Leaf Generator | Beginner Substance Designer Tutorial

I want to preface this video by just saying that we're not creating the disarray of the leaves but rather just a base height that we can use as a simple generator to drag and drop in our future projects and as always thanks for watching and I hope to see you guys in future tutorials here's our little itty-bitty graph here's what we're gonna make let's get right on to it like usual I want to go up to our new substance button here we're gonna get this little drop down and I'm gonna pick my new template and if you don't have this make sure to check out the video in the description below and I'll show you how to create your own custom graph templates and so we go up to our graph name here and I named mine easy-breezy because you can't stop me and we just leave all of the other settings as they are so now that we've got our graph set up what I want to do is I just want to right click drag and drop this guy into our 3d view and you're just going to show up immediately on our mesh here as well I want to go up to our materials go to default and edit and I want to come over to where the scale is and I want to bump that up to ten and this is just going to show up our height map on our material so in order to start I'm going to come over here and I'm going to start by adding a shape node I'm gonna plug this guy into our normal and our height as well on our base material here I want to come down and I also want to expose the aming occlusion and so with that I'm going to plug in our histogram range and I'm just going to add an ambient occlusion node on top as well so now that we're all set up I'm going to come back to our shape I'm going to go to our pattern and I'm going to hit paraboloid and you can see that we're just going to get a nice circular parabola shape and I'm going to come down to the X on our size and I'm going to shape this right down and we'll go about 0.5 and actually I want to change this from paraboloid too rigid Bell and that's gonna give us a nice little split down the middle and I want to bump this up now actually just something like we'll go point 6 instead that looks pretty good so the next thing I want to do is I want to add a levels note on to this and I just want to boost up the white levels a little bit to make a bit of a sharper edge and bring the black up and you can see what I mean now that we don't have a nice kind of hazy glow I also want to bring down the white values a little bit to make it a more of a uniform gray you I also just want to avoid any peeking so I'm gonna leave our white over there so believe it or not this is actually going to be the main shape of our leaf and so what I want to do with this guy is I want to start adding some more leaf details or information to our texture here so on top of our levels I'm going to add a blend I'm going to bring this over so we have some room to work with I'm going to start by adding a cells one node I'm gonna plug this guy in and you can see right now it's going to show up ourselves and so I want to mask off this blend to only where we have the leaf showing up and so I'm going to take our levels here and I'm going to plug this guy into the opacity so we're going to use that as a mask now I want to make sure that it is uniform across the entire leaf geometry here and not kind of fading as it gets to the edges so all we have to do here is I'm going to add a histogram scan node if we take a look at this guy here you can see once we move the position all the way up we're just gonna get a solid white outline which we're gonna use as our mask you can see now we're getting all of these cells showing up consistently across our texture so now that I'm looking at these cells I think they're a little bit too big for what our leaf is gonna be so I'm gonna come up to our scale here and I'm gonna really bump these up and I found that something like a hundred and seventy is small enough to work with our leaves and so it looks very very small right now but as we start adding more detail along our chain here it's gonna look more and more cohesive I also want to warp these guys a little bit to distort them just a little bit more organically and so I'm gonna take this guy and run it through a directional Ward and I'm gonna use the levels node that we use on our shape here then I'm gonna use that as kind of an indication as to where I want these cells to distort and it's going to distort along the gradient of our texture here and you can see that you can't really see too much of a difference but as we bump this up to something like 85 you're gonna see that we're starting to get the rigid Bell shape in our texture for ourselves I also want to come to the warp angle and change that to 90 degrees so we're gonna get it kind of warping down our leaf texture and it looks a little bit more like it's blending nicely with the geometry you can see in our mesh it's gonna do just that where it's blending down towards the kind of stem area of our leaf and now the last thing that I want to do is I want to invert these colors because right now we have the wider values as being the bumpy areas of our material and I want to have those as more of divots and have these darker areas just kind of be the edges so I'm gonna take these guys back here and I'm going to add invert greyscale on to this and you can see now that we're gonna get more of a recessed and kind of divot like looking effect so now that we've got this detailer information for our blend here I want to go into our opacity and I'm gonna decrease this heavily because I want it to be a very very subtle effect and right now it's a little bit difficult to see so I'm gonna come to our normal map I just want to bump this up to about five so we can see what's going on I think that's still a little too noisy for me I'm gonna try 0.01 and I like