How to Realtime - VFX / Lightning Texture TUTORIAL PART 1 Using Substance designer

hello this time i will show you how to create very basic lightning texture um so we're going to start in substance designer and as usual we're going to start with a simple shape which would be the line in this case and we're just going to alter it a little bit try to maybe add a little bit of stylization to it and a little bit blur basically so we can get like a nice glow around it in the game engine and we're going to create one of those two textures obviously they probably won't be the same as you can see on this images but i'm going to go through exactly the same process and as the process is procedural you're probably gonna get a little bit different results but my hope is that i'm gonna um give you a small tutorial and maybe a little bit better understanding on how to create those sort of textures so basically you can use that knowledge and apply it to your project or whatever you're working on and hopefully it's going to improve a little bit of your texturing skills or even get you started on creating textures in substance design so as usual before i create a tutorial i actually am trying to find out if those textures are useful so i've created a small scene in an unreal engine and i've created some geometry as well for the texture so those are like cross sections and planes as well but with a little bit altered geometry and all the uvs are very simple they just fit into the square [Music] and i've created a small particle system which i'm going to show you in a second but i just want to show you how the mesh basically look like it looks like with this texture and as you can see the texture is tiling a bit vertically with those i've created this particle system obviously there are some material tricks so this is done in niagara but yeah basically i managed to create something like this with those textures okay so let's start by jumping into substance design okay so let's start with shape node let's scale it down to be something like this basically like a stripe or line and maybe let's unlock the node so we can tweak its resolution basically what we want we want this to be 1024 wide and 512 height um next let's use transform now let me zoom in a bit and in transform let's just grab the sides basically and we can do it that way although the better way would be to stretch it to 100 here next let's maybe try to adjust its shape a bit using warp and maybe used cells to do that because we want we want those big shapes to and alter just few of the in a few places [Music] 10. what we're looking for we're looking for very thin line something like this basically so we can use edge detect next and have something like this basically and we want to invert it as well and as you can see we're kind of getting somewhere i think let's try another warp um let's maybe copy and paste cells but maybe let's drag it and through blur because we want those shapes to be now a little bit softer let's try it with see what that's going to give us not much maybe let's just increase the scale of it and obviously lower the intensity so we're looking forward just we're just trying to alter those um shapes so we can have something a bit more stylized so we could have like a this round round surface here and then it goes into the spike here the same in in this place you know let's try tweaking the scale and see what else we could basically achieve with this it's not quite like this so let's maybe stick with this for now obviously we can go back to the warp as well and just keep tweaking this until we happy with the shape [Music] me so i quite like this so i have like a very thick line here and a very thin line here i mean it looks a little bit stylized but let me just keep tweaking maybe i'll come up with something better i'm just changing this order and just looking for a slightly better shape okay i'm going to drag it through another warp this time let's maybe try pedaling nice let's try 20 and what i'm trying to do now i'm just trying to alter the shape a little bit vertically so i need a very blurry shape because i want the movement to be very soft [Music] so maybe something like this [Music] [Music] i think this could work let's maybe try edge detect and see if we could get better shape uh probably not so maybe just stick with warp what we are missing is those uh sharp edges so maybe let's try another warp and another cells and see if we could get back those sharp edges [Music] i'm gonna reduce the blur and change its scale so okay so i've got something like this but maybe list let's tweak few parameters in our previous notes to see if we can actually get different results [Music] so and quite like this although i think there's a too much frequency and a noise here because i'm trying to get those straight lines and somehow reduce the scale of this node cells i quite like this shape and i think it actually could work as a lightning so there's a lot of as you can see there's a lot of back and forth basically and because you kind of need to experiment with those nodes and tried to find something that actually you like in terms of your taste and the look of it in general so feel free to experiment with those nodes and you know move and those sliders until you will be happy with the with the shapes but yeah basically i've got something like this so i'm hoping you get similar results but let's go further let's maybe try uh bevel because what we'll be looking for we'll be looking for um this blurriness um outside because when we're gonna bring the texture into the and into the game engine we we want those blurry edges there as well and let's try distance note as well it's going to alter our shape a bit the distance node i'm going to invert it maybe let's try to invert it before i'm gonna plug it into the distance node and histogram scan although let's invert it before we plug it into the [Music] histogram scan [Music] let's try to bevel this note instead because what we want to do we want to blend those two together [Music] so as you can see we've got very hard shape here and we're just blending it with our bevel so we can have like a slight and blur around it that's going to create like a halo effect as you can see here those edges are very jaggy so maybe let's try to run it through um the blur blur node so we can get slightly better results for this and let's run the transform and as you can see is tileable i usually color those in the engine so all i need is just a great scale but if you want to color it i think a gradient map might be a good idea so let me grab and grab gradient map i run it through i'm going to open gradient editor and i'm just going to click here and try again and we get something like this and as you can see you can basically export it apply to your mesh or maybe find a different use for it and then the one i showed you in the in the game engine um but yeah basically this is my process of creating a very simple lightning texture which i probably want to alter later on and create a bit more interesting shapes or even a movement in photoshop but in terms of you know getting that kind of texture straight from substance designer and basically that's the process as you can see it's a very small graph and it gives you something that you can basically start with okay so i hope you enjoyed it and um yeah see you in the next tutorial um let me know if you would like to know how i've created those meshes because i assume that everyone knows that you know you can go into any 3d software and just create those however i created those in houdini and then i managed to get like a as you can see here eight variations with very quickly just moving the slider in the procedural procedural way as well and so if you would like to learn how to do those just let me know and i will drop a tutorial which should be very very short but again it might be something that you actually have no interest in um so let me know in the comments all right so thanks everyone thanks for watching and if you could share that video that'll be great and hopefully i'm gonna create a few more tutorials in substance designer to give us a better idea how to create various textures using the procedural weight in substance design and don't get me wrong those textures are very very simple and then yeah my hope is that we're just going to create a bit more complex ones later on the idea is to start very simple and then we can expand on it okay so yeah again thanks everyone

Channel: 1MaFX

Views: 17,471

Keywords: vfx, tutorial, unreal engine, unity, special effects, FX, textures, substance designer, ue4, real time vfx, lightning vfx, lightning texture, game dev, art, 3dart

Id: WUfx5z7gi60

Length: 17min 44sec (1064 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 20 2020