High Quality Wool Fabric Textures in Substance Designer

[Music] today's a big day for many reasons and one of those reasons is that we're going to be creating this [Music] a high quality wool fabric texture from scratch in substance designer with all of the built-in nodes that come with the program hi i'm jeremy signer and i've got something big for you like really big huge even a little while ago i created a tutorial where we built a wall knit fabric texture from scratch and due to the overwhelmingly positive response i decided to create this fabric essentials wool is a new premium training series where we go in depth to create high quality wool fabric textures and to give you a taste on what to expect i decided to create this free lesson here on youtube to get you started so let's strap in and get texture making now if you've seen my previous tutorial where i'll put a link down below we rely heavily on the tile generator node and we used it to create the basic shape of our wool strands today i want to show you a more intuitive way of going about it so that we have more artistic control as a material artist i'm always looking for ways to improve my process so that i get exactly the kind of shape that either myself or my client is looking for this way you'll easily be able to tweak your wool strand shapes with a couple clicks and drags instead of fiddling with the tile generator sliders let's take a look at what a regular wool knit pattern looks like what makes these patterns unique are the strands that form a v each strand has a thin top that leads to a wider body and then thins out at the bottom now there's an optical illusion here because this is actually a single column and it's reversing on the other side but they connect together and they sort of look like a v shape to make it easy to build these patterns we're going to focus on creating a single v shape and then repeating that over and over again so let's create that v shape in substance designer okay we're in substance designer and we're creating a fresh new graph so i'm going to start off by using the pbr metallic roughness template and let's give this graph a name i'm going to call this simple wool pattern the size mode is set to absolute and i'm going to be dealing in 4k today so 4096 by 4096 and we'll do 16 bits per channel and hit ok so i want to do a little bit of graph setup first before we start creating with some nodes so if you're just starting in substance designer you might notice that my layout is looking a little bit different that's because i've taken my 2d view in my 3d view and i've just moved it to the side here so i get all this room for our graph and i've also taken our explorer and i put it in the corner and what you can do is you can grab these and then you can move them anywhere you want and you can also put them on top of other panels to create these tabs so i've just moved my 2d 3d view over here and so let's focus on setting up this 3d view normally when i work on a fabric i like to work on something that has a rounded shape on it so you can go into scene and i normally choose this rounded cylinder but i decided to do something special for you guys and create some cloth geo that you can drag into your 3d view and we can work on that so you can really see what your cloth is starting to look like as you work on it on the 3d view so i'm just going to drag that in now so you just drag it in and drop it on your 3d view here and we've got some simple cloth geometry to work on so to set this up let's go to materials default i'm going to make sure we go to physically metallic roughness and choose tessellation i'm going to scroll down here i'm going to set the scale up to 10 and the tessellation factor up to 16 and then take this scalar zero value and bring it all the way down to zero and then we're going to scroll all the way down to the bottom and we're going to adjust this tiling parameter and i'm just going to set it to three and these are just specific things for this cloth geo that i've supplied if you're using the rounded cylinder you don't really need to adjust the tiling or the scalar zero value but you can increase the tessellation factor to 16 and bring up the scale just a little bit and you'll be able to play with this once you have some information going into your 3d view so with every graph i create i like to start off by creating this final blend that pumps into our outputs here so i'm going to hit spacebar bring in a blend and i'm going to hook it up to a couple nodes here so i'm going to take this output hook it up into the normal conversion node here and then i'm going to delete these two nodes these are two uniform colors connected to my amine occlusion output and my height output so i'm just going to delete those and then i'm going to connect my final blend into the height output and then i just need to click on my graph and bring in an ambient occlusion conversion node this takes height information and converts it into ambient occlusion information so i'm just going to connect this new node to our ambient occlusion and then also connect our final blend to this height and so i'm going to create a comment here by clicking on this blend right clicking and choosing add comment and i'm just going to call it final blend and so we should be ready to go i want to start by breaking down those shapes into really simple forms and so the quickest way i found to do this for our wool strand shape is with a waveform node so i'm going to hit spacebar type in wave for waveform bring in the waveform one node here you see we get this really cool almost sound wave oscilloscopy really awesome pattern here and so let's adjust some of these properties i'm going to go