[Freebie] Plain Weave Height Map | Rattan Rocker

we're going to deviate a little bit from our previously scheduled programming and we're going to take a look at setting up and developing materials that we're going to be able to use in substance painter to really truly create a unique asset and so the first material we'll take a look at is going to be this rattan weave or plain weave material which is going to be used for the seat primarily but we're also going to build off of this material later on to make it a little bit easier to use on a lot of those bracer pieces that we've been making so to start this off let's go up here to this little icon to create a new substance and let's go ahead and let's use the pbr metallic roughness that's a good place to start and i'm going to call this plane weave and we can hit ok and so we're going to be using this plane weave graph but the actual package is going to house all three of the materials we're going to make so i want to go ahead and just quickly save this package and i'm going to save it under the substance designer folder under the resources panel and instead of plain weave now we're saving the actual package not just the individual graph i'm going to call this rocker materials and when i go ahead and save this now you can see that our actual package is going to have that name but we're still going to have this plain weave name for our graph now before we really get deep diving into making the material there's one more thing i want to go ahead and change because it's just kind of a technical parameter that's going to kind of screw us over a little bit in the long run and that's going to be changing the normal format if i click on this node down here where it's our normal map you can see that we're using the directx format and depending on kind of the final destination that you're going to want to have your rat rocker asset in you might want to choose the directx but for this particular tutorial series we're only going to really be rendering this in blender and marmoset which are both opengl normal formats so i'm just going to select opengl and i'm going to make sure that my project is also viewing in opengl format so i can come up to materials and default and edit and right now you can see right it's directx normal set to true let's just set that to false so now it's going to be opengl alright so let's get into this now you probably have already kind of seen this video because i've actually done this on my youtube for my substance designer pattern fundamentals series and this is actually where the idea came from so there's not going to be much that's different in this particular video but in the next video we'll actually look at completing all the outputs like our albedo and our normal and roughness and all that so if you've already got this height map kind of lying around on your machine somewhere you are more than welcome to just kind of skip this video and go to the next one so how are we going to start this material right well most materials start with just a shape and a very simplistic shape at that and this material is no different so let's go in and add a shape node and i'm going to use this as the basis for just kind of the strips that we're going to be making for this material so i want to plug this into my normal i'll go and plug this into my height and my amine occlusion and i'm just going to get rid of these two nodes and actually real quick i'm just going to hit alt and click down here on this connection so that we can kind of clean this up a little bit more and for my ambient occlusion i'm going to type in ao so that we have an ao node going in so it's actually getting proper ambient occlusion and before our ambient occlusion and our height outputs there i'm going to also add a histogram range node and it's accidentally added it after which is not what i want plug that in here and there we go so we've got this feeding directly into our height and we've also got it feeding directly into our ambient occlusion now we're not going to get much showing up because we just have one big shape which is going to be a square covering the entire texture set so let's actually start to define something we can see so i'm going to bring the x down to something like 0.2 so we're going to get this vertical strip going from top to bottom and this is going to be the basis shape for our material but it's looking pretty flat right now it's not going to give us the most ideal normal map and actually i'll bring the intensity up to 10 but it's not going to really change anything because we have a black and white image here so there's no gradient there's no kind of soft blending and that's going to be really tough to make a convincing height map from so there's a couple things we need to do with this the first thing we're probably going to need to do is just add a little bit of curvature to this because i don't want something that's just going to be like flat like this right for ratten straps and rat and wicker it's actually got a little bit of a bend so there's a couple notes we could use for this but the note i want to use and i really like to use is going to be the bevel node so i'll select bevel there and just shift click to steal that connection and now you can see if we come back to our actually i can take a look here right we're actually going to get some information with a normal map and i'll bring this intensity up just to see it better but now we can see that there actually is going to be something showing up on a normal map and if we take a look this is the result that we're gonna get now we're casting outwards actually from the uh initial shape here whereas i want to cast inwards a little bit because i want to be able to define the overall shape from this node and then just have this kind of give us that gradient and kind of bevel those edges because right now this is a little unpredictable as we