Forest Ground | Beginner Substance Designer Tutorial

[Music] so I popped into designer here and I've just gone up and started a new file here with our custom template and if you don't have this template make sure to check out the description where you'll be able to see the video where we can actually make our own and so I typed in grass tutorial for this package and I just hit OK and I'm going to start off by creating a shape note so I'm going to come in here create a shape node there to plug this guy into our histogram range and our normal I'm gonna come over to our base material here I'm just gonna right click and drag that into our viewport so it's going to show up in our view here if we take a look we're not gonna see anything because we've got our shape set to a square and so it's just gonna be pure white so if I come into pattern here I want to go down to Arab light and so this is gonna give us a little bit of a fall-off you can see there and so with that I want to go ahead and increase the normal and this is going to really help us see the light reflections of our material so I'm gonna bump this up to about ten to start and this is gonna be not too bad of a starting point the last thing I want to do is take full advantage of our height map because right now we are not actually displaying any height information so what I want to do is come up to materials and I want to go to edit and I'm going to come down to height and scale and just drag that guy all the way up and you can see our materials kind of slunk into our object here because we're using we take a look parallax occlusion mapping and so it's just going to give us a little bit of a fake looking a map or a little bit of a fake visualization of what we're doing for our height okay and so the reason that I started with a shape node is because I want to start by creating the blades of grass so I'm gonna drag this guy over so we have a lot of room to work with here and I want to start by coming down to our size and we're gonna get our size X&Y and this is going to allow us to kind of reshape or scale our paraboloid here and so gonna bring this guy down to about close to about 0.15 and that's going to give us just kind of that nice thin blade of grass look and over top of this I'm going to add a transformation to D because I only really want about the half and up of this shape here so I want to get rid of the bottom half so what I'm going to do is come into our transformation parameters over here and I'm going to move it down on the y-axis till it's about I'm gonna say about point five negative 0.25 there and so that looks pretty good except we run into the issue where now it's going to tile on our texture here and you can see that it starts to once the texture gets pushed down it's going to start tiling from the top and in order to fix that all we have to do is come into our again transformation 2d here and come up to tiling mode we want to make sure that we set this to absolute right now it's relative to input and then just come into our drop down here and hit no tiling and so now we're just gonna get our one blade of grass and it's not going to tile from the horizontal or vertical axis so with that now I want to come in and I want to start by creating a kind of a crease down the middle of our blade of grass here to kind of give it that folding effect that you see in a lot of little leaflets of grass so I'm going to add a gradient linear three here and the reason I'm doing this gradient linear three is because you can see it's got that nice sharp kind of point to it right down the center of the texture and so with that I'm going to come into its rotation and I want to rotate this 90 degrees and you can kind of start to see what I'm gonna do with this where I'm gonna basically over to overlap this over top of our grass texture here so I want to transform I'm gonna add a blend node because I want to blend these two together and so I'm going to take our gradient and pop it in over top and so now there's one final thing I want to do to our gradient linear before I finalize the blend and I want to add a gradient map onto the chain here and making sure that it's set to grayscale I want to come in [Music] and I want to get these two handles here just by clicking on our spectrum and I'm gonna bring this guy right up and you can see what that's doing is essentially it's mimicking that of a levels node where I've got all this black which is just going to be flat and then right down the center we're gonna have this little tiny incline here and you can see what I want to do with that is I want to switch the colors and you'll see in a second where I switch this guy to white and I bring the middle right down to black so instead of coming up in the center I want it to be down in between or I want it to be a bit of a recess right in the middle there and so when I come back to our blending mode here I want to go over to our blending mode option and I'm going to hit multiply and you can see what it's done is it's taken all of the white values from nests and overlaid it over top of this removing any of the lighter values and only keeping the darker value right down in the center there and you can see if I play around with our gradient here we can affect the intensity of our centerpiece and you can see we can make it very sharp but I want to dial that back just a little bit so it's nice and smooth I also want to come back into our blend here and I want to change the Apostoli down just so that it's not too sharp I'm gonna bring probably bring that down to about 0.6 so we're getting a nice little leaflet of grass there the next thing I'm going to do is just add a levels node on top of our blend and I'm gonna come into our value outputs here and I'm gonna just bring down the white I want to kind of flatten the an overall color value of our height for our leaf here or our grass