Plain Weave | Substance Designer Pattern Fundamentals

either so this is a new series that i've been thinking about doing for a little bit because as a material artist one of the biggest kind of roles of the job or requirements of the job is to be able to read shape language and forms and just general patterns and in general although it's not always the case if your height map is kind of lacking initially the rest of your outputs like your albedo your normal your roughness and so on are going to suffer because of that so it's really integral as a material artist or a texture artist to really understand and focus and hone in on developing your height as best you can and that's really going to be the overall goal for this new series is just finding some pretty common patterns and deconstructing them so that we can almost use these videos just as a quick reference to really help understand how we can structure our height maps with that all out of the way in this tutorial we're going to be taking a look at developing this just kind of plain weave material now i know that you could do this very easily with the weave generator node but i find that it's kind of lacking in some areas and there's nothing bad about kind of knowing how to set up a weave generator of your own right because it's going to be more flexible so let's take a look at it so i've already gone ahead and set up a new environment for us to work in and i'm using a custom template that i've developed in a different tutorial so take a look at that up in the top right maybe i'll leave a card put a link in the description as well and this is going to allow us to just kind of isolate the height map so we only have to focus on developing that i can just right click this base material drag and drop it in there and it's going to look pretty similar to just kind of any other standard pbr metallic template but we're only going to be looking at the normal and the height here so to start off our straps or our weave or whatever it is we're making we're going to need to create the initial shape and if we take a look the shape's not really that complex but there is a little bit of nuance that we're going to take a look at in a minute here that we don't maybe initially give a credit for it's going to be a little bit more complex than we can actually see but to start off the initial shape let's go ahead and add exactly that a shape node and we'll plug this into our normal and our histogram here and so we won't see anything right now because it's just a pure white value but if we go ahead and bring our x value down to something like 0.2 now we're going to be able to see that we're getting a nice solid strip down the center there and really that's as pretty much as complex as it's going to get for just kind of the silhouette of the shape but if we take a look at our end result here we're going to notice that we're going to need the straps to kind of dip a little bit so that other straps can actually go over it in different areas right so how do we do that how do we accomplish that so for the strap shape over here i'll just bring it over we're going to want to find a way that's going to pretty much equally depress this area and this area while keeping kind of a centerpiece as a brighter value to denote that it's going to be kind of higher on this height map right and we're going to want to make sure that the overall shape is rather soft it's going to be a softer blend between a darker area to a lighter area and back down to a darker area so to start that i'm going to duplicate this shape and i'm going to rotate it 90 degrees now i'm actually not going to use this shape here or this this lever here but instead i'm just going to bring our x up to 1 and i'm going to bring our y back down and actually i think for the y i'm added about 0.25 so it's just going to be a little bit bigger but essentially we've just rotated it so let's just blend these together right now and i know that at the end of the day i'm going to want to use this top option here to provide darker values for this bottom option so there's a couple different ways that we could go about doing that but because i know that the darker areas from this are going to be kind of down on these sides here right which are already black in order to keep these darker values the blend mode that i'm going to use is going to be multiply so if i go ahead and multiply that right you can see that we're only getting a blend result of this because we're using the top value as basically any white values are going to capture any of the white values if we click on this bottom one here and anything that is black from this note here is going to just kind of cut away and remove any of the white values so hopefully that's pretty simple we're going to see more how that works in a second here because we're going to alter this just a little bit right we don't want our strap to be kind of like a smaller square so instead what we'll have to do is add a bevel node let me just plug this in and now you can see right we're kind of getting this gradient a little bit because we've created a gradient here and so now all of these values aren't necessarily a dark black or a pure black value so it's going to add some gradient to these edges so for our bevel i want to smooth this out a little bit more and i'm going to do something like 50 just to kind of give it a general nice slope and on top of this bevel here i'm going to add a blur high quality grayscale as well and we're just going to actually blur the result of this too so i'll bring the quality up to 1 and let's give it a strength of around 50 so