Substance Alchemist: Blending and mixing materials

[Music] in this video we are going to create a new material from the starter materials here in our resources we are going to mix and blend these materials to create something completely new so to do that we are going to come over here to the create tab and so the create tab is going to give us a layer stack that we can work with so to get started let's start here in the starter materials and we are going to work with this raw slate material so here I can just drag and drop this here into my 3d view you'll notice that we now have a material here in the 3d view and we have this raw slate material as the first layer now let's also make sure that we're all on the same page in terms of our viewer settings so I'm going to quickly drop over here to my viewer settings and for the mesh make sure that you're on the plane also for the environment make sure you're on the panorama image we also may need to change our exposure setting but we'll do that in just a bit so now let's go back here to our resources also make sure for the tiling you are set to a 1x1 texture scale for the U and V okay so we have this first material let's left-click on the layer to view the basic parameters so here I can do things like adjust some of the parameters that are a part of the substance material itself so here I'm going to just increase this detail highlight intensity and I think that's going to be enough alright so now we can start to add some layers on top of this original material and to do that I'm going to start to use some filters so here we are under the create tab and we have this new filters option so I'll left-click here and we can start to view some filters we have various categories such as finish we have generators we also have like weathering filters and so on so we can access these filters through this menu and when you're new to substance alchemist it's a good way to work as you can come in and you can start to look and see every thing filtered through their categories and it helps you to get to know the filter set now once you become more familiar with the filters you like to use you can add a filter by coming here to the layer stack and at the top click the filter button here you can start to search for a filter so for example if I want to grab the pavement filter I can start to search and it will filter here in this window we can find that here in the filters if I look under generator here's that same pavement pattern another way to access the filters is to simply hit the spacebar this gives us the same pop-up menu I can do a search again and here I can grab pavement in this particular case I've searched for it I'm just going to left-click to add the filter now if I want to remove the filter I can just select it in a layer stack and I can just hit this little trashcan icon to remove it now let's say I wanted to add the filter from the filters category I can just left click the filter and drag and drop that into the 3d view that will apply the filter here to the layer stack now the layer stack is going to process content from the bottom up so we have our material and then on top of this material we have this new pavement pattern filter so let's go in and access some of the parameters for this pavement pattern I'll left-click here and now I have lots of options and so let's go through and build up the specific pattern that we want to create so in my case what I want to do for the pattern type is I'm gonna set this here to a brush rock now I'm also going to come over here and increase the spacing so I'll start to do this you can see that everything I'm doing here is procedural but it's also very interactive here in the 3d view I also have my shadows enabled you can disable these if you like so here I'm just going to turn them off for now and then I'm gonna play around with some of these settings so for example I have this tilt intensity so I'm going to increase this and you can see that starts to vary the overall tilt intensity for each of these little rocks the joint I'm not so concerned about this so I'm going to take this joint height and just lower this down a little bit so we'll do something like that now a couple of the things I want to work with let's come into the corner roundness and I'm going to enable this so you can see it start to round the edges speaking of edges let's also round those as well so I'll start to mess with that setting now I'm going to scroll down towards the bottom and I'm going to increase the surface intensity I can also play around with the overall surface height so I'm going to start to increase this value here just a little bit and then I'm going to come over here to this surface smoothness and I'm going to lower this and so when I do that you can see that it starts to add a little bit more roughness here to the rock so you can see we get just some increase in detail here and that's what I want to work with now I also have something called surface poke I'm going to play around with this as well and you can see that I'm just kind of building up this pattern now if I scroll up here towards the top I also have the capability to tile the underlying material so for example that base material scale it's set to one I could actually set this to two to tile that and in this particular case I think I'm gonna go ahead and do that so now I think I have what I want to work with so with this stage we started with a base material and we added a filter on top of it to create this pattern material now what I'd like to do is take another base material and blend that with the work that we've done so far so now I'm gonna come over here to my resources tab and again I'm just sticking with these starter materials I'm going to go back to this mud brown and we're gonna use this guy so let's just left-click and drag and drop this here into the 3d view so when I do this you can see that now we're starting to get a mix or a blend of the two materials the original slate material and the mud Brown you'll notice here in my layer stack that I have this substance icon which represents the actual material and now I have this new filter icon so let's say that we want to get to the mud Brown properties well