blade here just so that we're not getting something too contrasted because for the most part blades of grass are pretty flat and that's looking pretty good so the next thing that I want to do with our grass is I want to add another gradient over top of our grass to make it look like the bottom is a little bit darker a little bit recessed in and the blade of grass at the top is a little bit brighter in value and this is going to make it look like the grass is going to be coming out of the ground or or another clump of grass so the way that we can do that is I'm going to add a gradient linear one and you can see that this is just a straight gradient overtop I'm gonna add a levels note and we'll see what the levels note is going to be for in just a second here so back on our grass here I'm going to add another blend and with this blend I'm going to plug in our gradient I'm going to come down to our blending mode in hit overlay and so now when I play around with the levels you can see as I'm increasing the white value it's increasing the value towards the top end because we've got our whiter value at the top here and if I increase our darker value it's going to eat away at the bottom of our texture and so what I want to do is our mid gray a little bit just to make everything a little bit whiter increase our white a little bit and maybe increase our black a little bit more to to make it look like it's getting kind of eaten away at the bottom of our grass here and that's looking pretty cool and now the last thing I want to do with our leaf here is I want to go in and I want to start warping it and I want to make two variations of our grass just so that we're not getting the same looking grass all over our material so with that I'm gonna hide a warp node and I'm going to add in noise and it's a pretty standard warp or I'm just going to strictly warp around our grass leaf here with some procedurally generated Gaussian noise and so it's a little bit too intense I'm going to come down and change the scale I also want to change the disorder a little bit if we take a look that looks pretty cool for a blade of grass what I'm gonna do is just highlight these two here it ctrl D duplicate these guys down here and doing the same thing I did up top I'm just going to play around with the intensity a little bit play around with the scale as well as the disorder that looks a little bit too intense Oh wrap that down and so we've got some cool looking grass Leafs that we're gonna be able to tile and create a nice looking grass pattern with and so a little bit of setup before we go ahead and create the tile of our grass here I'm going to come up just over top and I'm going to use this space to create a vector scale and mask for our leaves here so that we're going to be able to tile around them and also use them as a scale reference and mask and you'll see once we create it and then add it to our tile sampler what the effect is going to be so the first thing I want to do is I'm going to add a plasma node I'm just going to hit f2 zoom in there and so this is going to be the basis of what we're going to use to kind of tile the leaves around or the grass blades and so I'm going to come to our scale and the first thing I want to do is just decrease the scale to make it a little bit bigger and I'm going to come around and play with the disorder as well just to find some different looking assortments than just the standard plasma and so on that I'm gonna had a levels note here and with the levels note I'm gonna come in and take our high high value here our white value and I crank that right up so that we get a much brighter looking value and so this levels right here is going to be both our mask and our scale map for our tile sampler here and we're gonna see what that actually does in just a minute the last thing I want to do is take this levels and add a normal map to it because we're going to use this as a vector map to kind of randomly displace and rotate our grass here and again I want to come in to our intensity just bump it up to something like 5 to make it a little bit more intense so we get some actual color values for our position [Music] and now we're going to see how we can use these to shape and mold the position and rotation of her grass so now that I've got that set up I'm going to come in here and I'm going to add a tile sampler now the first thing I want to do is come into our pattern or a tile sampler here click on the pattern and I'm going to hit pattern input and so now it's going to allow us to plug in both of our grasses here and use these as inputs to tile around and provide new geometry for so I'm going to click on our warp plug that guy in and you can see that it's going to tile our grass sample very very finely very small and I can come down to our second warp here and drag this guy in but you can see that we don't have another spot to put our second pattern input here so if I release that and I come into our sampler you can see right under our pattern we have pattern input and number and if I just increase this up to two it's going to allow us to plug in a second texture and it's already gotten rid of some of our first texture and just a random assortment of areas if I just click this guy bring it into our wort now we're going to get both of our warps piling in our sampler here so I'm going to go ahead and I'm just going to take our sampler and plug them into both of our height and our normal here so that we're gonna see what's going on so right now the grass blades are a little bit too small for what I like so I'm actually gonna bump them up to about 10 they're gonna be very very large to our scale random do about point two so this is going to randomly scale our grass here so that they're all not the same uniform size I'm also going to come up to our size X and size Y and I'm just going to decrease the size X to