Creating Damage Decals using Substance Designer

quick everyone turn your scale up turn your tessellation factor out let's get crazy we are thinking we are a tool using animal um and we should start acting as such because I think what happens with something like substance designer often especially with students is that they think about this just as a One-Stop shop for making tiling textures which I agree with I do think this is where I make most of my Italian textures but you can do much more than that with it so in this case we're thinking a little bit out of the box and we're using this just as a generator to create this kind of Creator impact texture that doesn't tile but we can use it for all sorts of different cool things I'm going to show three examples of where I'm using this in a workflow somewhere else and then we'll come back and actually build this because it's pretty easy and it piggybacks off of a lot of stuff we've been doing in previous videos so here's the first of the three options I have a different graph here the sort of cobblestone I know classic we're doing a lot of cobblestones these days but in here what I've done is I've dragged that whole node Network that Creator node I've just dragged that graph into here and I'm using that to just spit out this Alpha I'm inverting it and I'm putting it through a tile generator and I'm actually using that to Splatter it all over this Cobblestone to create this kind of procedural damaging and like impact craters wherever I want on the cobblestone let's turn our tessellation up to go into materials installation I just want to make sure we have the scaling cool so really sweet right I don't have to do anything fancy in this graph once I make this guy one time I can reuse it in any material I want and I can see this right so I could take our create our graph and change the random seed and I'm going to get a totally different crater which is really cool I could actually if I wanted to get a separate scene on this other graph do the same thing here right so I just have my output inverting it that guy I prefer something that goes right to the edge like this and I can have a second input on the tile generator and put him in put in the wrong guy there him actually you don't care to invert this one with this plug him in and now it's picking the tajender is randomly picking between one of the two crater damages we built and that makes a lot of sense in the past right in Photoshop you make these two versions and it takes a lot of time it's really annoying but here we just have these two graphs we can make endless versions of it which is awesome and we can obviously do things like scale this up by just making those cracks bigger because it's a little too big but we can have some random scale we can rotate them randomly position them around the graph give them random luminance that some aren't as punched in as others but you can see this is a really cool way of expanding on your other graphs and pre-packaging certain parts of your node Network in this case that that crater and just reusing in all other materials it's really cool the added benefit is we could always hop back to this original graph make any improvements or additional features to this graph and it would carry through to any other material we're using it which is really sweet another thing you can do is just output just the Alpha from here and I'm using this Alpha in something like zbrush to be able to drag this out so I have a sphere here in zbrush where I've created a brush that uses that Alpha texture reloaded in from we exported from substance designer and I can just use that to create the exact same pattern but when we're sculpting right so this can speed you up a ton if you're just working on wanting to sculpt some stuff and bake that down or you just you can this can be anything you need to be crater texture you can make like fish scales or you know leather skin or like wood textures like whatever you want you can just make them designer and if you're going to use them to sculpt it's really really helpful and just the same I have three versions of the cracks this is another one of those Hey look it's the guy from the thumbnail moments but I can have these three different brushes that use the same Alpha and it can really speed up your sculpting depending on what you're making right we got a really cool result really quickly here just that one graph so that's the second thing you can do right assist your sculpting with stuff you make in substance design pretty handy the last thing I'm going to show you is I have the same group of textures exported to Unreal and I'm using them as a decal so this is just a sphere I think a really simple sphere geometry here and just an empty unreal level and I actually have these textures loaded in as a decal material so I can use that outputted texture from designer to create decals pretty simple but so you can see that there's we haven't we can duplicate this have another one but hopefully you're getting the idea that you should stop thinking about substance designer is just a thing that spits out brick textures which is what I think a lot of people think about here I'm using it for these three it's the same texture I'm making and it's not telling texture it's just this kind of interesting gecko or a height map that would be more annoying to make in something like Photoshop or whatever and I'm using it in these three very different ways right either using it to improve other Thailand textures using it to improve sculpting and speed up sculpting workflow or using it in something like unreal to just help break up your big tiling textures with the aid of decals really really cool um we're gonna hop back into a graph and actually discuss how to make this thing so we've gone to the graph where we're going to actually build that Creator out and I think it's worth noting that we're going to touch on a lot of stuff here that was mentioned in previous videos so I'll put a link to all the relevant stuff in the description I'll also put title card stuff up when they're relevant the videos that were probably worth reviewing here are about flood fill um that auto leveling of bevel fixing all that stuff and then some more things I'll make sure to put them all in the description so you can catch up and like I said I'll put them up on screen when they're relevant but we're going to start we need a cells pattern to create that initial texture the initial crack texture we're not going to use the default cells we're going to make our own the background on this first title card that's relevant um is our video on creating a more interesting custom formula noise I would check that out but essentially what we're going to do is get a