Stylized Materials with Substance Designer - Concrete

[Music] [Applause] in this video i'll be showing some key techniques used to create these stylized concrete tiles i'll be explaining my tiling approaches how to make these brush based surfaces that look hand painted and how we can create corner edge highlights as well as the mos elements too an sbs will also be available if you're curious about anything not covered here when it comes to creating a patent layout should it be bricks planks tiles etc there are two methods i generally use with the tile sampler either those with a non-custom input or a custom one so for example this tile sampler doesn't have a custom input it just uses a square or a brick and we've got these cracks that i've just really quickly made just as a example and typically you get something like this where generally some tiles it looks good like it feels natural and like a good composition and then other places it's just too much noise so for photo real that can be quite nice and natural but for stylized where you really have less or should i say fewer and larger details such as these you really want them to be controlled and look good the way i do that is usually the custom using custom inputs into the tile sampler and that's where i'm just manually placing my cracks so the first tile doesn't have any then i've got this it just goes down and then i've got like a nice break here and then one where we've got different cracks on the tile on the corners and then that's being plugged into a tile sampler and by default the symmetry random is at zero and this is resulting in these cracks these tiles being placed out on exactly the same rotation each time by putting this up to one you just ensure that they're all individually rotated by increments of 90 degrees the other aspects of the tile sampler that you'll want to look at is the pattern distribution this is here so by default this is set to random and as you can see here there's just too many cracks that are showing up the mask random if you start dropping them then it just completely kills the tiles so what you can do is the use the pattern distribution and user just a parallel noise will do and then add a levels this will give you quite a bit of control so if we just take a look at this and manipulate the levels you can see that we can bring them in and out kind of like how we would expect a random mask to work if it was just for the cracks this is why custom shapes can be especially useful for stylized materials because you have more precise control so here i am dictating where the cracks would go between that and experimenting with the random seed to get different results you should be able to find a good composition this technique of course can be used with a variety of needs such as split ends of wood or bolts chips off corners etc to really help your materials feel stylized you'll want to consider incorporating brush strokes into your base surfaces this first video will show a quick method to achieve this effect and as we go through the videos i'll show increasingly more complex approaches before that i quickly want to show you one of my favorite noise maps the factual sun base now the clouds 2 is really great and i use it a lot but it only really has one parameter that's useful and that's the the scale with the factual sum base however you've got four and with this i've just got a lot more variation in the types of noises that i get and i can quickly get to what i need so back to the brush surfacing we can use a crystal too i like this as there is a lot of directionality to the noise and in multiple directions i personally do find it a bit too vertical so i like to often use a transform 2d and squash it by 50 in the height and then that just makes it more a global vertical and horizontal kind of [Music] directionality to it so then you would plug this into a slope blur like we've got the same setup here and we've plugged it into a slope blur grayscale and with a factual sum base we're able to get effect like this and if we offset it with a directional bulb and so on we get this brushy effect and this is quite a quick way of doing this if i'm making a brush surface for smaller details i find that this is often enough for what i need next i want to talk about the gradient map now you can see here that i have a auto levels before plugging in the brush base and i often use a auto levels because if i bring in another gradient map here and we have two contrasting colors let's pick more colors green blue and if i plug in the auto level version notice that you get definitely get blue green red however if we place it in before the auto levels there's much less range of color in there so i like to typically add auto levels just before anything goes into a gradient map just to ensure i get the full range now this is what i ended up with and i found this too noisy so what i've done is picked a similar color and created this mask here this is just a rotated version just to ensure that it doesn't line up correct correctly with the underlying brush strokes i'm just adding this on top with a copy so this is it without and this is it with now you might be wondering why i just don't use a normal uniform color here right so we could just do this and it would be exactly the same but if later we go back and we were to change the color scheme of this for whatever reason say we made it blue and then we plugged this in you're going to get this color on top which no longer works with the color before so this is just a trick where i set the so it's just a transform 2d and then going into the mipmap mode i turn it to manual and then just ramp this up and it approximates the average color and now i can just plug this in here or even if we were to do this one right just to