that just gives us a little bit of information as to what's going on but it's not too overbearing on our material now that we've got our cells out of the way the next thing I want to do is start by creating kind of the the pathways or the ribs of the leaf we're going to do that by creating a side chain here I'm going to start by creating a stripes node and I'm going to come up here and what I found works best is that we use our two stripes we want to bring the width down to about 0.5 here I want to make sure that we leave our softness on 0 and I'm gonna bring our shift to 8 and so it doesn't look like too much now but I'm gonna bring this guy into a blend with our chain here so we can see what we're doing as we progress with this side chain I'm going to take this guy and put him into the top here I'm going to come over to multiply and want to bring this really low and that's clearly not what we want but we'll continue along and we'll see as we progress what it's going to do to our mesh here so the next thing I want to do is I want to create a bevel because I want to soften these edges here and I'm gonna plug this guy into our blend because what a bevel is going to do is allow me to take these edges and I'm gonna be able to kind of round them and you can see with our smoothing here it kind of blurs it and rounds the edges a little bit I want to bring this down to point one and you can see now when I change the smoothing we're gonna have a little bit of a flat top here but as we smooth it out it becomes a lot rounded take a look at our material here you can see it's not really doing too much and we want to be able to affect both sides of our mesh here kind of symmetrically and so what we have to do is we kind of have to mirror this bevel modifier or this bevel node here so on top of that I'm gonna add a mirror grayscale and I'm gonna plug this in and you can see immediately it's going to take our texture here and it's going to mirror it down the middle and now we have a bunch of options where we can mirror it from but I'm gonna leave it on the X because that's going to cut down perfectly right where our texture cuts in half and if I come and bring the opacity up a little bit you can see that it's cutting down directly in the center and we're getting the mirrored effect on both sides of our mesh now the next thing I want to do is I want to add some distortion to these waves here and so I'm going to add a directional work I want to make sure to add a Gaussian noise I love gosh and noise and it's going to give us a little bit of warp on our texture here so we can play around with the intensity if we want a little bit more of an intense noise we can again play around with the rotation to set this to 90 so that it sits perfectly down the middle of our texture here our mesh I'm going to bring this up to something like 25 we can also play around with the scale to get different effects and I'm going to set this down to something like 15 so it's not super noisy but we can still see that there's something going on and now I want this texture to start warping a little bit to our material like we did over here with ourselves and so I'm going to do the same exact thing where I take a directional work I'm going to come back here and take our initial levels node then I'm going to bring this guy right into the input over here and so you can see that we're not getting anything too drastic but if we bump this up to around 45 you can see now our texture is starting to take significant emphasis on our warp and so again I want to bring this to 90 so that we start to get it down the middle here and you can see it's got just a slight effect and so now looking at her texture it's still not exactly where I want it to be because our ribs are still kind of looking a little bit peculiar and so what I want to do is I want to add a skew grayscale right before our mirror because this is going to give us way more control over the direction that our ribs are going to take and you can see here when I play around with this guy we start to be able to kind of direct where they start to flow off from and so because we're going to assume this is the bottom of our leaf here where the stem is going to be I'm going to have our arrows angle dis directions so I'm going to settle on a negative point five five so now we can go ahead and group all of these guys together and I'm going to call this ribs we can also go back into blend here and play around with the opacity to get a more subtle or intense looking effect and so now we've completed the rib of our leaf but now I want to go ahead and create a gradient then we're going to run that along the center of our leaf here so that we get a leaf that's kind of folding outwards along towards the edges and so it's pretty simple all we need to do is add a gradient axial reflected and in order to use this node you're gonna have to make sure you grab twenty eighteen point two you'll be able to get the same effect in any earlier versions than this but it's going to require to use a another gradient node and you're gonna have to use the mir grayscale to kind of reflect it and get it to line up properly so with our gradient axial reflected here we're going to make sure that we set our x 2.25 and our Y 2.5 so that we get it in the center and towards the left side here for this guy and I want to make sure that the X for our point too is 0.75 and our Y is going to be 0.5 and so this is going to give us a blend or a gradient right in the middle of our texture here and so when I add a blend node I'm going to plug this guy into our top and now I want to make sure that I invert this because I want to take the darker value and blend it over top of our leaf here and so I'm going to just invert greyscale and I'm going to come to our blend and I'm going to go down to multiply and so if we take a look here