about point nine five just to make it a little bit thinner and I'm going to increase the length of our blades to about 1.5 just to make them longer I also want to come into our size random and I want to randomize the X of our leaves to about point four so it's just going to randomly scale the leaves on the x value or the x-axis and I also want to do the same for the Y I'm gonna do about 0.25 just to add a little bit of variety to our leaves and a little bit more randomness in terms of their scale the next thing I want to look at is this value down here called scale mountain multiplier and if I increase it up you can see that it's going to just scale everything uniformly and the reason it does that is because if we come in to our inputs you can see we actually have a scale map input and we've got nothing plugged into it so it's just going to be black or in null value and that's why everything is going to be scaling at the same uniform value because we're just only scaling it at one entire black value so we need some variance in the color values in order to get the most effect of our scale map multiplier down here so if I come back up to our vector scale and mask nodes here I'm going to use the levels node as our scale map so if I take this output into our scale map input and then come back into our tile sampler I'm going to scale the scale map multiplier up and you can see not every leaf is going to be scaled the same way and if I take a look it's going to be based on our color values here so once we continue playing around more you're gonna see and start to notice just how we can use these different maps and nodes to scale and rotate our grass blades very differently and very randomly the next thing I want to do is start by playing around with our position here and so I'm going to just add a little bit of position random but I really want this to be directed or influenced by our vector map displacement and you can see in our tile sampler the vector map input is the only one that has a color value input and so that's why we've created our normal map here because it's going to give us a position value in a color output so if I click on this guy and drag him in to our input here and come back down to our position I'm going to click on our vector map displacement and bring that guy all the way up and so now it's going to use these values to reposition all of our samples here are examples of grass and it's going to fit it along the position normals of our map here as I come back into our tile sampler I'm going to scroll down and I'm going to find our vector map multiplier and so we can use the the vector map that we've created or the normal map to influence both our position and our rotation of our grass and so when I click and drag this multiplier all the way up it's going to use the normals again to drive the rotation of each blade of grass I'm going to come back up to our pattern amount here and I'm gonna do 200 by 200 and you can kind of see now what our maps are going to do is it's going to basically take on the form of the pattern that we've plugged in using both of our scale and our vector map here to really derive both the scale and the position and rotation of our tiles here I also want to come back down I'm going to decrease our scale map multiplier to about point six actually we'll do about point five because I don't want it to be too heavily influenced by the scale and now I'm finding our pattern to be a little bit too noisy and again with that what I'm going to do is take our levels here and I'm going to come to our tile sampler and I'm going to find where we have our mask map input and so I'm going to plug that guy in [Music] all the way down to the bottom we're going to have a value called masks Maps threshold you can see as I increase that we're really going to isolate those lighter values that we have on our mask or scale map here if we take a look and compare all of the darker values are going to be the areas that are going to get masked off first so I'm gonna do a value of about 0.3 for now it's gonna give us some nice patchy blocks of grass I'm gonna come back up to our rotation [Music] and as I play around with our rotation here we're going to be able to [Music] kind of give a direction towards the grass also playing around with the rotation random just a little bit and coming back down to our color here I'm gonna mask random again just to get a little bit more variety also color random just to make sure that we get some distinct blades of grass and I'm also going to come down to our color here click on scale and now when I drag this multiplier up it's going to color everything based on the scale so the smaller the tile is the darker the value will be on that particular tile or blade of grass here and it's a very subtle effect what can help you really differentiate and add some more variety to each blade of grass and so I'm going to come back up to our position tab here and down at our vector map displacement I want to bring that right down because I think it's a little bit too intense and I want to have the blades of grass a little bit closer together starting from a little bit more of a clumped area and you can see that the more we bring this down the more towards a certain area or cluster an origin of where these blades of grass are going to start from starts to resonate a little bit nicer so now that we've got our grass completed I'm going to go ahead and start working on kind of the ground that's going to be underneath all of this grass and so a quick little trick that I like to do is I take a clouds one node and I just add a directional war and all I do is just take the clouds and then I just plug it back in to the bottom area and so this is going to just give us a little bit of a ripple effect and it makes it a little bit more like it's kind of softer mud and we can play around with the