over to my parameters over here so the first thing i want to do is change the pattern so we've got these really cool patterns and i'm gonna bring it down to two and i'm not really sure why there's not a pattern one we're gonna stick with two and let's increase the samples and we're gonna bring down the noise so it's much smoother and we only need one wave so the wave number down to one and so now let's adjust these seismic and max properties you can see if we bring this up we're widening the end here and if we bring this down we're sort of rounding it out so for the size max i'm thinking 0.58 looks great and then for the size min let's bring that up a bit so it's a bit more of a cohesive shape 0.54 it's looking good so this is the base shape of our strand and now notice how we have what i mentioned before you've got this small beginning and a larger middle and then a small end and now the shape is very flat and uniform we want to add some rounded height information to it so i'm going to blend in a sphere with a smooth gradient to round out the height of this strand so i'll show you what i mean now so i'm going to go to my graph click into it and spacebar and i'm going to bring in a shape node and so in this pattern drop down we can choose the kind of shapes we want i'm just going to scroll down to paraboloid and so this is this rounded height information that i'm talking about it's got these nice smooth gradients going into the end we can blend these two shapes together to give this waveform some smooth blended height so i'm going to add a blend and let's hook these two up let's put the waveform in the foreground the shape in the background and i'm going to change the blending mode to multiply now because this blend mode is set to multiply it actually doesn't matter what's in the foreground or the background because we're multiplying these pixel values on top of each other but if you ever did need to quickly adjust these two connections if you select them and hit the x key you can flip flop them be prepared to have hours of your life back so we do have some depth but we still have this sharp aliased set of pixels here on the top and bottom so let's blur it a little bit i'm going to select this blend we just made and i'm going to bring in a blur high quality grayscale and so we can adjust this blur's intensity but if i bring it all the way to the top i'm still not quite getting what i'm looking for so we can increase these values here we don't have to go all the way to 16 and stop there substance designer in a majority of its parameters lets us increase this value even further so i'm going to type in something like 40 and now you see it resets our slider by putting it in the middle and so now we have double what we put in which is 80 and we can go all the way back down to zero so let's adjust this here i want it to be a little round but not too round 33.5 and let's bring up the quality to one we only accept the best quality here and so now i want to control this height information with a couple more sliders and we can do that with a levels node so i'm going to bring in levels and now take a look at what i can do here if i take this middle triangle on the top and i slide it to the right and left you can see we are focusing in this shape and so what i want to do is focus this shape into more of an ellipse but not too much because we still need some of that extra height information in our waveform where we're connecting here near the end so i'm just going to dial this in and move it a little bit to the right so that's looking good now if you want to copy my values exactly you can go to this little slider button here click that and these are all of the parameters that you're adjusting with those triangles so you can copy in this level and mid parameter or you could dial it into something if you'd like to use numbers or sliders now to give our strands some texture i'm going to blend in a couple of noises one of those noises is going to be for the larger thread detail and the other one is for the micro small threaded detail so let's make some room here i'm going to select these nodes we just created and move them over to the left and then off in my graph somewhere i'm going to click and hit the space bar and i'm going to bring in a crystal two noise so check out what this crystal two noise is giving us we've got these long swooping shapes and this gives us this nice sort of larger detail threaded texture that i'm looking for unfortunately it's going in the wrong direction it's vertical right now so we need to rotate it so i'm going to click on my crystal 2 noise hit space bar and bring in a safe transform grayscale and so safe transforms allow us to rotate and it'll snap to only these specific degrees and this is because it's really good to make things tile it only tiles on these specific degree increments so for us though i'm just going to hold shift while i click on this rotation and it'll snap to 90 degrees here so up next i'm going to add a transformation 2d node and so this node is going to be used in the future i just have it here as a placeholder but it allows us to adjust this noise and later on when we look at our wool strands we can move it around to change the threaded look of our strands and you'll see what i mean near the end of this tutorial so now i'm going to click off my graph and i just want to blend on this texture onto our strand that we're creating so i'll bring in a new blend i'm going to set this blend to multiply and let's connect the transformation 2d with our new texture here to the foreground and the levels to the background and so i can adjust this opacity i'm going to set it to 0.45 because i still want a majority of