you can see that we've taken the dark value from our gradient and blended it over top of our leaf to get a little bit of a blend of a gradient down the center so we have a more recessed area on our leaf that's a little too much and so I'm gonna bring the opacity down to about let's see here 0.75 should do and I'm going to come back into our gradient here and actually point three and point seven work a lot nicer and so now we've just completed our Center gradient here I'm going to go ahead and just run this through in Auto levels and it's going to brighten everything up so it's going to be a lot easier to see now on our material here so with that I want to go ahead and start creating some nice leaf veins kind of like what we have here with our ribs but I wanted to run across kind of the panels of each of the ribs here so we're going to start with another stripes node and I'm gonna go up to our stripes and I want to type in 100 because we're gonna have a lot of nice thin and fine veins running through I want to have about points 11 for their width so they're gonna be very very small I want to make sure that their softness as well as at around point eight five and I want to make sure that I just leave their shift to 10 and now like we did for our ribs I want to add a skew modifier onto there just so that we have more control over the direction of our veins and I'm actually going to set that to point seven and it's going to be a slight turn but as we directionally warp this texture here it's going to make all the difference I'm also going to add a mere grayscale so that we have it going down both sides symmetrically of our leaf here and now I'm going to directionally warp it so I'm going to add a directional work I'm going to add another Gaussian noise and when we take a look here I only want to set the intensity to about 15 we can also again play around with the scale to get different intensities as well and I'm gonna leave to set around actually I'm gonna leave that at about 40 that looks pretty good now lastly I want to directionally warp this one more time and again I want to use the gradient of the leaf shape itself to determine where the actual warping is going to occur and so for this I'm now gonna use our levels or our Auto levels here because we also have these nice little stems or veins in our mesh and it's gonna help us kind of play around with our veins I'm going to take this guy and plug them into the intensity and I'm going to come into our directional warp here and so I want to set our intensity relatively high and I'm gonna set it to about 85 so you're gonna see that we're gonna get our lines warping with our texture here I also want to set this to a 90-degree angle and now we're gonna get some nice patterns kind of warping around in between each one of our little blends here and it's gonna look pretty gnarly now I'm going to set a blend node over here plugging this guy into the top and I'm going to take our Auto levels here and plug them into the bottom and then I'll plug these both into our outputs you can see what's gonna kind of happen here is we're gonna get a nice-looking radial effect in each little panel of our leaf but like we ran into initially we're gonna have some pattern kind of splitting over the sides here or spilling over the sides so what I want to do is come back to our Instagram range mask and I'm just going to use this as a mask for our opacity and when I plug that guy in immediately we get rid of all the excess extra noise in the background so now that we've got this masked off what I want to do is I want to use these lighter values and I want to subtract those from our mesh and so the way that we subtract lighter materials our lighter values from a value below as we use a subtract blending mode so now that's taken away from our material but I still want it to be just kind of a subtle effect and so I'm gonna set our opacity right down to 0.01 so it's just barely visible and you can see what it's going to do to our pattern here is we're gonna get it kind of overlaying over top and it's gonna make our material look even that more realistic and now that we've completed the veins for our leaf I want to go ahead and start creating the stem but before we do that I want to move the leaf up a little bit and I want to decrease the scale just so we have enough room to go ahead and create our stem so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to come back all the way to where we have our first shape here and I'm just going to bring the scale down to about 0.75 and it's gonna make the leaf just a little bit smaller and actually I think we can bump it up to even point here going to add a transformation 2d node and so what we're going to be able to do with this is we're just going to take our shape and I want to move it up on the y-axis here this is that we have a lot of room when creating our stem and so the next part is going to be a little bit tricky and it's gonna really just involve you following along with the values that I'm inputting in the nodes and so the first thing that I want to do is I'm gonna go ahead and create an SVG node and I'm gonna go from new resource and I'm just going to name this stem I also want to come into its parameters and make sure it's set to grayscale so we get a nice black background and from there I'm going to create a shape extrude node and so this note is new in substance design or twenty eighteen point two and I'm probably going to cover it in more depth in its own separate tutorial so for now just kind of follow along with the values that I'm inputting so we have an option with this shape extrude node profile type and so with the profile type I'm just going to come down and I'm gonna hit mask and so what this is going to allow us to do is we're going to be able to take our SVG node and plug this into the profile mask