it a lot cleaner in this sense instead of like basically plugging in these colors randomly throughout the graph it might also just affect where the stuff is being layered so you might not get the best result doing it any other way really again at this point um i actually am pretty happy with how things are and this is where i'm actually gonna grab a moss scan here so the moss scan and the scattering of it i'm doing a little bit differently so before i was actually breaking up everything and splitting all these atlases up for this instance i'm using uh one of their nodes called i believe it's the atlas scatter and the atlas scatter is cool because you can actually plug in all your final maps and plug in a scan and it's going to scatter every single element so it's going to scatter like your color your normal your height and all that and it's going to just blend seamlessly the one thing about these to watch out for that i've just i've ran into is that these tend to be a little bit more expensive in the sense of like milliseconds i found my machine starts to chug a little bit more when i'm using these guys as opposed to splitting out exactly which elements you want so for example like you're using six different moss patterns here if you were to use the um the earlier method where i'm just splitting off and choosing maybe a couple in particular and even just choosing which maps i want it saves a little bit of computing time in that sense so just something to look out for but the cool thing is it's got all the same um parameters that you would find in the shape splatter so um really nice to see everything just update in general i didn't use this one too much and i believe i only use it like twice um i just knew that if i used the atlas scatter it was just gonna chug this whole material a lot more so just something to note there again masking these out and again like i mentioned um because it affects all your different maps it has a few extra features so you can actually change the color of the moss in here and everything so instead of having to like bring in your own hsl or something like that it has those features already plugged into the atlas scatter here so could save you a little bit of just headache with all the different nodes you have so moving forward um once i had the moss i wanted to add some leaf scans so same thing leaf scans off are off adobe substance source so just using the same method that we did for the mos i'm doing the scatter method um just because i wanted to see everything all together and with this guy i actually um only did like a few leaves i didn't want it to get too noisy um i was running into instances where the leaves were the more leaves i added it was just getting way too noisy but again play with the different values and the amount you might you guys might get different results than i do so something to play around with there so just messing with the smooth conform background you can form the background those are nice sliders to play around with because those are the ones that are actually going to help whatever shape you're blending in to conform to the shape underneath it's similar method that i go over with the pre blurs and then the using the add onto the blends earlier like so for the lycan um it's basically that similar method it's just baked into this one specific uh node here so cool little thing there so next up um once i had all the elements i pretty much am going into the final stages here um this was almost an afterthought um i wanted to see what it would look like the material would look like with water so uh it's really easy to add water to your materials um because substance has introduced uh well i wouldn't say introduced it's it has a water level node that i like to use a lot of the times so if you've already finished your whole material and you just want to see what it would look like wet or with puddles this is a great node to try out i didn't want it to get too reflective so i only did like just a little bit puddles here and there and i just plugged it in and see the results there so here i'm coming to my final uh sort of post process stuff here i'm doing curvature passes on my material here i'm doing that by grabbing the normal and doing curvature smooth and curvature sobel sawble blending them into each other and using a gradient map the reason i use a gradient map is because these curvatures are coming out as grayscale outputs to blend it into a color albedo map you actually have to create that grayscale into a rgb node so i had to use that there cool so now i'm going back just naming everything accordingly framing everything just so we can keep nice and clean and this is where we're gonna start our process of creating our roughness map so to begin i'm just going to do a grayscale conversion with some of the color block out i did for my stone shapes and then do it levels this is essentially the the first couple of nodes that you're creating with your roughness are more or less the effect that you want on your material so i did that levels and you'll notice that it's mostly on a on the white almost brighter white values there is because i want the stones to feel a little bit more matte and not as reflective there's still going to be some opportunity to add that reflection or reflectivity later down the line as i'm building the um the roughness because i am starting to take all the grunges and all the different passes with the color values that i did in my albedos so just something to note there it's gonna be a fine balance of tweaking all the stuff that you're adding with the stuff that you did in your albedo with the really early color values that you choose at the beginning for your roughness here and again this is this is pretty streamlined here i'm basically taking the exact same connections and the exact same mass that i used for my albedo to add all the different variations all the different color values all the different grunges and i'm just using these specific connections plugging them in and for the roughness i either use a black or white because i can control the opacity and the value within the blend or sometimes i go into the uniform color and change it to like a gray or something so here you can kind of see me uh just plugging stuff in here and messing with the different opacities uh i throughout the whole process of the roughness i do name everything just because i don't want to get lost of what's going on and what i'm doing so um yeah i mean i'm i'm looking at the albedo and i'm basically just grabbing the exact same connection based on where it is above the roughness node network so now that i have the stones all set i'm gonna do the exact same things with um the dirt i'm just gonna run it through a grayscale conversion to get that first value and i'm gonna run it through levels to control that value a little bit better so similar to how the stones are these specific values that you start off with are going to determine a lot of how reflective the dirt is going to be so something to keep in mind there i also made sure to connect it early on just because before i didn't have anything connected there next up i'm going to start blending in some of the other elements similar to how we were doing with the stones and looking right above to find the connections i'm just doing that again with the dirt i tend to do this a lot with my materials is i build the albedos and i try to keep it on the same highway like right underneath that way it's just easy for me to grab the same connection point so you notice as i go through the graph that i'm just grabbing the same connection points that are from the mass for the different elements and i'm just plugging these guys in and choosing different roughness values here making sure everything is named accordingly and making sure everything is tied into the same names as the albedo that way if i ever need to go back and reference where something is i don't get lost in the node network or anything like that so again just messing with the different blend modes and the different opacities play around with the different blend modes because they might give you some different results as far as the intensity some of these roughness valleys i have been finding out so you know you might not necessarily need to change the uniform color to a certain way if you were to change the blend mode on some of these blends so again just streamline here continuing forward through the entire highway of the roughness map some of the scans here again you're not conformed to some of the roughness values of the scans that you're given you can always go in and change that sort of stuff so that's why i like working with just the substance stuff is it's you know uh non-destructive and even though um even though the scan comes with a predefined like accurate uh roughness value uh sometimes when it's working together with your material it might not be necessarily the right one for an art direction purpose and there you have it so this is pretty much the final result for your material i'm just going around and doing different primitives just so i can kind of see it in different shapes and forms um making sure to save my file and yeah i hope you enjoyed this tutorial thank you to everybody at view conference for having me on really enjoyed it and i'll see you guys in the next one peace

Channel: Javier Perez

Views: 4,356

Keywords: tutorials, substance designer, adobe, textures, cobblestone, texturing, gameart, free

Id: jBm-v8u0jNI

Length: 90min 11sec (5411 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 25 2021