our shape to shine through this texture just a little bit of height information that we're blending in here and so we have the macro detail the larger threads now let's do the micro detail so for that i'm going to use a fur one and i need to transform it just like i did this last one so let's get a safe transform grayscale shift click on rotation and snap it to 90 degrees so it's moving left and right and let's blend this on so click out blend and let's move this blend into the background and let's take our safe transform into the foreground and let's change our blending mode to multiply and so just like before let's dial this down so it might look like this macro fur detail is overpowering the rest of it but when we bring it into the 3d view we're going to see that there's a lot more information there so now comes the part where we really get to make this look like one of those wool strands i'm going to click on our blend here hit space bar and bring in a quad transform grayscale and this is where we really customize our strand shape so we're going to use these four points here in the corners to warp our ellipse into a shape that more resembles a strand and this is how we can do it in a much more visual way than using the tile generator in my other tutorial with its sliders so i'm just going to take the top right here and i'm just going to bring it down down and inward a little bit and then i'm going to take the bottom left one here and bring it up and slightly inward here and i want to sort of create this flat point here and then i want to do the same thing to the bottom so i'm going to take the bottom right and slide it way down here and now we're starting to get more of that shape that we looked at in our reference so let's continue to adjust some of this and if you'd like to copy in these values you see that each of these points have their own set of values here and you can copy these if you want to get exactly what i'm doing but really this is where you can add your creative control and change your strands to make them look exactly like the way you want them to so again i'm going to make some more room and i'm going to add two more nodes here that are going to work in conjunction with one another so bring in a transformation 2d and also a mirror grayscale let's connect these two together and let's connect our quad transform to the transform 2d so now if i double click on the mirror grayscale but single click on the transformation 2d i can adjust these small boxes here and see what shape i'm creating and so now we're really going to create that v shape so i'm just going to squish this in a little but then i'm going to bring this top middle box up so we can fill up the majority of our square here and i'm going to bring it down here a little bit so don't worry too much about cutting it off at the bottom here when we blend this all together and tile it you're going to see that they're going to blend together pretty well when they overlap each other and so this is how we can sort of dial in this v shape that we're doing so i've double clicked my transform 2d and if you're noticing some weird effects happening here you can go to the tiling mode and change this to absolute and then no tiling and so everything should look better now and this is what our v shape now looks like now let's tile these v's over and over again to create our base wall pattern so i'm going to bring in a tile generator so i'm going to hook up our mirror grayscale into the pattern 1 input of our tile generator and let's go to the pattern and change it to image input so here's what we have so far now let's adjust how many times we're repeating this pattern so i'm going to increase it quite a bit so let's go up to 46 and let's do 48 on the bottom and what i need to do is go all the way down to the bottom under the color parameters and i need to make sure that our blending mode is set to max so scrolling back up again i'm going to go to the size parameters here and the really important sliders here are these inner stice x and y sliders so look what they do if i increase the x we squish these in and i increase the y we squish them in a vertical way and so just like before we can not only increase our parameters by more than what they slide to but we can also decrease some of them into the negative so i'm going to take my inner size x and i'm going to type in negative 1 and that resets my slider this way and we can see that our v's have stretched outwards in the horizontal fashion so i'm actually just going to dial this in a little bit differently maybe not so wide negative 0.95 and then we can do the same thing for our inner size y i'm going to hit negative 1 here and we can see that we're matching these up but i think overall the scale is a bit too big so i'm just going to take the main scale property bring it down 0.78 and then i can adjust this inner slice y and we can get these two link together and so while i do this i just want to show you if i scroll down to the bottom where our color parameters are and i flip this back to where it was on add it's getting a completely different result and they don't really blend together well so i'm going to set this back to max go back up adjust my interstice y and now they're linking up really well negative 1.53 on the inner slice y and we're really starting to get this pattern coming together now it's looking a bit uniform so what i can do is get the scale random and i can increase it now a little goes a long way so i'm really just going to bring it up to maybe point 0.1 and the idea is to set up your pattern so you create this optical illusion so you have a v here but it also creates a v here and now let's connect our tile generator