Substance Alchemist tutorial: Image To Material (AI Powered)

[Music] in this video we are going to take a look at how to use the new image to material a I powered filter to create a material from a single image input I will showcase how to use the filter as well as explore various methods for tiling materials in using material blending to remove tiling repetition to begin I'm going to drag and drop the image that I'm going to be using in this video here to the alchemist UI I'm then presented with the new material creation template and here's where I can choose image - material and I have options for bitmap - material or the new AI powered however before I use image - material I want to actually set this to use as bitmap because I'm gonna do a little bit of pre-processing before I feed this into the AI powered image - material so with this set as used as bitmap I'm going to click OK here in my layer stack you can see that a base material has been created and the image has been imported here in the 2d view I can view the image by scrolling over here to where I have the scanned one input so now you can see the source image that I'm going to be working with now this is an image that actually photographed right outside my front door and because of the harsh directional light we are gonna have some challenges creating a material from this source image now before like I said we use the image 2 material I want to do a little pre-processing and I'm gonna start that by applying a crop so here I can go to my add a layer and in my search field if I do a search for crop we have the crop filter so I'm adding crop here to my layer and what I'm going to do is switch the material outputs in the switch this two layer inputs and this allows me to see my layer inputs from my stack I'm doing this because I want to be able to take a look at the source resolution for this scan image and I can see here that it's 40 32 by 30 24 and is non-square so I can use this aspect ratio or this input size I can enter that in here - the input size parameter field of my crop so we had 4 0 3 2 I'll hit enter and then for the y component we'll set 0 3 2 4 and once again hit enter this allows me to set my crop based on the original input size of that scan image this is really good step to do when you're working with something that's not square now I am going to use my manipulator here to set my crop range and you can see I can interactively position this here at the top of the UI I'm going to choose the make square option and so I can actually see the result of this crop I'm going to switch my layer input here to layer outputs now I can also grab the crop manipulator and make some adjustments here as well so you can see I can also reposition this while viewing the actual effect of the crop now with this particular image when I was holding the camera I didn't actually have it quite level and that's introduced a little bit of lens Distortion you can see here towards the bottom so here I'm going to come over to my add layer and I'm going to do a search for perspective and we have this new option called perspective correction so I'm going to apply this filter and it gives me this corner pin effect and I can adjust these nodes here to basically just remove this lens distortion so you can see I'm gonna make just a few adjustments if I come over here to my perspective correction and disable this well the image goes away and that's because I'm set here to layer outputs I want to view my material output so I'm going to switch this option to material outputs now again if I just enable perspective correction here you can see the difference that we're getting now we're ready to apply the image to material filter so again we'll come up to add a layer I'm going to do a search for material and here we have the image to material AI power this is the option I want to use left click to add it to my layer stack so once the filter has finished processing will then see a full render of the material here in our 3d view over in our 2d view we can take a look at the individual channels this is the data that the AI powered material has created so for example we have our height here's our normal and our base color now I mentioned that we were going to have a little bit of a challenge with this particular image due to the harsh directional lighting but thanks to the AI powered image to material that challenge wasn't actually much of a challenge at all you can see here that all of those harsh shadows have been perfectly removed here within this base color if I take a look here at the layer inputs I can jump back and see that here is again the harsh shadows here I'm going to jump back to my material outputs make sure like my base color here and you can see again these shadows have been completely removed here in my base color before we move forward on our material I want to share a few details about the AI process the high-res input is split into tiles of 512 by 512 to keep a small dimensionality in the neural network this is important because otherwise it would consume too much video memory and would be almost impossible to train the AI every tile is then processed separately by the network and then merged seamlessly at the end the AI portion of the process generates the base color in normal Maps the other maps are deduced from this data in particular the height map is computed from the normal so each change to the normal affects the height and speaking of training the AI it's important to understand that this first iteration of the AI powered image to material has been trained to work on various ground surfaces without door lighting such as the rocks we are working with in this video for your own work you can use the AI powered image - material with content such as pebbles pavements concrete dirt or sand rocks and forest ground to name a few with the filter selected we can come in and change some basic parameters so we can