that you can see it's actually now touching the edges of our texture set here so that now the values from our strap are going to be able to repeat like this right so this is really good this is actually a really good start to kind of the general shape of this strap i'm actually going to go ahead and just before we're done with this blend here bring this down to 0.9 just so that we're not actually cutting off at the corners right that's not a pure black value so we can see that this is going to actually tile across different faces and across different uh uv sizes so so far that's looking pretty good right but there's one more thing i want to do to really just give it more realistic feeling to it and that's going to be just some general roundedness to the faces of this strap because right now we can see it's pretty straight pretty flat and obviously for a height map something as contrasted as these values here right where it's pretty much pure white in pure black or at least there's no gradient between these two values that's not going to be good for a height map and i also want to add some roundedness or slope to the left and right side so this is an area that's going to be a little bit more difficult at least conceptually to try and figure out if you weren't watching this video because it took me a little bit of time to actually try and figure this one out too so like we've done over here right with this bevel we can see that we kind of got the same effect that i'm trying to go for albeit you know left to right so let's try and do the same thing with our shape so we can add a bevel and for the distance i actually want to go into the negatives because i don't want to cast any gradient outwards right i want it to be within the limits that i've set for the strap so that i know wherever the limits of this are is going to be the extents of this strap shape so i'm going to go negative 0.01 and it's really not going to look different but if we take a look really zoomed in here we can see that this is the initial shape and here's the shape with a little bit of a gradient i'm also going to go ahead and change our smoothing up to something like 15 so that it's going to again have just a little bit more of a gradient pushing inwards and a little bit of a smaller softer i should say not smaller fall off there so now if we take a look right it's going to look a little bit smoother like this so why didn't i just do this and then just blend that on over top right why did why did we do it this way where we've got our flat strap and we're blending it like that so if we take our now newly beveled shape here and put it in that way as it gets towards these more depressed areas it actually flattens out the height map a little bit so that we go from a nice rounded if we take a look at maybe a better hdri here a better rounded shape in the center there to a little bit of a flatter one so that's why i'm going to continue to just keep that plugged in there and we're going to just blend this in a little bit later to try and steal some of the roundedness of the shape so if i add another blend and i'll plug this in to the top layer here what i'll go ahead and do instead is change our blending mode to be down at the bottom here soft light so that we're going to maintain some of the posterity of the roundedness at these areas that are a little bit more depressed and then as it gets towards the center here right where it's maybe being pushed over another strap right if we can think about it there's going to be another strap going underneath this center area here it might flatten out just a little bit because it's now sitting on a different strap so this is going to look a lot better once we go ahead and tile it but at the end of the day this is possibly going to be a marginal extra use case here depending on how you know close you're actually going to be able to see this strap this material so that's really going to be it for our strap geometry now let's go ahead and add a little bit of wood grain to this and depending on what your use case for this material might be this probably can be a skippable part because it's just going to be too small to actually even see this information but i thought i'd add it anyways just to kind of help you out a little bit so i'm going to add another blend to the end of this blend here and i'll bring this out because i know that i'm just going to want to do all of the kind of scratches kind of within their own contained unit here and then i'll just blend that into the final result or as the final results to whatever we have over here so to start off our scratches let's go ahead and add a directional scratches node and the first thing i want to do is make sure that this is running in the same direction as our strap so let's go to our angle here and just rotate this 90 degrees and let's just blend that in together so we know it's actually going to be running the same direction and i'm going to use the subtract blending mode right so that the white values of these scratches are actually going to cut away from our strap and i'm going to bring the opacity down to something really really low like 0.01 so that it's going to be just kind of a surface or very superficial height contribution to our map here now that we can kind of see how this is going to work let's kind of iterate on these scratches a little bit so for the scale i find is a little too small so we'll bring that down to 2 right so we're getting some larger scratches a little bit more surface information there i'm also going to bring the pattern amount down to around 0.2 just so that we're getting a lot of