tile sampler we're going to get some squares I'm just picking an arbitrary number right now we'll do like 20 by 20. that's not enough 20 by 20. we'll scale this guy down a bit give it some random position we need random color as well which is in the color roll out random color you can probably scale them down a bit more even we'll do something like 0.1 like I said you can actually set this to pixel and have them be a single Pixel it would work it actually works better especially if you resize the graph later I'm just putting them as little squares right now because it's easy for you guys to see what I'm doing so I'm going to do that and then I'm going to take a shape and grab a cone because what I'm going to do is I want to have a different amount of because so for instance if we just made the boring oil like this we take a distance this gets run into source we get an all white version using a histogram scanner level whatever make a version of this point field where everything's White plug that into mask set to full so we don't like this is on that impact crater we built we sort of want smaller little bits at the center of the crater and then they slowly get bigger think Dragon Ball Z like combat Battlefield stuff like the bigger cracks are always at the edges then you get tiny spidery cracks as you get towards the middle the problem is that this is all kind of evenly distributed right they're all kind of within the same size of each other if we thin out how many we have here by just turning something like the random mask up they get bigger and the reason they're getting bigger right is that there's more distance between any of these seed points so that when the distance Works they can spread further before they hit something so the resulting cells are bigger you can see it here if I play with the mask the less I'm masking out the closer they are together the more I mask them out the further we are together so I kind of want to do is make two versions of this with different distributions so this one will have much less than the top one and all I'm going to do is mask this guy so that all of the dense stuff I'll turn the mask map threshold up all of the dense ones appear in this little circle and then I'm going to invert this like this plug him into here and then this last dense one will only appear in the ring outside so I'll turn the mask mask map threshold that's a tongue twister it's hard to look sometimes I promise so we have a really dense amount in the middle and much more sparse on the outside and we're going to blend these together we'll just use like a Max you could blend these together with a mask and ignore doing the second invert grayscale Mass map here but you risk getting half of one which can be an issue sometimes so I like just separating like this guy and be sure they never double up and you can see we have a texture now where there's way more in the middle and then much less dense outside and if we run that then we get these smaller cracks and they gradually get bigger which is really neat then if you want them to get even bigger on the outside what we could do is mask it so that there are none on the outside here so I could take the same texture our shape here of our cone I'm going to set this to full and I'm going to just multiply out here so there's none in the middle but there's also none on the extreme periphery and then we get these really long streaks at the edge right you can see the difference if I don't use that we still get these kind of big ones but if we mask out the edge we get these big streaks off the end which is really cool and you can play with this too if you wanted to bring it in more something like that that probably feels better so these really long streaks from the impact we have bigger stones and then smaller stones and we can make this even more Stones if we wanted to by just increasing the number of both these tile Samplers and we'd throw this to like 22. and we have more of them something like that so now we're going to Edge detect this and you can sort of see how we're going to start to get our cracks here to start that spider webbing crack detail the issue with doing this is we probably this is like the first big trick of the video we don't really want the same width of crack for the little guys as we do for the big guys because a crack width of this out on the big ones might actually feel pretty good but it kind of erases the ones in the middle right since they're so close to each other that an edge width that big erases them so we'd rather have two types of width one for when you're up close one from when you're far away or one from when the cell is small one from when the cell is big it's actually really easy to do I'm going to make an edge with or an edge to Tech that's really low scale right it's just a line and we're going to make a flood fill and I would check out our floodfield video I think it's like the most popular upload at this point um a lot of stuff we're going to do today is heed off of this flood kill node so it makes sense to go check it out so we take this guy and we're going to use our flood pill to bounding box size which we did touch on on that video if I could type the right note so this just Shades them darker based on how small the cell is and brighter the the brighter they are which is pretty sweet I might actually want a bit more but we'll see I think it's fine anyway so we have this and what we're going to do is distance this because we want to close up that Gap in between so we put the thing we're trying to distance into Source we put whatever went into the flood fill into the distance let's make some more room It's always important to try to stay as organized as you can auto level this because I want to make sure that we have full value range and now what's cool is we can histogram scan this and just mask out the smallest elements right so if we do something like this and set the contrast to fold we're grabbing all of the little guys right are in black and all the bigger guys are in white so I want to feather that a little bit something like this cool set that before because we're getting a little bit of noise in there sweet so what I'm going to do now is have a two separate Edge detects one is our wide one so I'm really only focusing on the big Stones here I want a bit around this and have a you know some significant width and then I'm going to make a second Edge detect and focus on the small ones or I'll make it a lot less round in a thinner crack and now we can just blend between these two so I want the big ones up top the small ones in the bottom and use this as a mask you may have to play with this a bit to get what you're happy with here something like this I have a pretty