intensity and that might be a little bit too rough maybe something like blue seventeen so change the direction and again I think that's it gonna be a little bit too noisy I'm gonna come down to try 15 and that's a little bit softer and we can try working with that so what I want to do with our ground here is I'm going to add a I blend node going to take this guy and plug our grass right into the top right there I want to come into the height offset in order to bring this up because I want to work towards our grass popping over top of our dirt there I also want to make sure that the contrast is at one I'm going to settle on something like 0.9 for now and I'm just going to shift left click and drag that into our height blend there and I just want to see what this is going to look like on our mesh and there's not as much grass as I was hoping so what I want to do with that as I want to just add a levels note on to our grass here and so instead of trying to manipulate it with our ID offset or high blend here I'm just going to increase the white value of our grass just to help it pop through our I blend here just a little bit nicer and so now we're getting some pretty nice grass so now that we've gone ahead and created the blend between our grass and our ground I want to go ahead and start creating new and different geometries that we can scatter across in between the grass and the ground there and so I'm going to start by creating some nice fine little pebbles or rocks I'm going to find some space up in here and I'm going to start with a polygon to and immediately with this what I'm going to do is ctrl D to duplicate and I'm going to blend between these two so if I take a look nothing's gonna happen because we've got to over top of each other and we're only using the copy blending mode so realistically we're only going to see the top node here so what I want to do is I want to use this top node to cut away from our polygon to down here and just randomly kind of move it around to create some interesting different cuts to make it look more rock like so the first thing I'm going to do is in our blending mode come down to subtract and so now we should get nothing because we're basically subtracting all the white values here from all the white values here and because it's a one-to-one pixel value it's going to give us completely nothing with that being said I'm going to bring this polygon to back use a transformation 2d here and now if I double-click on the blend and single click on our transform as I move this around you can see that it's going to cut away from our rock I also want to randomize our polygons here a little bit so that they're not quite the same so I'm going to decrease the size of this guy here maybe scale it down a little bit around a little bit and kind of round the curve so that we're getting something kind of like this and we'll do the same for the polygon to up top here so again double-clicking on blend let me increase the number of sides decrease the scale give them a different rotation [Music] and maybe decrease the curve as well to give it a little bit more rounded and so we'll get something like this and so now we can click and drag around just to give different random cuts we can also come back up to tiling mode it absolute and no tiling if we only want just the one and we don't want this to tile around and cut in different parts of our mesh so I'm going to cut something like that the next thing I'm going to do is bevel this so that we get a little bit more rounded and soft edges and so I'm going to decrease the distance on that bring up the smoothing just a little bit do about point three and I'm going to do the exact same thing as we just did with the cutting and subtracting I'm going to control D this guy here plug him in overtop come down to subtract if I move this guy around we've got a nice-looking little rounded and soft pebble the next thing I want to do is bring this guy through a slope blur grayscale and I'm going to use a till some base and I want to get some larger scale edge destruction in this rock and so I want to increase our samples really decrease the intensity here I'm gonna go to a min blending mode and I'm going to come into our fractal sum here I want to decrease the max level there's something about we'll do seven you can increase the mid level a little bit and I think I'm going to just decrease the opacity and increase the roughness and now what I'm going to do is I'm just going to again shift click on this and plug it into a rock so that we're able to see what we're actually doing to this pebble here I also want to come over to our Instagram range here and I just want to make sure that we bump this guy all the way up to so that we're getting the full breadth of our eight map and for all the color values that we have you I think I'm actually going to change the mode to blur just that we get a little bit of edge information on the in and outs you and I think I'm going to invert the roughness in the global opacity just to get some nice larger-scale detail and then I'm going to do slow blur once again I'm going to control the the fractal sum here making sure to come into our second slope increase the samples decrease the intensity amen to really increase these sample values or the the mint the min or max level here something like that actually just a level up with the roughness just to add some my new detail and that's looking like a pretty good Rock I want to come over to the bevel again because I feel like the fall-off is a little bit too long so I'm going to come to the distance and I'm just gonna drag that down to maybe 0.15 and that's looking pretty good so just like we did for the grass what I want to do is I want to control and select all of this and I'm going to hit ctrl D because I just want to get a little bit variety in the rocks that we have tiling and so the first