like kind of smoother surface faces right so that we're getting a little bit of breakup between just being a super scratchy material and i'm also going to make the x size of these right so the left and right sides of these a little bit thinner so if we come down to pattern size i'm going to make that 0.1 so that they're very fine and very thin and i'm also going to make the size y to be around 40 so that they just stretch a little bit longer and actually i don't know if i like 40. i'm going to take that back let's go to maybe let's try 25. yeah something kind of like that right so we're getting just very minute brain information here so that's looking okay but it's looking a little too uniform we'll go ahead and just add another warp node onto the end of this here and for our gradient input we can use a gaussian noise and now obviously we're not going to want this kind of weird lava lamp looking stuff so i'll bring the intensity down to maybe 0.06 ish just to get a little bit of kind of waviness we'll also play around with the scale of this because i don't want it to be again super uh wavy maybe do something like 17 and then you know just throw the disorder around wherever you want because it doesn't really matter it's just going to kind of change the seed of our gaussian noise now let's actually get into tiling right and that's probably really what you wanted to get out of this video and quite honestly it's not actually that difficult once we kind of understand exactly what we're trying to do so at the end of our grain here let's go and add a transformation 2d note because we're going to need our pattern to be kind of in a cube right or a square fashion so to start this off i'm going to bring this on the x just over by 0.25 so that we're getting it in this quarter of the x here i'm also going to need to move it on the y so that we're going to be able to actually bring in an iteration of this depression here into our texture set so again i'm going to also bring it in by 0.25 so that we're getting this pattern like this and it's going to look really not too grey right now but by doing it this way it's actually going to add a lot of flexibility and we'll see kind of why towards the end of the video now i'm going to quickly add a blend node and bring this out and i'm going to bring in another transformation 2d node and let's plug this in over top so how this transformation 2d node network is going to kind of work is that each one is going to perform a different and new transformation and it's going to be kind of independent or isolated from the rest so this one actually moved our shape into the position that we needed to be in what this one's going to do is then take that one and rotate it 90 degrees right now notice with this note i don't want to then go ahead and start moving it up and down right because that's going to be off kilter with our other node here so this node this first node is going to be doing all of the moving and then the rest of these are just going to be different rotations so now that we've got this rotated how do we actually go ahead and blend these right what's the blending mode we're going to need to use if we come in here we'll take a look and we're going to want to use max lighten now you can see whoa look at that right this is showing up over top of this one here we can see that this strap is actually exactly in the center of where the depression is for this and if we take a look right i'm going to move just this note here and i'm going to move it on the x well you can see it's also going to move our top one on its local x-axis now it's going to be technically the the y and actually i'm kind of moving it on the y as well just do the slider here right you can see that it's going to actually move this together which is going to be really cool so now let's just go ahead and add another blend node here make sure that it's going to be max layton because we still have a whole other side to do right we still have the one strap coming down this way and the one strap going this way well instead of this you know just adding two more transformation nodes we already have all the information we need so we're just going to try and rotate that again so i'm going to add a transformation 2d node here and i'm going to hit 90 degrees clockwise well we're almost there right but we have that strap there so we're going to just need to rotate it again and plug that in and would you look at that right we've got a really pretty cool plain weave here and so now if i go ahead and start to move this one actually i'll view this here but then we're just going to be moving this one here right if i start to move it we're actually going to get some information that's pretty flexible we can kind of change the actual weave pattern so i'm just going to leave that on the default for now but this network right here is actually a very very powerful and very simple as we can see it's only what five nodes node structure node setup it's going to really allow us to increase our flexibility with this and now just a quick note with these blending nodes here because i didn't really touch on it but the reason we're using max lighten as we can see right is that this blending mode will actually pick the brighter value between the foreground and the background and display that over top so that's why it doesn't even really matter if i go ahead and blend these darker values over top of these values here because it's going to pick whatever the brightest pixel is between these two so that's really handy because we don't really even have to worry about order when blending these together because