Substance and Fluent Texturing Addons Tutorial in Blender | Polygon Runway

hey everyone welcome to my new tutorial this time i won't be building a new scene instead i want to talk a bit about the texturing workflow because i've been searching for some viable solution for a longer time and even though i use substance painter and there are some alternatives like pixel and stuff like that i was looking for a solution how to do a quick texturing inside of blender in real time without jumping to a different application and i think i just found one this is connected to a recent migration of substance tools into adobe suite and their release of a blender add-on that makes use of substance files in blender a breeze that's the first one and the second is add-on that recently came out from the developers of fluent modeling tools it's called fluent materializer and it's a set of tools that can help you with some basic tasks like masking and adding grunges and stuff like that and i know there are multiple add-ons that help you with this but for some kind of reason this one seems really easy to use and well rounded without much of an overhead that's why i picked it and i will show you a combined workflow with these two add-ons and how you can use it to quickly create results like this without even jumping to substance painter if you don't really need to that said substance painter is still industry standard for texturing really powerful tool with a lot of built-in features like auto unwrapping baking layers smart materials and for complex texturing i think it's the best you can get right now but for simple workflows i think this solution works just fine if you're new to the channel and you'd like to see content like this in the future please hit that subscribe button and the bell button to get notified when i release something new and if you enjoyed this video please leave that like it really helps the channel and if you're new to the world of 3d and blender and you're just looking around you might be interested in more effective way of learning so please go ahead and check out my website polygonrunway.com i of course is specifically designed to get you knowledge you need in the most effective way and in shortest time possible and you will go from low poly scenes all the way to full character creation in no time if you choose to pick up our new ultimate 3d bundle so if you're interested please go check it out and now let's jump right into empty blender file and before we start let's make sure we have everything we need and the first thing we'll need to enable are some add-ons obviously we'll need the fluent materializer and the adobe substance add-on i've linked these in the description just go ahead there's an article from adobe and you can find the link to download the add-on here it's in pre-release so it doesn't have like its own product page or anything just go and download it and after you get that one you can go to a blender market and get fluent materializer it's a paid add-on it's priced at 35 bucks i really think it's worth it you will see what's inside in a second i just have to say i'm in no way affiliated with the addon maker the link in the description is not an affiliate link so this is just my honest opinion and the third thing make sure you have the note wrangler add-on active because i will use it a lot in a note editor just go to the edit preferences and let's search for node and you will find the node wrangler add-on and just activate it regarding the other add-ons you will download them probably as zip files and you will just click install and locate your zip files right there and activate it same as the node wrangler so after you've done everything let's just delete the default cube and i will leave the lights and the camera in place and let's press shift a and i will add a monkey head here suzanne default blender monkey and let's just press ctrl 3 to add some subdivision surface modifier to make this look nice and smooth and right click and shade smooth so i will use this model to demonstrate the add-ons and before i import any materials i want to set up some render settings so we get this out of the way so let's go to the render properties and while in ev i will enable ambient occlusions screen space reflections and refraction in case we need later and we can of course enable bloom for the preview purposes and now i will switch these two cycles and configure that i will switch to gpu compute make sure you have gpu and that you have it enabled in your system preferences and now let's ramp this up to something like 512 because i don't want to go back here later and i will just set up some denoising here and performance in case i will need to do some final render later and this is just to make the tiling larger for the final render so that it runs a little bit quicker on the gpu and now with this out of the way and now let's press n to expand the sidebar here and after activating these add-ons you should be able to see substance 3d add-on here and fluent as well so let's start with the substance 3d first it's very simple ui basically you have two options here to get your materials first is substance community assets and the second is substance 3d assets this will take you to a standard substance asset website which is subscription based and you can get a lot of high quality materials here i use it a lot on my recent projects and i really recommend it though you can go to the community assets and get some assets from other users for free and the great thing about this add-on is that there are not only these two places for your assets because substance format is pretty common now so you can search for some substance materials libraries from other creators these are created with substance designer and these are sbs ar files that you can just import with this plugin and use directly in blender now so it's not only adobe subscription assets but you can get these materials basically anywhere let's get some free assets