start by taking a look at the overall normal intensity we also have the normal details which is a slider that controls the balance between a low-res normal and a high-res normal that are both inferred by the neural network they are blended together before the height is computed the low-res normal represents the geometry low frequencies and the high res normal is the geometry high frequencies we also have an equalizer setting here for the height as well as some values for adjusting things like roughness and ambient occlusion strength now that we have our material I'd like to take a look at how we can tile this material so here in the 3d view you can see that I have my tiling set to 3x3 and of course we're starting to see some seams also here in the 2d view if I hit the T key I can go into my tiling mode and sure enough we see definitely some seams here that we need to take care of so there's various ways we could handle that here in substance Alchemist so let's just take a look at the options that we have so first I'm gonna come over to the layer stack and click add a layer I'm going to do a search here for tiling and you can see we have a tiling filter let's give this a try so I left click to select this to add it to my layer stack now if we zoom in here into the 2d view I'm actually gonna drop this view over to height so that we can more clearly see what's happening and if you see here we have a seam if I come over to edge then I turn off detect edges you can see that we have an offset in our image and here we have a scene now if we enable detect edges we use an algorithm that will detect the underlying shape and forearm and then it will try to distort that seam line so that we break that up and help to make it less recognizable and we have some controls for this such as our threshold so you can see I can change this the resolution of this effect is pretty high so I can even come in and drop down my grid resolution I can play around with things like the overall smoothness as well as blur this seam line and so this can be an option in this particular case it's not really giving me the result that I want especially you can see I'm having some issues here so I can keep trying to tweak this but instead let's just take a look at some other options we have so what I'm gonna do is just delete this filter and now let's take a look at another option once again we'll go to add a layer and let's do a search for tiling and this time I'm gonna take a look at the make it tile advanced so we'll left-click and here you can see the result that we have just right off the bat so this is what we're getting again we can see the seams have been removed but there's quite a few issues with this method as well so first I'm gonna come over and make some adjustments so let's take this color equalized radius and let's just move this up here if I take my threshold and move this all the way down you get a more clear idea of what's actually happening in this filter so we have this offset of the filter and this gives me this cross seam and then adjusting this threshold allows me to blur or dissolve that seam now I have some options such as mask invert I can also control the height matching so right now it's set to maximum which I'm not really sure I like what that's doing so what I'm gonna do is just set the height matching to none and so now this is the effect that I get so this doesn't okay result however I can see right off the bat things like this section here I really like and I guess I could go in and continue to play around with some of these settings here to try to you know blend this as best as I can but instead of doing that why don't we just look at some different options as well so again I'm gonna come over to my layer stack and we're gonna delete this guy now for the next options I'm gonna show you just a few different techniques so here we can come over to again let's just say our base color and this time what I'm going to do is just run the transform and so I'm gonna just essentially create my own offset so I'm just gonna left click and drag and just move and create an offset here and so we have an option if I come over to my add layer once more and I do a search for material we have this option called material content aware fill and this can be a powerful feature let's take a look so I'm going to add this filter here to my layer stack then I can come over here to my brush settings and I'm just going to simply paint a stroke over the seam line so here I'm going to just paint a stroke and this filter is going to attempt to remove this seam line by filling it with content from the image so let's take a look at what we have so far in this particular case this actually did okay not perfect here but it's an interesting option we can also come in now and just draw another mask here for this vertical seam now one thing I want to say about using material content aware fill is that it can actually be quite slow to process so it's just something to keep in mind especially if you're working with higher resolutions like 4k so I'm just going to let this process and then we'll take a look at the result so here's the result we have thus far not perfect but it's not too bad and again it's just another option that you have that you can work with your in substance alchemist not really happy with this section so if I wanted to I could go in and just paint another stroke and then again just see what the content aware fill is going to feed back to me and see if feeding it more data gives me a better result I could also come over here to my add layer grab my clone patch and then manually patch and clone some of these areas so like I said this is just another option that we have now what I'm gonna do in this case is I'm gonna once again delete my layer and let's look at another example this time what I'm going to do is actually jump over to my clone patch so let's add the clone patch here to my layer