we can do that by just coming over here to the layer I'm gonna left click on this and you can see that this gives me the parameters that I showcased in the previous video so here I can make some changes to that original mud brown material and I think I'll do that here maybe I'll go in and also increase the overall kind of value for this guy now something else I want to make sure that I have set correctly as my resolution so I'm gonna come over here to my viewer settings global parameters and sure enough I'm sitting here at 1k that's pretty low however like I said in the previous video I can change resolution at any time and the substance engine will recompute these textures so I don't have to worry about that I can just come in and I can set this to 2 or 4k in my case I'm gonna set it to 2048 by 2048 now you'll notice that we start to get a better quality of the textures that are being generated for us alright great so that's where I want to go with that so far I'll go ahead and set my resources back to the main view so we've tweaked the parameters for this mud Brown layer however I want to be able to control the actual blend between these layers and I can do that by accessing the blend parameter here so I'll just left-click and now this gives me some new parameters to work with here in the basic tab now the blending mode is actually controlled with this drop-down that you see here and by default it's set to blend height meaning that the blending is going to take place based on the height output from the two layers or between the layers in the stack but I could change that to a different mode like for example I could blend based on ambient occlusion so let's just see what that does ok so now you can think about the occluded areas I can see that well a lot of this dirt is now showing up in the occluded areas or I could do something like maybe switch this to curvature and so what that does is it's going to start to place the dirt on more of the curvature areas now what I want to do in this particular case though is I want to set this here to blend height because that's really what I want to be working with here I will click the mask option on the layer and I can start to adjust the blend amount and I can do that by adjusting the offset so if I start to move this slider you can see that I'm actually able to blend the two materials together again I'm doing this based on the height information from the layer stack so what I want to do is probably this more more kind of in this direction here so I'm getting something like this now a couple other changes I think I want to make here in my viewport previously I talked about the exposure let's go ahead and change that for the environment so I'm gonna come over here to my viewer settings and under the environment I have my exposure I'm gonna increase this slider a little bit so here I'm sitting at a value of around 0.8 6 and I think I'm gonna use that now also if I take a look maybe the displacement could be a little bit intense for what I want to do so I'm gonna come over here to the displacement options and I'm gonna start to just lower this just a little bit so you can see I'm probably gonna sit around point 3-0 for my actual displacement amplitude again just want to make note that I have my displacement quality set all the way to 1 as I had in the previous video ok so here's the result that we have so far we could go ahead and enable our shadows and now we get an even better look at the overall shape and form that we're getting from the blending of our material all right so a couple other settings that we want to take a look at one of the settings that's really great is this bottom material color match so right now we're blending these two materials together and you can see that my slate rock and the mud Brown well the color values or the albedo we'll say is basically it needs a little color correcting well we can do that right here inside of substance alchemist by just adjusting the slider so you can see as I start to increase it it really starts to blend and match the bottom base material which is again this raw slate now that's a little too much so I'm gonna back it off just a little bit and get something more like this alright great so that's what I want to work with now I've started with a slate material I've added a filter to generate this pavement pattern and then I've blended a new mud material on top of this again all of those materials coming from my starter materials so next I'd like to add some more procedural effects on top of this so to do that let's jump back over to our filters this time I want to go and take a look at the generators because I want to generate some procedural effects we have one here called the gravel generator and that's gonna do exactly what I want so let's left-click drag and drop the gravel generator here into the 3d view and you can see that this starts to add a lot of pebbles into the scene of course we need to make some adjustments to this so let's come over to our layer stack and left-click on the gravel generator and now let's start to make some changes first the quantity there's a lot of pebbles I don't want that so let's just decrease the overall quantity of this so we'll start to decrease this value a bit I can also play around with the overall stone size so let me just increase this value just a little bit more maybe to round something closer well we'll do 7 so let's stop there now I also have my bottom material color so I can increase that the the overall primary color for these pebbles is still a bit too high so I'm going to just adjust the value range of that you can see that I'm just setting this to be a bit of a darker value then I'll click OK now the next thing I'm gonna do is again just play around with this quantity a bit so I'm going to increase the quantity I could also come in and start to play around with some of the masking so I have the ability to come into here and change the random masking of this you can see it's just starts to randomly mask out some of those pebbles and I think that gives me a little bit of a better result I also have the ability to play around with this scattering volume threshold so if we start to change this this