thing I notice is that we've got these two nodes here that we don't actually need to duplicate because I don't really care about the edge damage being the same but more so just the overall shape of the rock so I'm going to take these two and delete them I'm just going to plug these nodes in and they're gonna share the same fractal some base nodes and so what I want to do is just come back to these transforms and I'm just going to move them and rotate them around so that they're cutting into the rock a little bit differently you it's now if we take a look we've got two nice-looking rock types now that we've got our rocks completed I want to go ahead and tile them and then add them along in our height blend here so I'm going to add a another tile sampler node and just like we did for the grass I want to come in [Music] coming to pattern make sure that we have pattern input selected and I also want to make sure that we're going to be able to input two different nodes here so now that we've got these rocks we can plug those guys in and I want to start by plugging in our scale and mask and vector maps here so I'm going to come back to where we've created them I'm going to take our vector map or our normal map here I don't plug that guy into our vector I'm going to come back to our scale and mask here I'm going to plug this in to scale and mask and now the only problem that I can see right now with using using the same mask is that when we mask off our rocks we're going to get them masking off in the same areas and so we're gonna have our rocks overlapping with a grass so what I want to do [Music] as I'm going to add an invert grayscale note I'm going to take our mask here and plug it in and then I'm going to use this to substitute both our mask and our scale map input and this is just going to allow us to essentially mask off all the rocks that are going to be within the grass and it's going to allow us to scale the rocks differently using the scale map multiplier because it's going to be inverted to what we did for the grass so now coming to take a look at the rocks here I immediately want to come in and just do 25 by 25 because I want to have a lot of rocks to tile over top of our material I'm also going to come down to our size and I'm just going to size it 1.5 on the X just to make it a little bit wider and I want to again just like the grass randomly size up the X to about 0.3 and I'm going to size up the Y randomly to about 0.1 to scale up to about 2.5 randomly scale-up our rocks again just to break up the uniformity but I'm also going to use our scale map multiplier to really scale these rocks up depending on their geography and you can see if I come in to our scale here the darker areas are going to hide the smaller rocks while the larger areas are going to have the brighter or bigger rocks I should say now I want to come down to position and I'm gonna again just randomly rotate these rocks just to give it a start so that we're breaking up the uniformity of all of our rocks here I'm also going to come down to our vector map displacement and just use our vector map to pretty much throw these rocks around I can also come down to the rotation play around with that play around with our vector map rotation again it's not going to do too much to our rocks but just kind of randomly rotate them and I'm also going to do rotation random just a little bit more just to get a little bit more of randomness to our rocks I'm also going to come down to our color now and start masking off some of these rocks and you can see that it's going to start to do that in the darker areas of our map here I also want to color random just a little bit to give it some random height maybe mask a few random off again coming back to scale just to make sure to color them according to their size and now I'm going to add a hype lend again so taking our hype Len down here making sure that I plug this guy into the bottom and input there and I'm going to shift click and drag it to this output now I want to take our rocks and just plug it into the high blend there you can see all of the rocks that we're gonna get from our tiles here they're a little bit too too pronounced as well I want to add increase the contrast because you can see that the rocks are not going to blend too nicely with what's below them so with the height offset I'm going to just decrease these rocks a little bit something like point two we're going to get these rocks popping through and I'm going to come back into our scale over here decrease the scale to maybe two [Music] I want to increase the scale random to maybe point five five and depending on how many rocks you want to have in your scene you can come back down to your map here and you can start adding some back so now that we've got our rocks added to our chain I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to come and delete our base material because I want to start plugging everything into our final outputs so I'm going to bring our normal map in plug in our immune occlusion and I'm going to take our height and plug that guy into also want to just plug in some placeholder so I'm gonna take our uniform color make sure that's set to grayscale and I'm going to set that up relatively halfway plug that into our color hit control D into our roughness and once again hit ctrl D and I'm going to plug it into our metallic and with the metallic what I'm going to do is bring this all the way down to black because we don't have any metallic properties on our material and so black is going to indicate that nothing is going to be metal so the first thing I'm going to be focusing on is our albedo map and so normally what I do is I come back to our eight map here and I use this guy to plug in to our albedo so I'm gonna take that just plug that guy in and you can see that nothing's going to show up and that's because we need to