it's always going to pick now for the hundredth time i said it the brightest pixel all right and so we are almost done we're getting really close to finishing this off but now we need to go ahead and actually tile this right because i doubt you're probably going to want just a really big you know 2 by 2 weave here i'm going to use the tile generator and now you could go ahead and use the tile sampler if you wanted to but i don't really need this tile node for anything more than just simply tiling it so i think the tile sampler might be a little bit of overkill let's go and change the pattern to be image input i'm going to change the x and the y amount to be four by four so we get some nice weaves here and then to add a little bit more variety to this let's go ahead and actually warp this information so i'm going to add another warp node and we'll bring in a gaussian noise and now we want to make sure that we're warping this after we've tiled it rather than before because if i was to go ahead and warp this it's going to warp every iteration in the same way so that we're going to really do nothing but shoot ourselves on the foot because we're just going to get the same pattern showing up for each iteration so instead we need to warp it at a more global level so again looks kind of like abstract art not exactly the look we're going for i'll bring this down to 0.2 and i'm going to bring the gaussian noise scale down as well to maybe something like nine and if i play around with the disorder you can see it's just kind of giving it a little bit of random shapes just kind of subtle but for something like this right you don't want something uh super super visible because realistically it wouldn't look like that right we need something a little bit subtler so it looks like it's changing the actual direction of these weaves and they're just kind of settle a little bit unkemptly or a little bit disorderly now before we go and close this video out i thought well because it's a weave we want to maybe take a look at it right with a little bit of transparency so i've set everything up into our outputs here and in order to set that up we're going to have to just add another output node bring that down and up in our identifier we'll call this opacity under label i'm going to call it opacity again with a capital o and i'm just going to put it into the material group in case we wanted to use it later for whatever reason now under usage i'll come and add a new item and let's just go ahead and find opacity here now this is going to be used as an opacity output or a channel for this material and if we go ahead and actually just right click and view outputs in 3d now you can see it's going to disappear because by default it's actually going to be black and black is going to mean that nothing shows up so now that we've got that i'm going to go and find kind of the last area that we have for our height pattern here and let's just plug this into our opacity now it's a pretty good mask so far but we'll notice that um in areas that are kind of a little bit darker it might be a little bit difficult to see actually in the video but this is actually going to be a little bit transparent so if we had stuff kind of underneath this kind of in these areas here we're going to be able to see that so we're going to need a binary mask a pretty just black and white mask so on that connection let's add a histogram scan node just bring this down here and holding alt i'm just going to click there and bring this down so we get this little you know clean connection setup and i'm just going to bring the position all the way up again making sure we're taking a look at this and i'll bring the contrast up so now i can kind of play around with how much i want to be visible here and you know what i'll just leave it at full like that so very easily now we've got a pretty nice and robust plain weave material we've got an opacity channel so it's actually going to be transparent and we can also come back and maybe play around with exposing some parameters like the initial size right of these weaves here to make it something a little bit smaller if we wanted to we could also go ahead and play around with the actual offset of these weaves so we could get a different pattern as well really it's pretty versatile and flexible in what you want to do with it and again all it's really taken is just a handful of nodes that we work with pretty much in our day-to-day job so hopefully that's helped you kind of deconstruct these weave patterns a little bit and who knows maybe you found a different use for this kind of note structure and let me know if there's other materials that you maybe just don't quite know where to start with in terms of its height map if you found this pretty helpful make sure to pass it around because i do think this kind of series would be really beneficial for the substance designer or material community at large and i'm looking forward to developing a whole library of these kind of quicker breakdown videos to really get everybody up and running with creating some pretty robust and solid height maps if you're new to the channel i'm chunk thank you so much for getting learnt with me and wherever you find yourself going in life make sure that you go there with [Music] kindness [Music] you

Channel: Get Learnt w/ Chunck

Views: 4,367

Keywords: 3D, tutorial, Substance, Designer, Substance Designer, weave, material, texture, pattern, height map, design, fabric, game dev, art, Substance Painter, Painter

Id: csSutepJyEU

Length: 24min 0sec (1440 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 18 2021