changes some of the scattering so maybe I can play around and see what I want to do with this so I could for example adjust the scattering and then maybe play around with the quantity so I think I'll just go ahead and and work with what I have here for now so that's in place we could also work with the height depth of these rocks so if I want to just increase that a little bit I could also play around with the stone height so let's increase that that's actually going to increase the height of each of the pebbles and we've already set our random masking and I'm just kind of looking here's another one that's pretty good this stone elevation random so we can you know further randomize the elevation so some of the stones as you can see here are kind of embedded into that dirt some of them are sitting more on top of it and so on again it's always good when you're creating these procedural layers to random nice things as much as possible so I think we'll go with something like this for now okay so this is going to be like one layer of the gravel and I have like these small pebbles let's go ahead and add another layer of gravel and this time we'll concentrate more on maybe larger pebbles so here I'm going to grab that gravel generator once more left-click drag and drop that here into the 3d view so now we get you know all of the scattering of these little pebbles this is totally not what we want to do so we can come back over here to the layer and I'm going to decrease the quantity now the stone size I'm actually going to set this you can see that if I move my slider here this goes to 10 but I could enter in a different value well I don't know ten looks pretty good but actually I think I'm going to come in here and just enter a value of 11 so now you can see that I have a couple of these larger stones in here now that I have that value or excuse me that stone size set I can now adjust the quantity so I'm gonna add a few more of these guys in here like this and maybe come down to that random masking and increase that a little bit there we go looks pretty cool now let's adjust our bottom material color match as well as lower the value for that primary color for those pebbles okay actually I think I'm gonna increase the quantity a little bit more okay there we go let's go with something like this for now okay so now since these are larger pebbles what I think I might want to do is increase that stone height so I'm going to increase that and you can see that as I do that here if you take a look at say these pebbles here you can see that they start to you know push a little further from the surface so again we're gonna increase that stone height I'm using a value of around 0.8 3 all right so the reason why I wanted to go in and adjust the gravel to have these two layers is I think it's always good like I said previously to work with randomized values so having these two layers one represents kind of these small pebbles and one that represents the large pebbles I have two layers of separate control here so again I can randomize the overall eyes of these pebbles and I get you know a better more realistic result so again like I said always a good rule of thumb randomized as much as possible this is looking pretty good so far this is kind of the idea of what I was going with however one other thing that I would like to do is I'd like to be able to basically add a dirt layer over top of all of this and I typically will do that when I'm lending materials because it's a really good way to kind of solidify all the materials together make them feel like they're part of the same environment and so we have here in our filter stack this weathering and we have several of these nice weathering filters and of course dirt is one of them it's really good option so I'm gonna left-click drag and drop and place that here into the 3d view and you can see that throws this dirt filter at the top of my layer stack now it's a bit too intense here so I'm going to left-click on it and I'm just going to drop the quantity down just a bit here there we go alright so now you can see that everything we have this dirt layer that helps kind of just unify all of the layers below it together here if I come over to the layer and I just turn off this eye icon you can see this is a way that we can turn the layer effect on and off so here's what we had before looks okay but something's a little off and like I said it's always good to have a little dirt pass to kind of unit unify everything together so we'll enable that and here's the result that we get at this stage you can see that we've built up this layer stack here of course we can always go in and make any changes we want and speaking of changes let's go over to our pavement pattern and let's say that well you know we have this brush rock that was a cool pattern but what if we wanted to try something different well we can always do that so for example here I'm going to try something a little different maybe I'll try this European fan pattern so we'll enable this takes just a second to compute and here we get a different result here I may need to adjust my brick spacing so I'll just make a change to this and you can see that you know really quickly we're able to generate a totally different pattern again because we're layering all these procedural effects together and that's another core powerful aspect of working with substance Alchemist and these substance materials alright so I actually don't want to do that so let me go back to my brush rock and so I'm gonna rien a bollec I and then maybe increase my spacing here again just a little bit okay that looks pretty cool let's go with that one last effect that I want to do is I'm gonna come over here to the weathering and we have this water so I'm gonna left click and drag and drop water into here and this is always kind of a cool effect to use so now you can see that we have this water here and of course I'm gonna move my lighting around it's always really good to constantly adjust your light direction here so this way you can see I can pan this kind of back and forth like this or excuse me rotate this back and forth and it just gives me a good idea of seeing again shape and form I'm seeing how