right-click on our graph and we need to go view outputs in 3d and so now all of our outputs are going to show up and you can see that our height map is a little bit too tall so I'm gonna come back down to our height here and I'm just going to decrease the range a little bit to about 0.85 and that's a little bit better now coming back up to our albedo here I'm just going to get rid of this uniform color and on top of our connection I'm gonna add a gradient map and so this is how I block in the first initial colors of our material and I want to start by creating our gradient map for our dirt in our mud background so I'm going to come in here I'm gonna hit gradient editor and we're gonna get this color spectrum and so if we just click on this here you can see that we're gonna get our two handles to pop up and this is going to allow us to play around with the color values and so I want to take our black here and I'm gonna go up to a little bit of a darker Brown [Music] I'm just gonna plot that point on our color graph here and the same thing for the white I'm gonna come up to a little bit of a an orange your Brown [Music] make it a little bit T saturated in a little bit brighter I'm gonna come back to the dark make that a little bit D saturated too so we've got an initial start to the color and you can see that we're getting a little bit of variation however it's also affecting our grass so what I want to do is I'm going to control D this gradient map and I'm now going to add a blend on to this then I'm going to plug these both in on our top gradian here a nicer greeny kind of color for our grass so I'm going to come back into her gradient editor just switching this up to green a little bit of a lighter D saturated green [Music] and again the darker values to be a little bit of a darker green want to crank this up a little bit so that we're getting some nice variation on our actual blades of grass here and so now what we need to do is blend between these two radium apps here so what we can do is come back to our initial height blend here where we blended together the ground and the grass and if we take a look you can see that we actually have an output called height mask and this is going to be the mask between both of our ground and our grass here so I'm going to use this and plug this guy into the opacity of our blend and now we're going to get the separation of color values and gradient maps between our two materials so now that I've got those separated I want to go ahead and hash out the dirt and the grass a little bit more so I'm going to move this back and I'm going to control D again on the dirt here and I'm going to swap the positions of these just that we have this guy underneath and we have this one over top and so now I want to add a little bit more annoys detail on to the dirt and so with that I'm gonna put in a white noise fast because I like the little random specks that it gives us so I'm going to plug that guy in there and take a look at this gradient map and you can see it's going to give us a lot of different color values and we can also come in here and play around with that and just add a little bit more riah t to our color map here and that looks pretty cool so now I'm going to blend these two together and so right now all it's going to do is give us the top gradient map here because we have the blending mode set to copy so we can also play around with different blending modes by just clicking and scrolling down and to see what different effects we get and I'm going to stick with screen but I'm going to decrease the opacity just so that we get a little bit of color information in our dirt here I'm gonna stick with a boat about 0.6 and now I'm going to come back up to our grass and I'm going to do the same thing where I'm going to control D I'm going to blend them together and reconnect this output so what I want to do with these guys is I want to just add a little bit more color variety and then I'm going to ream ask them so that we get a little bit of a different color balance on our leaves or our grass so at the top one here what I'm going to do [Music] is going to take our lighter value and I'm going to bring that closer to a yellow to make it look a little bit more dead and again same thing giving it just a little bit more of a worn collar value and you can see the difference between the two that we've got so now what I want to do is I want to make sure that the yellow color values and the more yellow color values are a little bit towards the end and the tops of our grass blades here and the nice you know fresh green are a little bit closer to the stems of it so what I'm going to do is I'm going to find where we have our grass I'm gonna add a histogram select and so when I plug this in what its going to allow us to do is essentially shift through the color values of our grass and this is going to allow us to make a mask that's very position based on our grass here so if I bring this back over and I plug that into the opacity now we're going to be able to see as we play around with our position what it's going to allow us to do you can also change the range and even bump up the contrast a little bit too and you can see with the contrast what it's going to do is just make a very sharp contrast between the two values which is pretty much just a binary mask so we want to leave this relatively low so something like that looks good it just adds a little bit more color variety to our grass blades here and if we take a look at the blend you can see that we're getting a little bit more of a Warren affect so it's not super fresh grass so now I want to go ahead and start adding in some color to our rocks here so I'm going to do the same exact thing where I just add another blend going to control D on the gradient map over here and instead of plugging in our height map what I want to do is instead plug in the