by clicking on the community assets button here this will direct you to the website and you will see some materials here some are stylized some are photorealistic and scanned and i'm interested in some wood materials here so let's click the boot category and now let's get this one here the smooth wood let's just click download and the next one i'm interested in is the wood substance zero zero one here i like that one i want to combine like the smooth varnished wood material with more rough one and after you get these two files let's jump right back into blender and after you get these two let's jump into blender click the import button and just locate your files and let's import the first one the smooth wood this might load a little bit and you will see you have it imported but it's not visible in the viewport even though if you go to material preview because our object don't have any material assigned so this material is imported within the add-on but we didn't create blender material yet and you do this by clicking this button here so let's click the material button just wait a second and your material is created and this looks really low resolution right now because we need to change some settings that you can find here in the substance palette in the substance 3d sidebar and you can see you can change the resolution right here and this is a great feature you can just change this texture to 2k wait a second and it will update just one thing to keep in mind if you use render preview with the cycles and you change this back to something else this will not update in cycles preview you need to go to material preview to see the results but here it will update just fine so this is really powerful to be able to change the texture settings on the fly and you can see bunch of different settings here these are material specific this will be different for every material a little bit with some really high quality procedural materials from adobe you can find color options here a lot of different settings and basically whatever inputs the material creator prepared for you you can use them right here so for example we can reduce the scratches here and they will disappear from the texture you can change the scale of the texture right here and you can see how it updates in real time and updates your maps in the background so really powerful add-on to be able to work with substance files directly and if it were only about this add-on we could end it right here but i want to show you how you can incorporate it with the fluent materializer how you can combine them and mask these materials it's possible to do this but if you just go to shading and start to change this material here it might break sometimes because anytime you make some changes here this add-on will generate this material or update it so in case you do some changes directly in the material and in those node groups it might not work but there is a workaround around this so first of all make sure you have your materials saved in blender because if you remove the material from object and then close your file and open it up again if it isn't assigned to any object it will just disappear because it will be considered orphan data and blender will throw it away so to make sure this material exists just click this icon to protect it to basically create the fake user and now we can go ahead and import another material so let's click the import button and import the other one and before we assign it to object let's make sure we remove this one and just assign it same as before and again we'll change some settings so i'll change this to 2k and you can see there are a bunch of different options here um for example you can edit the roughness directly here without going to the node editor so i will increase this to something like point eight and we can reduce a little bit of the texture so i will reduce the stripes to something like point three it will make the texture a little bit more subtle and smooth so we have another material in place and now i can click this button to protect it once again and remove it from our object and as you can see these materials are here and the f suggests that these are protected with fake user and now let's select the original material and we can rename it to monkey and let's switch to shading workspace so we have our node editor here and the first thing i want to do is to get these two materials right here so i can mix them and we can just switch the material on the monkey directly select the node group and you can see this is the material that the substance generated and basically it's all basic blender stuff we just have this note group and if you press tab to and if you press tab to inspect it you will see these are just maps imported and mapped to our output so this is the group i'm interested in just for the safety you can protect this node block as well and i'll press just ctrl c and switch back to monkey material and control v to paste it here and i will repeat that for the other material as well let's protect this group and let's paste it right here so we now have two node groups with the substance materials and we can mix them up and i will use and instead of creating and mix rgb notes for these separate channels we can use that fluent materializer so let's press n to expand the sidebar here in the note editor and you can find there is a fluent option here and the second way to access this add-on is to press f in the node editor it will create this pi menu that you can choose some options from options to mask to create the new layers to mix layers and stuff like that this is basically the workhorse of the add-on and this is a nice to have option but it's so powerful that i needed to get this plug-in right away because you have some sections for different maps you can choose from and then you have all bunch of grunge maps imperfections and stuff like that and you can just drop them in your nodes like this and now if we make use of the node