the shadows kind of wrap around and form around the shapes also I get a good idea of the rough rough nough sand the micro surface of the material and how the light is scattering across the surface so it's always a good idea to constantly be rotating your environment checking things from different angles as well as you know rotating rotating the lighting environment I should say and again like I said just getting a good idea of how lighting is interacting how the light in the scene is interacting with your materials okay so let's jump back over to this water here and we have some settings for this so the water level I'm just gonna decrease this a bit so right now it's a little too much all that really was interested in was making a few of this these kind of little puddles here like this now there's quite a few cool controls here like for example you have your water darkness so we can enable that we can come in and enable some dirt on the water but this edge wetness is really cool so if I drop this all the way to zero you'll get kind of like this really hard edge but if I increase this edge wetness you can see what it's doing kind of in this area it just gives a nice kind of fall-off here so this is like right where the puddle is but here we have some moisture also kind of you know bleeding or feathering off onto the rock and the dirt and it gives a really nice effect so here I have my finished material and you can see that you know with pretty much very little effort actually probably more fun than anything I'm able to go into my resources of some of my materials and just blend and mix them together add some procedural effects on top of that to create a new material now that I have this in place I can come over here to my layer stack and I can click this Save button I'm gonna give this a material name so I'll call this stone let's see here underscore dirt underscore ground and I want to save this to my ground collection so I'll click Save and here you can see that with my project my getting started this is the project we created in the original video underneath my ground library or collection I now have this new preset so if I want to clear this out and start on another I can just click this button here which is basically going to create a new material for me and let's say that I want to use this new material that I created as a base layer well I can do that as well so here I'm going to take stone dirt drag and drop that here into the layer stack and now I've basically merged all my layers down and here is the result that I get so now if I wanted to let's say jump over to my filters and maybe make turn this into like a snow scene I can do that by let's add our snow filter on top of this so now we have like a cool snow scene here of our material this is our fresh snow we can lower this down a little bit maybe make it a little bit melted here add some build up things like that now I have a whole new material here that's based on snow this is pretty cool so let's go ahead and save it material name we'll call this stone underscore ground underscore snow and we'll save this into the ground collection so again you can see super fast to be able to build up these different layers and effects so with substance alchemist everything is non-destructive so if I want to go back to that original material all I need to do is just simply left-click on the material and you can see that it's going to load the entire layer stack here so all of the layers are intact I can go back and make changes any changes I make will also be updated in this other material as well so now that we've created the material let's talk about exporting textures our substance alchemists so that we can use those in another program so here on the far right toolbar we have this export option so I'll click this here and it's going to ask me to export the current view so you're always going to be X the current view which is going to be the scene that I have here so I'll export this current view now the output selections these are all the outputs heading into the shader that I'm working with so I have a couple options here for the format I could actually export this out as a substance archive file so this file here can actually be loaded into an application that's that supports the substance plugins such as epics Unreal Engine or unity or Maya 3ds max modo or any kind of application like that I could also choose to export out just an actual bitmap format so for example let's say that I just wanted to export out a series of PNG files for each one of these texture channels so let's say that I want to do this and then here I can set a resolution this time I really want super-high quality so I'm going to set this to 4k remember I don't have to worry about this being up scaled it's actually being recomputed at this new 4k resolution so you're getting that true 4k texture then you just set a destination path the material name and then you just click export and there you have your textures or in the case of using a substance archive file you have that file as well so that's how you export the current material in this video we went through the process of taking a look at our resources we used a couple materials here from the starter materials we blended them together we also layered some procedural effects some of these procedural pebbles here we've added some dirt and water and we were able to create a new material from a lot of the materials that are in our resource we were save those to our ground and then we also talked about how we can quickly export the current view so that we can use this content in another application

Channel: Adobe Substance 3D

Views: 40,591

Keywords: Substance, Substance Painter, Substance Designer, Sustance Source, texturing, texture, textures, painting, mapping, 3d art, materials, procedural, generation, Allegorithmic, Library, Material, Authoring, Integrations, Live link, PBR, Physically based rendering, Scan, Scans, Photogrammetry, Paint, Painter, Sculpt, Games, VFX, ArchViz, Architectural visualization, Automotive, Real-time, Offline, Render, Substance Alchemist

Id: ZRsNpdkOZXY

Length: 24min 2sec (1442 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 11 2019