actual tile sampler itself here this way we get a little bit of a nicer and clean selection for our rocks and so I'm going to plug that into the gradient map plug this guy into our blend and then I'm going to come back to where we blended the rocks with the rest of our height and again use the height mask that we have so I'm going to quickly drag this over and plug this into our opacity and now we're gonna get our nice green rocks so yeah I'm not gonna leave them on green I'm gonna come back to our gradient editor switch this to a little bit more of a bluish color making sure to really desaturate that and darken it a little bit and we're just going to use this as the the the foundation or base color of our rocks now actually I'm going to come back and really bring down the color values they're a little bit darker so now what I'm gonna do is I'm going to add a flood fill node because what I want to do is randomly select each one of these rocks and just add a different kind of color overlay over top to give it a little bit of variety in its color so what I'm gonna do is draw again from our mask and use this as a flood fill I'm then going to take our flood fill and add a flood fill to random color and just plug our flood-fill into that guy and you can see that we're going to get a bunch of different random colors rocks here and the last thing I'm going to do is add an RGBA split and this is going to allow us to separate all of the color channels into a different grayscale mask and you'll see why we're going to use this in one minute so I want to set up a few different colors that we're going to be able to use to colorize our rocks here so I'm going to draw or drag in our uniform color here and I'm just going to control D and duplicate it to get about three different colors and so the premise of this is I just want to add some again variety to these colors so I'm going to pick a little bit of a bit of an off orange going to take more of a blue when I'm going to take mmm we can go with a bit more of a greeny yellow and so I'm going to add a blend to control D and plug this into our start here and actually I'm going to switch this guy to a different color as well mmm go to a little bit more of a and off purple and so I'm gonna plug these two in and try and blend them together and you can see right now it's only going to show us the top uniform color until I take the red Channel split from our RGB a split here and you can see it's going to affect our Rock's all differently with white having more of an influence of the top and the darker black or one's having more influence from the bottom texture here so when I plug that guy in all of a sudden we're going to get different color values showing up and this is going to be the same for when we plug in our blue and I'm going to use a green so now we've got the brown to a certain extent from our first the purple and the blue and the same thing again when we do our uniform color green and I'm going to plug in our blue here now we're going to get a bunch of different colors for our rocks so I'm going to drag that back add another blend and plug this in overtop again making sure to just control click and we're going to steal the mask from that previous blend and add it on to that one so now we've got a little bit of a confetti or sprinkle looking rocks and so I'm going to come back down and change the blending mode of this to be overlay I'm also going to really decrease the opacity then we're gonna go about to 0.25 and it's a very very subtle effect but you can see that it's added a little bit more variety to the colors of our rocks here and so the next thing I want to do is I want to add some chipping damage to these rocks so that they're not just nice and smooth and so where we can get this edge information from is right down here with our normal map and so I'm going to add a curvature map and we're going to be able to plug in our normal and get a lot of edge information and a lot of edge detail and you can see right in here with the rock we're getting a lot of that chipping edge where so I'm going to bring this up and I'm going to add a levels note on to this guy and so once I increase the white values and increase the black values you can see they were really only going to be left with the edge highlights where all of the edge where is going to take place and then we're going to be able to use this as a mask but in order to do so I'm gonna have to get rid of all the excess edge information because I only want to use it on our rocks so I'm going to add a blend note here plug this guy into the top ctrl-click to add this guy to the bottom and so now what I'm going to do with that is come down to our blending mode and just hit multiply and that's going to allow us to keep all of the edge information from the rocks here and not keep any of the excess information that we don't need so I'm going to add another blend going to drop in a uniform color and bring this down into the blend I'm gonna do a little bit brighter of a white more of a mid gray and I'm gonna take our mask and plug that into the opacity and you can see now what its gonna do it's just mask off all of the edge wear and we can come back in and play with our levels to maybe decrease that amount that is not too pronounced and now coming back into our blend I'm going to change the way that this blends over top of our albedo then I'm going to come down to overlay and it's going to be a very very subtle Edgware effect where it's just going to kind of lighten the edges of our rocks now that we've done that I want to go ahead and add a little bit of our shadow information to darken some areas it just kind of push the effect of our albedo had a blend note again I'm going to come down and add an ambient occlusion node and so I'm gonna take this guy here because we already have all of this information and I'm gonna plug that