wrangler add-on if i press ctrl shift and click this node group we'll preview how that looks and you can see this is the map that i've chosen here and imported into the node editor and this way you can choose from all the different maps right here and to be able to do this so easily without importing external images without setting up note groups is really worth the money itself and now if i tap into this you can see this is a note group there's no magic happening here this is basically all native blender features just packed into usable note groups that you can use right out the back and speed up your workflow so i'll press x and delete this for a second and first thing i want to do is to mix those mood materials here so let's select the principle bsdf shader and i'll press f and import mix layers node and this is node that serves basically just for mixing different layers and you can see there are two color inputs two roughness inputs metallic inputs and stuff like that and you guessed it we need to just connect these maps into those slots so let's do that right now and of course we need to control shift click the principle shader because we didn't cancel the preview before and now we can see that wood shader and you can increase the mask to blend between those two but you can of course connect the mask and it doesn't really matter if you just create an empty texture and painting you can paint in the mask of course but you can use some of these grunges as well there is another option let me move this to the side a little bit if you select the mix layers note group and press f you are able to create mask with edges so let's create that and it will automatically connect into the mask slot and you can see it's already masking out the materials to preview these edges you can again press ctrl shift click and see how that looks and of course if you go to render this looks better because if we inspect this and you can see this uses the ambient occlusion node so again it's native stuff in blender and this works really better and nicer in cycles and you can modify the distance to edit these edges and now if we preview the material you now have nice mask for your different wood materials imported from substance files but we can go even further because you can see there's some texture input in the edges node group so you can just choose whatever grunge map you want for example the grunge grunge04 and connect it to a texture and now if we inspect this you can see we have a grungy edge mask just in a few clicks so this is really powerful feature you can make it a little bit larger smaller whatever you want and now if we explore this you can see we have a nice wear effect directly in blender without taking this out into another software and by using substance material natively in blender so if at any time you need to make some changes since these are protected node groups from original protected materials you can just switch to substance and for example change the resolution of the map and for example scroll down and change the hue of the material and it will update there as you can imagine this is really powerful to have a quick note setup like this with all of these grunge maps directly within blender i really love this workflow for some simple projects especially the isometrics projects that i do where i don't need extra detail and extra close-up from the objects i just need some cool looking materials and occasionally some wear effects some masking some grunges and stuff like that this is really perfect for that so i'll be probably using this a lot and i will definitely use these maps from fluent because it's so easy to import them with one click directly into the node editor so this is our material we can preview it rendered let me move the light a little bit so we better see what's going on here and we have this nice wooden wear effect directly in blender so basically there's no reason you shouldn't get that substance add-on and search for some free substance materials go ahead and give that fluent materializer a try i think they have a free trial so give it a go and you will see if it helps you and just a small note when i open this file again i could see that i can no longer edit the substance materials even though these maps got saved the protected nodes are still there i'm not able to work with the substance files anymore so i just wanted to give you a heads up this will probably happen with those files but when i opened my recent project where i use these substance files i can see that these works no problem i can still edit these settings so this might be substance file specific issue which is connected to those community files so maybe try different free assets or maybe try some different substance file library just remember this substance add-on is still in the early access is still in the beta stage so there might be some issues and quirks you will encounter but overall this workflow works but just not with these two particular files that i used in the tutorial i really hope this workflow will help you with your projects and you enjoyed this video if you did please leave the like and again if you're new to the channel please hit that subscribe button if you want to see more content like this in the future thank you all for watching and have a wonderful day [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Polygon Runway

Views: 22,156

Keywords: blender, 3d, tutorial, isometric, diorama, blender tutorial, low poly blender, illustration, isometric illustration tutorial, 3d illustration, 3d modeling, 3d modeling tutorial, blender modeling, blender modeling tutorial, modeling, modeling tutorial blender, 3d modeling software, blender 2.93, blender 2.93 tutorial, substance texturing, blender substance, blender substance painter workflow, fluent materializer, blender procedural textures, blender texturing, blender texture

Id: V8ol45ccQ0Q

Length: 19min 5sec (1145 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 20 2021