show you so this way it just keeps your average color so that if you do make color scheme changes later it will still update this node also with the gradient map you often see especially in photo real tutorials you'll see this where they bring up the gradient editor and do the pick region on usually a photo so imagine this is a photo but this results in a lot of pickers which is good for photo real because it's adding a lot of variation which is more natural but with stylized materials you really don't want that much to mess around with to be honest like i rarely have more than six pickers and doing this just gives me a lot more control over my values something like this so i'll be showing a few different methods for edge highlights over the course of these videos typically they involve taking information from the height up converting that into a height and then a curvature move but for now let's take a look at a more manual approach that is especially useful for materials such as these tiles to start this process we find a mask for the main pattern that we have in this case these concrete tiles and that goes into a blur hq grayscale and then that goes into the background and opacity and this creates a sort of outline and we can create a highlight so just to show you what's going on here i'm gonna just pick a very simple shape such as a square and let's use that as the mask and this will go here so it's blurring this it's creating a outline and then it's being put on if you multiply it becomes a highlight that you can control the distance with the blur however if you change this to a subtract it becomes more like a shadow in this case we're going to use a multiply and the original mask of course so after that i'm just clamping it with levels giving it more contrast and then i'm using just a flood fill with angle variation and multiplying that on top just so that it gives a sense of direction on these tiles and then again just clamping it down to get these more thinner stronger shapes then just to make that feel a little more natural and brushed we can add a crystal too and just use our really quick method of using a slope blur if you don't use this blur you might get like little things like this so just add an extra blur can sometimes just help get rid of those and then again just a levels just to really clamp it and then that's just being plugged into at the end of the albedo with just a flat color or actually you know in this case we took this like an older version and just made it much lighter because that's more interesting than just a completely flat value if you've got the time it's worth doing things like that and so we've got this mask that we made just now into the opacity and that's being overlaid on top so this is it with the highlights this is without it and back again so for the moss we want the moss to be coming out of the crevices and the cracks and so on so if we go earlier on in our height map we've got a mask here if we invert it that's showing all the cracks and crevices you can always use a slope blur to push outwards whatever you're plugging into it if you use it with a blurred version of the same input so to show that i'll just be dropping this intensity down so it's like this and then it's just a nice way to push out your shapes this causes some artifacts in some cases so i just used a non-uniform blur to give it a bit more shape and smooth those out a little and then another slight blur just to play around with the distortion of it so that it's a bit more organic and then this is just being added with a moisture noise just to give it a little bit of texture into the moss if you look closely here you can kind of see that going on and the whiter parts of these of this map is where it's going to be coming through first if we use it with a height blend now typically a high blend you kind of want the contrast to be one but in cases like this where it's coming through and you kind of want it to be like staining the surrounding areas it can be useful to drop the contrast just a tiny bit to get some fall off so this is it without the fall off and then with so just a little bit there can be kind of interesting and then this is it without and as you can see the white parts as i just explained come through first which is exactly what we need in this case to add some extra mustangs i'm going to use the height mask on the height blend and plug that into a shadows and we can adjust the size of the shadow with the shadow distance and then with a slope blur add in a crystal 2 again just to make it film brushy and then plugging that into the albedo now the albedo for the moss again just no like i said before it doesn't need that many color inputs i just added a darkened version of that by plugging in a hsl with lightness lowered and by using that mask we made sure that the stains are coming off from the source of the moss which is in their cracks prefaces those were some of the techniques used to create this material as we go through these videos i'll be showing many new techniques as well as alternatives to some of the methods shown here in the next video we'll be looking into techniques to help create stylized wood materials

Channel: Adobe Substance 3D

Views: 18,135

Keywords: procedural, PBR, Physically based rendering, environment art, 3D design, 3D painting, 3D texturing, texturing, 3D material, stylized art, substance designer, substance designer tutorial, game art, procedural art, environment artist, physically based rendering, game dev, procedural generation, substance designer tutorial beginner, substance tutorial, gamedev, stylized, adobe, substance by adobe, beginner, tutorial, 3d, cgi, 2020, cg, Concrete

Id: ZUizTieD6Fw

Length: 16min 48sec (1008 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 05 2021