into the blend and you can see right now we're having the issue of plugging in a grayscale node into a color node and so with that all we need to do is add another gradient map and I'm going to bring this guy up over top here and so the issue with this now is that we're only seeing our albedo or our ambient occlusion map so I have to come back into the blend come down to multiply to get rid of all the white values and now we're going to just get the darker values from our ambient occlusion now the problem with this is that a little bit too much shadow information and it really is working inversely of the effect that I like so it's very important at this step that we remember to really decrease the amount of ambient occlusion and it's only going to be a subtle difference between our maps here because we don't really want to simulate any shadow information in our albedo we just want to darken some of our lower colors to really highlight and push the effect and normally I keep it at around point one and that's looking pretty good and so before I go ahead I just want to come back to our tile sampler because I realized that our grounds looking kind of sparse so I'm gonna go down to where we have our mask map threshold here I'm gonna bring that down to about point to just add a little bit more grass back to our material so now that we've got our albedo out of the way I want to go ahead and work on our roughness map and so just like we did for the edge where of the rocks I want to draw some more edge information to just start us off so again I'm going to use our normal map here and I'm going to use a curvature smooth making sure not to click on that and add a curvature smooth there so I'll plug that guy in and I'm going to take this and plug this into our roughness and just get rid of that and so that's already looking kind of neat but the problem with our curvature is that the darker values are going to be glossy ER and the lighter values are going to be rougher and in certain areas of our material that's not going to work so I'm going to take this guy and I'm going to add a levels note on to it and I'm just going to simply invert our inputs and so right now I really want to be looking at our grass here because this is where we're going to be working on primarily for the time being you can see that we've got a little bit more darker values so it's gonna be a little bit Gloucester and you can see when I crank up the dark values we're gonna get very very shiny grass so I'm gonna decrease the black output just a little bit but the white value a little bit more and maybe even the mid and I might decrease the weight because we still want to get some nice specular grass that looks pretty cool so now I'm going to add a blend and I'm going to take our initial curvature smooth and plug that in to the background here I'm going to take our levels here and plug that into the foreground because I like the color values for our mud here of our initial curvature smooth but then I wanted to invert those with our leaves here are our grass so again we have a mask that I'm going to be able to blend between the two and that is our initial a mask here for our grass so I'm going to take that plug that right into the opacity [Music] and so now we're going to get kind of D I guess mix or the blend between those two so now I'm going to take this and plug that in [Music] so we get the nice kind of glossy mud but also the nice more kind of matte but still relatively glossy grass I also want to add some variety to our dirt here because of all those miniature different specs that we added in the albedo I'm going to just click and drag these and move them down I'm going to add another blend and I'm going to come back up to where we had our white noise here and I'm just gonna take this and plug this into our blend I'm gonna play around with some different blending modes and I'm gonna gonna go with soft light I'm just going to again decrease the opacity down it's gonna be a very subtle effect and not too subtle though so I might increase it we'll go with maybe settle on point seven there and that's looking pretty cool so now what I want to do is again take our mask here plug that in but I want to invert it so I'm going to add an invert grayscales for that it's only going to land on our dirt so I'm going to bring this guy over just so that we keep it relatively the same area and the last thing I want to do is I want to add some variety to our rocks here so I'm going to add another blend come over to where we have our rocks masked off and plug this guy into our blend there and I'm going to add a directional war and so what I'm going to warp is if I come into our noises here I'm going to take our BMW spots one and take this in and plug that guy in there and I'm also going to add a Gaussian noise and plug that in and I'm gonna really ramp up the number of intensity here so I'm gonna try 200 and that's a little bit too much it can also decrease the scale on that and I can plug that guy into our blend I can also decrease the opacity there again having a rocks a little bit darker because we want them to have a little bit of gloss and that's looking pretty cool [Music] [Music]

Channel: Get Learnt w/ Chunck

Views: 56,563

Keywords: 3D, tutorial, get learnt, substance designer, material, pbr, game, asset, texture, grass, forest, ground, rock, render, #Get Learnt

Id: VZwji9UIfXA

Length: 66min 44sec (4004 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 21 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Kashmeer]

Hiya Chunck, I took some inspiration from your work here when making a stylised material (predominantly your grass, which I used as over sized foliage).

It's not the best, but it's a start, and I thought you might be interested in seeing what your followers do with your teachings.

Keep going with the videos, it's a great teaching style!