good with that so now we have the interesting different line width right like much thicker on the outside thinner on the inside pretty sweet and you can exaggerate this more if you wanted to add more or add a bit more to the middle whatever you want to do but you have the control to be able to change those and like I said you can see this whole graph to get different unique versions which is really sweet so I like that right that we have this varied up line with this is a thing that like students miss a lot right it's having just one line width for everything like generally you want to vary up your line weights so I might thin this out and the small ones just a little bit more and we'll call that a day cool and I might actually change the thrust Threshold at which to start making them small so something like this sweet so that's sort of the first step we're going to Bevel this like so set it to full I would recommend checking out our video on bevels and tricks for bevels because it'll explain why we need to do this but we want a full range and we'll plug this into normal let's give it a pretty strong normal map uh we don't want this to be as smooth it is right now so we could do it rougher we're also going to plug this into height and then let's make just quickly a second normal hello we'll make a second normal I'll just let people play this one what am I doing I make mistakes all the time get a curvature smooth and I'm going to just overlay this curvature so we have something nicer to look at so switches to grayscale so I can blend the curvature without having to convert it set it to Overlay and we're good I'm also going to displace it at this point I'm using the plain high res so you don't really need to over tessellate it because there is so much geometry there already so let's scale this up and there's sort of the first I say we don't need to do it and I do it anyway there's the first kind of look we have here we've accidentally made a desert base for like a warrior miniature or something pretty quickly but now comes the fun part there's a couple things we want to touch on we want to be able to change the angle of these cells so that they're more caved in towards the center of the crater and they're outsides that are further away from the impact or up higher and we also generally want all of the small cells in the middle to be pushed more down than the ones on the outside because we're trying to create this impact crater so we're going to use a bunch of different flood fills for this but the first thing I want to do is recover our flood fill because this mask won't necessarily make sense with all the stuff we've done up to here and for a quick review on that I have a video on how to recover a flood fill like this it's up here it's probably worth checking out but we'll just do that here we make our normal map I think the strength of one is fine we'll make a curvature Sobel because I'm using a normal syllable and then we'll histograms get in this 50 plus one full contrast and because we have all these little score lead bits we may want to add a bit more so this is a better mask to start that flood fill with right because it's it's changed a lot since when we used it here and we want it to stay as close to the current result as possible but we're going to use a couple of things here the first thing we're going to use is a flood filter gradient because what we would like to do um you need to make a flood bill first what we would like to do is tilt all of these right so that they're deeper that like the the black end is towards all facing the middle of the impact in the white right now all the white is on the left side of these cells and the black is on the right side of these cells we can't just give them angle variation here make them random but we would write them all to be pointed towards the middle and the way we do this is by supplying a slope input texture which we haven't done before so I'm going to make a shape and just make a cone because this is really a good way of representing the impact crater right we're going from think about it inverted like this the impact crater is deepest at its middle and brightest at its Edge right so I'm going to plug that into slope input and then use the slope input image multiplier and you'll see that it's using that texture to reorient itself so now all the texture is white where it's facing in towards the middle in black when it's facing away which is the inverse of what we want we can't just flip at 180 here and now we have this cool texture where each of the cells are darker when they're facing towards the middle and brighter when they're facing away which is really cool again we'll want to distance this because we want to get rid of that black Edge in between so this goes to Source whatever went into the flood fill will go into the mask only source filled up and that's pretty sweet and what we're going to do is start by just multiplying that against our original height map and this is already really sweet right you can see how they all tilt up in a way and again I think I'm just thinking Dragon Ball Z I'm a big fan and like this is what I like to this is what I always remember from you know Krillin blowing through a mountain or whatever or getting plastered into a cliff this stuff looks great you get that real kind of kinetic energy feeling of like an impact happening in the middle so this is cool however we do want to make some improvements to this we probably want to add a bit of Randomness on top of this so we could add a tiny bit of Randomness so that they're not all perfectly aligned with the middle right if you put this to full it's just totally random which you might like to depending on the look I kind of like this look that they have a bit of a directionality to them and then we add a bit of Randomness on top so that solves our first problem of having that kind of kinetic blast Krillin through the namekian cliff type energy what we want to do next is make it so that the craters in the middle or rather the cells in the middle are further down because that's where the it's been pushed deeper so to do that I'm going to use a flood fill to grayscale we'll plug our flood fill in and this is just going to color the cells based on what texture is below them right so we would want to invert our cone here and now we have the middle shapes are much blacker than on the outside right which is going to have the effect of pushing the height map down same thing I need a distance put that into Source whatever went into flood fill we'll go into the mask set the only source put assistance to full and then here we'll multiply it again like so and you'll see we're pushing the middle down so it's further it's deeper down than