see if i go ahead and scale this up right not really predictable as to where the actual limits are going to be for this so back in our bevel instead of a positive distance let's go ahead and make this negative 0.01 so something really small something that really doesn't even look too different than the initial piece we had but if i zoom in here we can see we're getting just a slight bevel whereas before we didn't have that that's looking really good but we're only getting the bevel on the side and we're not really getting anything down the middle here so another reason i like to use the bevel node is that it's got this smoothing option so it basically has a blur node built in to the functionality so for the smoothing let's set that up to something like 15 and you can see now it's actually going to round that out a little bit with that bevel so now we've got this a much smoother and much more rounded height information so so far so good but we have this pretty straight strap and if i take a look at our height map here and just hit spacebar to tile it right it's just going to tile forever we're going to have to figure out a way that we can add some kind of depressed areas that are going to go underneath our strap so that we can have this kind of interlocking weaving pattern right that's what we're making we're trying to make a weave so this isn't going to fly just on its own we're going to need to figure out how we can actually add some of those depressed areas so what we'll have to do is we're going to have to define what those areas are first and then we're going to add it on to what we have down here so i'll add another shape node if i can spell it and instead of having a vertical strip like this we're actually going to have a horizontal strip like this so i'm going to bring the y down to something like 0.25 which is going to be very close to what we had before but we're going to be using this for something a little bit different so i'm just going to bring this back and bring this one back too let's blend these together and just kind of set up what we're trying to do first and then iterate on it as we go so i'm going to be using this part up here to basically kind of mask off this bottom part here as to give an indication as to what areas are going to be going over other straps and which areas are going to be going under straps so it might be a little bit hard to kind of visualize right now but let's go ahead and just switch the blending mode to multiply and we can see that now we're just getting this kind of little rectangle here the idea is that i want to use all of the white values on this image here to denote which areas are going to basically show through 100 on this bottom image and anything that's going to be black or darker in this top image is going to cut off or kind of obfuscate a little bit some of the values for down here now because we're using two very binary images it's just gonna cut it off one to one but obviously that's not going to look good right because now we just have this little kind of tiny square there so we're going to have to iterate on this shape just a little bit to add some gradients and some blurs so that it's not going to completely remove it 100 so i'm going to add another bevel note onto this chain right here and let's plug that in and now we can kind of see a little bit hopefully where i'm going with this is that we're going to kind of have a little bit of a blend or a bleed off where it gets to some darker areas on both sides so that we're going to have kind of this pattern where it's brighter and then it goes down and darker and then brighter and darker so that this is going to be the basis of our weave so i'm going to bring the smoothness up to something like 50 which is pretty drastic but we can see that it's giving us you know a much nicer kind of continuous smoothing rather than you know being dark and then bright and then dark again and i'm also going to add a blur high quality grayscale just to really complement the smooth transition here so i'm going to bring our quality up bring the intensity up to 50 as well so that you can see it's actually now blurring out to both of the ends here so now if we take a look i zoom out here right you can see that it's going to be one continuous chain with brighter and darker areas so it's looking okay with this blend here and actually i'm going to bring the opacity down to 0.9 just so that it's not completely black there and we've got some more gray tones instead but it's not really looking too hot in our 3d view here right and that's going to be because of our bevel so why did i have us add this bevel if we can't even really use it right like let's go ahead and just steal this connection and let's use it for this blend here and so that's going to look a lot better we can kind of see that it's going down maybe a little bit might be a little tough to see but we're going to lose all of that roundedness that we developed we're going to have to kind of do this in two different steps because if we take a look too and say i plug in the bevel into here you'll notice that as it gets darker we're actually going to kind of lose some of that roundedness so it's going to look rounded up here but then as it gets to the darker areas it's not going to be as rounded and i mean that might be okay depending on what you want to use it for and again we're going to be seeing this material really really small you know kind of like that on our screen but i do have a way that we can actually avoid it so i might as well just show you so let's plug in our shape node there so that we've got our shape being depressed before we go ahead and include our bevel so now what i can do is add another blend node onto our already blended chain and i'm going to plug in our bevel into the top and the blend mode that i want to go ahead and actually blend these two models together using is going to be soft