stack now I'm gonna hold down the Alt key and I'm just going to sample an area so in this case maybe I'll just sample right here and then I'm just going to left click and drag and just create a stroke you can see that this works actually pretty quickly and then I have some settings here that I can change such as my overall threshold I can adjust my blur here and as well as my grid resolution reduce this slightly and again just play around with that blur so now I get something like this again not perfect but just another option one of the new features that we have in substance alchemist when working with the clone patch is that you can actually come over and grab the clone source and left-click and drag to reposition it so one thing I like to do is once I have my clone set I then just kind of move it around to see if I can't just find a different patch that might work a little better so for example maybe I could try something like this and then of course it's always comes down to going back and just playing around with your thresholds and so on to see if we can't get something that's gonna work now here in this case what I'm going to do is I'm going to add another layer on top and this time I'm going to add it yet again another clone patch and then I'm going to take care of my vertical seam so it'll be the same process I'm gonna come in and just sample a region and then just come in and paint my stroke just as before I'm going to make some adjustments here to the threshold and blur and probably adjust my grid resolution now I may come over here to my actual source and move this around to see if I can't get something to fit that gives me an optimal result okay so you can see here that I now have used a transform to do a manual offset and then to clone patches to remove the scene so now that we have our seamless material you can now see that we have the issue where we have this repeating pattern when we tile the material so what I'd like to do now is take some steps to reduce this overall grid like repeating pattern so first I'm going to save the material so I can come over to save your material and click Save I've already done this and my material is now being saved to one of the collections I have as part of my project I'm gonna come over here and create a new material which essentially just clears out the layer stack now I can left-click and drag my material to the layer stack and this essentially is like just merging all the layers down now I'm going to add a transform and then I'm going to just move the manipulator and just do a rotation here now this rotation is completely breaking my tile so we've introduced seams that I need to fix and to do that I'm going to rely on some material blending once again I'll left-click and drag and drop my material here to the layer stack and this is going to default to a height blend I can click this drop down and I'm gonna choose this new custom mask blend now I can select the mask and choose the paint brush this allows me to paint a mask manually I can come over to the brush and change the size now I can go into the 2d view and paint a mask around the edges of the tile to remove the seams in this technique I am blending the material with a rotated version of itself to introduce some variation in the repeating patterns found in the tile I can tap the X key to invert the brush value to remove the mask this acts like an eraser and the process then becomes refining the mask to reveal portions of the blended materials that fit well together I can then adjust parameters like the mass blur in contrast to further refine the result here I will disable the material blend and transform layers you can see that through blending materials with a custom mask I am able to break up the repetition and make the tiling a little less apparent here I have taken some additional time to refine the mask the key to this technique is to mask sections of rock to manually create an overlap between the layers to enhance the overall feeling of depth another option for removing repetition is to blend additional materials layering is always key when creating materials and in this example I'm using Atlas scatter to scatter flower petals on top of the rocks now I need to export my textures so I'm going to come over to the export option and next I'll go to export current view and here you can see that I can change my format in my case I'm going to be working with the substance archive file I'm using this format because it acts as an easy transport mechanism to get into other applications such as taking this into substance painter or using this in an application that supports the substance format such as a 3ds max project where this particular material was used so here you can see that I have my resolution set to 40 96 and then I can just simply click export to export the substance material file here I have the render of the material with the maps exported from substance Alchemist I used marmoset toolbag for the rendering of this image now we can take a look at the final result of the material in this arc viz seen as one example the material was used in this planter and the scene was rendered in 3ds max using the Corona renderer in this video we looked at using the new AI powered image - material and we also explored some options for tiling and removing repetition I hope you enjoyed this video thanks a lot for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: Adobe Substance 3D

Views: 68,781

Keywords: Substance Alchemist, substance alchemist tutorial, physically based rendering, texturing, pbr, allegorithmic, textures, substance source, nvidia, photogrammetry, game art, substance by adobe, stylized art, digital art, procedural, game development, machine learning, shading, 3d, gamedev, vfx, cgi, cg, game dev, learning 3d, 3d tutorial, realtime pbr

Id: EFv01Aen7js

Length: 16min 45sec (1005 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 16 2020