it is on the edges I'm also going to put an auto level after this just to make sure we get our full value range and we probably need to increase the height on this a bit on the actual displacement so go to my tessellation rollout Jack the scale up a little bit or a lot I guess you can see what I mean you can sort of see now where we're starting to go the one thing I'd caution on this multiply is because we're multiplying by zero here right where there's black we're actually flattening everything you can see like the normal gets really weak just because everything here is you know the values are between like zero and 0.05 like there's so little variance so I ease off of this a little I don't multiply it as much just that we we keep that that level of Fidelity in the middle but we still have that impression of the big scoop being cut out really cool now what we need to do is create the edge of the crater because right now it kind of extends all the way to the end right at tiles over but we we want to create that kind of central crater we had in the first example so the way I'm going to do that is just a histogram scan this guy like this and choose the point at which I'll set the contrast to full and this is sort of the edge of the crater like where it'll stop and I'll take this and just add him like that cool but now obviously what we don't like about this is we have the flat Place Krillin has not launched to the cliff here and then we have a sheer drop down to this really dark value and you can see it here right we get all the smearing in it doesn't make a ton of sense we're sort of now thinking about the shape that does this and then this and then there's a v right instead of it being flat and then having a nice V we have these sheer drops that we want to get rid of so the way I'm going to do that is I'm going to actually bevel this shape inward set it to full again watch the bevel tricks if you haven't seen it auto level this and then I'm going to use this into another flood fill grayscale so we'll just reorganize this a little like this so this guy is sort of like him but he's much more reliant on this shape which is cool because if we ever decide to change the bounds of the crater he's going to come along for the ride so we're going to distance this put it into Source whatever went into the flood fill this guy should go into mask only source fully close it and I'm actually just going to add this we wanted that auto level here I'm just pressing D to dock that node against the graph we'll do a video on interface shortcuts and I'm just going to add this texture to this one so what that's going to do is these textures on the periphery are going to get a lot brighter so they're going to step up so just add and you get this which looks super awesome really really cool and we have the added benefit of getting these like extra neat cracks here at the edge where you can see the beginning of the crater pretty slick I really like the look of this um I smile whenever I make it like I think it's just really fun when it all comes together like this it looks really cool and it's super suitable like I said we can I'm double clicking on the graph and I can just change the seed and get a brand new crater potentially it looks like there's some flood fill stuff we might have to fix in there on certain scenes and that'd be easy enough to fix like here for example these all work but this one fails and that's just because this flood fill is failing here so we actually might need the position to be a bit lower like that and now they'll work better just something to keep in mind depending on the seed you might have to the settings you made and the one seed might not work so you may have to go um fix that one and then the rest will all remain fixed so that's really cool I like the way this looks um this has an added bonus here something you can do to improve the look of this that I did um was I didn't like just how perfectly straight all these lines are it can be cool if that's the look you're looking for something a bit more cartoony more uh simple um but if you want actually first let's make a quick AO of this and multiply it so we can see the depths of this a bit better that looks really cool one of the most disappointing things about a texture artist is oftentimes just the AO is the coolest looking texture and it's only going to get worse from there as you add color but that looks really really slick so what I'm going to do is just make these not be perfectly straight lines so what I'll do is at this step I'll make this noise a bit less straight so I'll get something like you can do a lot of things here but let's just like do a slope blur it's maybe worth watching our video on slowblers if you want to give it a shot so I'll put this here and I'll find something like a crystal or whatever slope blur this set it to full set it to like Min or something and I might actually right now it's only this horizontal noise so I'm probably going to make a vertical a horizontal one and a vertical one overlay them together and then work using that right so I'm just using this to break up the shape a bit I have it set to min because I just don't want to perfect it's probably better to have a dumb blur and then I'll just scan this a little bit so this shape is a lot more broken up in like ragged than this one right so we get a much more like kind of beat up noise on the edge and obviously the more you the more you blur that the more it'll be beat up and you can play around with that but hopefully that helps and kind of gets your your gets you cooking I'm gonna put a link to this graph in the description so that anyone can use it as reference just so you can follow along um if you like the video like the video please if you like the videos subscribe to the channel it's the best way to get a notification when new stuff goes up um I'm looking through the comments and getting lots of great recommendations about what people want to see um I'm surprised that it's mostly simpler stuff um but we can definitely do all that kind of thing maybe later we'll make a video about putting these into unreals Adecco or zbrush as a alpha I think people can probably figure that part out because it's not really designer Centric but if there's appetite for it mention it in the comments and that's something we definitely can do um but other than that thanks so much for watching guys and we'll see you next time foreign

Channel: Johnny M

Views: 11,841

Keywords: Substance Designer, Substance 3d Designer, lesson, tutorial, howto, learning, decal, generator, unreal engine, game art, procedural, texture, think tank

Id: t9F1FVGvoVw

Length: 29min 21sec (1761 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 04 2023