light and it's going to be all the way down at the bottom so now you can see that we're still getting some of that roundedness in the center there but we're also going to continue to get these depressions as well so it's kind of the difference between a very flat model here and a little bit uh still more rounded because the soft light blending mode is just going to allow us to kind of brighten up uh some of these darker areas so that we're going to get something a little bit more agreeable still soft but still going to have that depressed areas so that's really all it's going to take to make this strap and i can still go ahead and maybe change the shape if i wanted to to make them thinner or thicker and it's going to update using all of those nodes so that's really handy now let's go ahead and start to develop a little bit of surface information for these straps and i'm going to want to develop it before i go ahead and start to tile this because it's going to be easier just on one asset then trying to figure out how to change directions for a tiled asset that's going in you know top to bottom left to right we can go and add some wood grain if we follow off of our last blend here i'm going to use another blend node and we're going to do a bit of a sub chain in here to develop the scratches or the the wood grain and then we're just going to plug it back in so i know that i'm going to want to end here and we can kind of develop something off onto the side so i'm going to add directional scratches and let's just go and plug this in and now i know that there's a couple of things we're going to want to do the first one being the blend mode i'm going to want to use the white values from the scratches to kind of cut in and be the wood grain themselves so the blending mode i'll use for that is going to be subtract so that we subtract white values from white values meaning we're going to be left with darker values and we'll also notice that we're not getting the correct direction that the grain is going to be running so we can go ahead and change that in the directional scratches just by switching this to be 90 degrees and that's looking a lot better now it's still a little noisy so i'm going to bring the scale down to 2. i'm also going to bring the pattern amount down to 0.2 so that we're not getting as many or as noisy scratches i'm also going to bring our pattern size so the actual size of each one of these scratches down to 0.1 so they're much thinner and then i'll bring the opacity back down on our blend here to something really small like 0.01 so that they're really kind of imperceptible to our view here but if we take a look we're going to be able to pick them up relatively easily and actually maybe we can even do something like 0.02 just so that we're getting you know more visible information there it's really up to you how deep you want these to cut and once i've got these to a point where i'm satisfied with them let's go ahead and add some organicness to it because you know they're pretty straight and i want to just add a little bit of waviness to this wood groove so with our directional scratches i'm going to add a warp node and off of our warp node let's go and use a gaussian noise as the intensity and so it's going to give us these kind of really abstract and funky looking patterns here but obviously that doesn't look like wood grain in the slightest so with our gaussian noise let's bring the scale way down because that's going to be a big contributor to kind of the weirdness that we're getting there and i'm probably going to do around 16. you can play around with the disorder to get some kind of cool different patterns if you want and i'm also going to bring our intensity way down for our warp is something like 0.05 so you can see it's very just slight bends and again we don't want it to be way too harsh it's going to be more of a subtle effect so now that we've got this pretty awesome looking strap how are we actually going to make it tiled right and make it look like a plain weave pattern well the next process that i've got to show you is at least what i think one of the cooler parts of this material and is really going to highlight a lot of the flexibility and the power that substance designer just in procedural textures and materials really has and offers so the first thing we'll need to do is i'm going to add a transformation 2d node onto our blend so far so this is going to allow me to move our asset around and just kind of position it so if we take a look at our rat and material we're going to notice that they're going to be in this kind of cube pattern or quadrant pattern where they're just going to tile around in a square so to start that off let's go ahead and move our first pattern here on the x 0.25 so that it's going to be in the left hand quadrant of our texture sheet and i'm also going to move it on the y 0.25 so that we've also brought in an area for our material or our strap to actually tile over so let's go ahead and just add a blend quickly and i'm going to take this guy and add another transformation 2d and just hit 90 degrees clockwise so that we're going to take this information here that we've moved rotate it and we're going to blend this in over top and so the blending mode i'm going to want to use is going to be max lighten because what that's going to do and we can see that it's actually already done in our 3d view is it's going to take the lighter pixels the brighter pixels between these two images and it's going to place the brighter ones over top so because this bottom one here has brighter pixels in this area than this one does we can see it looks like it's placed it basically over top even though it's actually on the background or the bottom layer of this blend so this is a really powerful blending mode if you want to have things look like they're intersecting or going over top of other things just base purely on