and so anything that we create in the SVG node here is going to be able to then provide a shape to be extruded in our shape extrude so with our SVG selected I'm going to come up and make sure that we have the pen tool selected and I want it to be set to path and so we can think of this as basically where we're going to extrude our shape along the edge here and I'm gonna just start by drawing a very smooth and very thin shape along the edge here and you can see that we're just getting a nice small vector along the edge but when we go into our shape extrude it's basically going to take this shape and extrude it along a 3d axis here and we're just going to get a 3d shape that we can move around and manipulate in our extrude node now I have a couple values in our parameters here that work well for creating the leaf and I'm just gonna go ahead and kind of type them in and talk as I go again this is all kind of playing around with your mash or your material but for our material here I found this values are pretty specific the first thing I'm going to do is change the extrude height to about 0.5 just to make it a little bit shorter and I'm gonna leave the extrude depth to one we're going to come down to the extrude shape size and I want to bring this down to something like 0.25 to make it a lot thinner and I'm going to leave again the y-value at 1 so we're getting a very long looking shape I'm going to make sure I set the scale to 0.75 as well I want to make sure that the bevel height is set to zero I'm also going to bring the bevel intensity down the bevel curve to negative point seven and these are all just gonna be subtle little effects that we're not really gonna see too much on our actual mesh I also want to come down to our downscale multiplier and what this is going to do is basically down scale the resolution of our mesh here when we're exporting it or basically plugging it into another node so if I downscale this you can see right here that we're taking a 2048 by 2048 texture and down scaling it half to a 1k texture now if I do that by 2 we're going to get a 512 by 512 so while this node is going to be accepting 2k textures with our SVG it's going to be outputting only 512 by 512 but as i zoom in here just to see what's going on I want to make sure that we also set our exposition to 0.5 so it's right down the center of our texture and I also want to make sure that we set this to 0.05 just to get a little bit straighter and so with that we've created our base geometry for the stem but now I kind of want to go in and bevel it just so that it's a little bit more rounded and not just a flat grayscale image I'm going to add a bevel note onto here and I want to come in and I really want to decrease the distance to something very small like point zero zero one and so we can see that it's not really done anything too drastic just increase the value but as we increase the smoothing you can see the fall-off that we're gonna have and it's a little bit more rounded as opposed to just a straight cut off so now I'm going to blend these two together using a height blend making sure to plug in our stem over top and our transformation in the bottom here I'm just gonna plug these two in now if I take a look I I noticed that we get a little bit of a shorter stem that we initially had and so what I want to do with that is I just want to add another transformation on to our stem here I'm gonna plug this guy in and so now we can also use this to stretch the texture a little bit to make it a little bit longer as well now I want to come in and play with the hype a little bit because I've noticed that it's a little bit too jutting out and it's not exactly like what a stem would look like so I'm gonna come in here and I want to make sure that the height offset is around 0.75 so that we get a little bit more stem going up our leaf I also want to make sure that the contrast is 0.95 so that we get a little bit less of the unalike the division between the two textures here and so now the final thing that I want to do for our leaf is I want to start warping it so that it looks more organic and natural so I'm gonna add a wharf node onto our blend and I'm gonna use a Gaussian noise to basically randomize our pattern here and so immediately it's gonna give us a very noisy result but I want to go ahead and decrease the scale go to about 10 there we can also increase the intensity up to two and just find a nice kind of sweet spot for our blend I'm gonna probably do 1.5 and so the nice thing about our gosh and noise here is that we can also play around with the disorder to give us different looking results now let's looking pretty cool now the final thing that I want to do is I want to get rid of our base material here because we no longer need it we also don't need a most of these outputs but we only need the height so I'm going to take this guy I'm going to plug them in over here I'm going to get rid of all of these other outputs because I only want the grayscale height value I'm going to get rid of the normal and the ambient occlusion as well and I'm going to bring the height over here going to plug this into our height output and so now essentially what we've done is created a generator for our leaf and if we go ahead and create a new graph and I'm going to call this one test click on our graph here and drag this in we're gonna get just a leaf generator that we can plug in to any graph that we want make sure to head to my patreon where you're able to snag this generator for free and as always thanks for watching and I hope to see you guys in future tutorials [Music]

Channel: Get Learnt w/ Chunck

Views: 21,900

Keywords: 3D, tutorial, leaf, leaves, pbr, material, texture, substance, substance designer, designer

Id: _UeCIak8sBk

Length: 30min 46sec (1846 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 03 2018