here to the foreground of our final blend and i'm gonna when i look at it i need to change the roughness value here so the uniform color connected to a roughness output i'm gonna double click that take this slider slide it up to something like 0.75 and now let's zoom in here and so boom we have a wool knit pattern and so let's scroll out here look at our graph i'm going to select all of the nodes we've created so far except the final blend hit spacebar frame them up and i'm going to call this component our basic wall shape and so now for our last component in this texture let's add a simple color gradient to customize the look of our wool fabric so i'm going to make a little more room and the quickest way to really add some nice color detail to a pattern like this is to use a gradient map node and so with the gradient map we're taking the height information that we've created these grayscale height values and we're mapping them to this gradient here so what i'm going to do is i'm going to select the output of our tile generator and hook it up to the input of our gradient map and so if i go to this gradient editor here we can adjust this gradient line here from black to white we can change the color values that we're getting from our grayscale height information manually you can click in and add a key here and change the color and you see it maps the darker values here because we have this key on the darker side of our gradient to that green color in fact i can drag up here on a key to remove it and you can crunch this down you can really adjust how it interprets this black to white gradient with these colors you can add more keys we can make a really psychedelic looking gradient here the easiest way to create a gradient with the gradient map is with this pick gradient button so here's what i'm going to do i'm going to hit clear all and i just want to make sure that i have my gradient map hooked up to the base color here and let's remove that uniform color that came with our template so double clicking on a gradient map choosing gradient editor and so i've brought up some reference here and i want to steal this color information and turn it into a gradient so that we can apply it to this texture so i'm going to choose the pick gradient button and then i'm just going to drag over these color values and you see that it maps it to this gradient range here and we can see what's going on in our 3d view as we go along you can increase the precision and it will add more keys and create a more complex gradient or you can bring down the precision and get a much simpler picking here and so now i'm just going to keep picking gradients here until i find something that i like and i'm going to adjust my precision pick another one i can also do is select these keys and we have our rgb and hue saturation and value sliders here as well as alpha and i can take the saturation and slide it up or i can adjust the value and darken it this way so i think i've got something i like here if you're seeing a lot of this dark information here we can go into our ambient occlusion conversion node and adjust our height depth and we can slide it down to make this look a lot more natural maybe something like .06 and so now we've got a wool fabric here and so i just want to go back to that transformation 2d that i talked about earlier and so now that we have everything built i just want to go in and show you that if you adjust this transformation 2d here you can change the overall feel of how these strands wrap around you can adjust this texture even further and this makes a lot more sense after everything is built so you can see just by moving this around we can customize these strands you can even squish this down and get sort of finer strands or you can elongate it to create sort of thicker wool strands and so you can really arch direct what kind of cloth you're getting and so this is what our graph looks like and you can see with just a handful of nodes we've created a very simple wool fabric texture and with that we have a realistic wool knit fabric texture now this graph was created with just a couple of nodes so it's really lightweight meaning you can crank this up to 4k or even 8k to show off that extra detail this is only a small piece of what we can make and it's kind of a clean cut version of this fabric but in the training we go even further in depth where we add multiple layers of detail so you can add more wear and tear with just a simple slider i want to thank you all so much for watching and if you like this video hit the thumbs up and if you want to see more in-depth tutorials with substance designer material making and texture making hit subscribe and hit the bell to be notified when i post new videos to demonstrate a little further what we can do in the training series i'm just going to leave you with a small trailer for fabric essentials wool thank you all so much for watching and i'll see you in the next video [Music] we've got a lot of fun awesome textures to create [Music] now this pattern in wool terms is called [Music] ribbing [Music] you

Channel: Jeremy Seiner

Views: 12,808

Keywords: wool fabric textures in substance designer, substance designer, game art, fabric material, material creation, 3d art, 3d tutorial, 3d tips and tricks, substance designer tutorial, substance designer beginner tutorial, substance designer stylized, substance designer fabric, game art design, game art tutorial, material creation workflow, 3d art tutorial, 3d tutorial scratch, 3d tutorial for beginners, fabric material creation, fashion design, fashion tech, fashion

Id: NfqNYxD1UsM

Length: 24min 19sec (1459 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 09 2020