their brightness value that's going to be really really cool and as we can see it looks like it's placed over top of this area that's been depressed so very easily now what i can do is add another blend node again using the max lighten blending mode i'm going to bring this out into another transformation 2d as we can see we've got all of this information and because all i need to do is just rotate this 180 degrees i guess i could have just hit that 180 but whatever i can go ahead and plug this in and it's going to pick the brightest values between our bottom and top layer here which makes everything look as if it's actually tiled over top so very easily and very flexibly with only five nodes and realistically only two different kinds of nodes i've created a pretty versatile material that now all i have to do is come to this first note here go ahead and move it on its x and it's going to give us a very easy and flexible material that we can play around with and kind of alter the pattern and design of so we've got our material pretty much set up for our pattern but we don't have a tiling quite yet so let's go ahead and set that up now i'm going to add a blur high quality grayscale just to try and blend things in a little bit nicer i'll bring the intensity up sorry the quality up will bring the intensity down to maybe 0.15 just to kind of make things pop a little bit more that's looking pretty good now let's go ahead and add a tile generator and i'm going to use a tile generator instead of a tile sampler only because i'm just using this tile generator node to tile the actual asset and nothing really more than that so i think the tile sampler is going to be a bit of overkill but to each of their own you can go ahead and use the other one too if you're more comfortable with that so let's go and change this to image input and you can see very easily now we've got our material tiling but that's kind of you know noisy it's very very small so let's go ahead and change the default to something like four by four so that we're getting some of those uh edge details in there too right or that uh wood grain so we can see and this is why i went ahead and actually added the wood grain before we tiled it because now we'd have to try and mask off individual directions to make sure the the wood grain goes with those particular directions and that's and that's going to be a bit of a pain in the butt and frankly nobody has time to deal with that so best to do it before and now that we've got it tiled let's go ahead and bring everything back just a touch because it's looking pretty straight and i want to kind of add again a little bit more organicness to this overall which we're only going to really be able to do once we've gone ahead and tiled it so on this tile generator i'm going to add a warp node and again we're going to be using a gaussian noise to kind of warp it around and again that's looking like hot trash so let's bring our noise down to something like nine round eight or nine and let's go ahead and bring the intensity down as well actually let's view that in our viewport i'm going to do 0.2 as we can see it's very very subtle and i don't want it to be very noticeable either now a way that we could go ahead and maybe change some of this is if we played around with the disorder you can see it's going to kind of just bend and warp some of these straps just a touch and it's going to really help contribute to just the natural feeling like these straps have been kind of disheveled a little bit so that's pretty much going to conclude it for this video where we've taken a look at the height the last thing i do want to show you though is let's try and figure out a way that we can actually create an opacity mask so that we're going to be able to actually you know have some transparency between these areas that aren't technically the rotten or plain weave so to do that we'll have to create another output node and we're going to use this to recognize a oh an opacity or transparency channel so i'm going to call this opacity under label we'll call it opacity with a capital o and i want to make sure that it's going to be in the material group just in case we wanted to add this to another sub graph later so we've got that done under usage let's go ahead and add item and we're going to want to make sure that it's going to be opacity so that this is going to obviously show up using our mask so that this is going to plug into our transparency for this particular shader so now that i've got that i'm going to take this little connection here we can see is actually going to be right after our warp and let's go ahead and just plug this in and i'll bring another connection down to clean that up and now while that's going to be okay let's just right click in our view of our graph here and view outputs in 3d it's not going to be the best mask because we're going to need something a little bit more binary right areas in here that are going to be a little bit darker are actually kind of transparent or translucent it's maybe a little tough to see in the video because we just have a gray background but if there was something underneath this strap we'd actually be able to see it through these areas so we just need to go and tighten this up a little bit so i can use a histogram scan node and let's just bring the position up and i'm also going to bring our contrast up as well maybe around 0.95 and as i bring this up we can see what the difference is going to be right a little bit transparent there and completely opaque but transparent in the areas that is not going to be this rotten weave

Channel: Get Learnt w/ Chunck

Views: 696

Keywords: 3D, tutorial, rattan, rocker, rocking horse, get learnt, pbr, game asset, materials, blender, substance designer, substance painter, marmoset toolbag

Id: 3Vu2OBZ-P1o

Length: 25min 44sec (1544 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 12 2021