Substance Designer 5 - Distance and Edge Detect

in this video we're gonna take a look at the distance and edge detect nodes now the distance node can be found as part of the operational nodes so here I'm going to tap the space bar it's going to open up the operational nodes and then here towards the top you can see that we have distance so here in this example I already have a distance node in place and you can see that I'm viewing the result of a distance node here in the 2d view now the distance node is particularly good at making a Voronoi diagram as you can see here and in this example here now this pattern turns up frequently in the natural world so it can be really good for texturing now the distance node itself we just kind of zoom in and focus on this node we have two inputs for this node a mask input and a source input and I have two examples showing how these inputs are used so let's take a look at this first input that's only utilizing the mask input and that's what we're viewing here in the 2d view so to start I need to feed the distance node a mask so let's start by taking a look at what I have here in this example so here's the tile generator now this is just the tile generator that can be found here in the library and it's just gone through a couple settings to get this kind of pattern that you have here so we have these tiny little squares that have some luminance variation and they've been scattered around to create this mask so then this is pipe through a levels and all this levels is doing is just clamping the varying luminance values so that all the squares are white for this first example so then we just pipe this mass so this is the mass that we have we just pipe this into the mask input now this is the pattern that we get on the note itself if we take a look at the parameters you can see that we have a color mode so we have color and grayscale here you can see that we are just looking at this grayscale value and to actually get this pattern we're going to change the value for the maximum distance so as I start to change this value you can see how it's affecting the pattern itself so if we take a look at this at a value of zero you can see that this is the salt of the mass that we input so if we start to just slowly increase here this maximum distance you can see that this is the pattern that we get so now let's look at another example so we're gonna take a look at this second distance node now this node is actually or this distance notice actually using the mask input so it's using this exact same mask input but it's also utilizing a source input as well and this is the pattern that it generates so let's go back to that tile generator and let's look at the difference between the mask and the source so this is going to be the source remember it's that same kind of scattered little square shapes with varying luminance values and then we have this levels which is just again just clamping this so that we get more of that binary mask so we feed this mask here into the mask input and the source here of the tile generator into the source input and this is the new pattern that we get now again if we go ahead and check out the maximum distance let's go ahead and just move this all the way down here to basically zero you can see that we are looking directly at the source which brings me to the combined source and distance options so notice here that I'm looking at only the source input which is here on the distance node itself is the second input now as I start to increase my maximum distance just as before you can see that what we're doing here is we're increasing this distance and here we get the pattern now we also have the option to utilize this combine so if we come in here and we click this combine option the distance node will combine the distance computation with the source itself so in this case you can see now the pattern that we get is just a little bit different you can see some of the source pattern as well as a combination of the distance computation in our case for the particular pattern that we want to work with we're going to switch this only to source so let's just step away from the distance node for a moment and let's focus on the edge to tech node so here in this section you can see that I'm viewing the output of the edge detect node now to find this node it's going to be located in the library and you can find it by searching edge and here you'll see the edge detect node now the edge detect node itself only has just a few parameters here I have a tile random and this is being fed into the edge detect and you can see that if I just adjust the width you can see how that's updating and changing the pattern and then we also have an edge roundness so let me just kind of zoom in on this area here and let's just decrease here our edge width now if we take a look at the edge roundness lower this value you can see that we can get very sharp corners and if we increase the roundness obviously we're going to be rounding out the corners now I mentioned in the bevel know tutorial that the bevel utilizes a combination of the distance node and the edge detect node to create the bevel effect so now let's take a look at how these two nodes can be used together for example edge detect uses the distance to make edges more or less thick here's an example if we go ahead and just double-click the bevel node in this case here I'm feeding this edge detect into the bevel to create this shape and so just as we covered in the bevel node tutorial we can now start to utilize distance as it's part of the bevel node itself so here you can see where I'm starting to get you know some different values here on the bevel of these edges here's another example that was also covered in the bevel know tutorial in that a gradient is used so we have this gradient here this gradient is used to drive the bevel profile again we're using edge detect to get this shape that we want to work with and then we're going through here and we're using bevel to create some customized profiles for that bevel operation so if we take a look at the entire workflow to this we start with just some random pattern that we either create through procedural means or it could be a bitmap that we import into substance designer we can find edges on that to create a version of that pattern and then we can utilize the bevel know to bevel different patterns so let's look at another way that distance and edge Sutekh can be used to generate patterns so going back to this pattern that we had generated let's now add an edge detect to this to create some different types of patterns so I'm taking this pattern and I'm feeding this here into the edge detect and you can see that we get more of this kind of organic shape or we could use the same pattern with an edge detect to create cracks or we can use bevel to create some kind of rock shapes so as you can see the distance node in combination with edge detect and bevel can be used in various ways to create very interesting and organic patterns that you can use in the texturing process so now let's take a look at a practical example on how these techniques can be used so what we're taking a look at here is a completely procedurally authored texture here in substance designer it was created by Nicholas we're Minh who is a tech artist and developer for algorithmic and nicolas is a true substance master so here we're just going to focus in on just this area to demonstrate how these cracks were made so let's just look at this portion of the graph and as you'll see it covers a lot of the techniques that we had just talked about previously so let's start here with this pattern so it begins with this a tile random node and so we start to get this pattern and you can see that we have some varying luminance then here we have a mass that's created so just using the level snow to create a mask and these two nodes are then piped into our distance node to create this pattern again just as we talked about previously so now we want to take this pattern and we want to create some cracks so this distance node is then piped into the edge detect and so this is what we get here you can see the edge width setting is set to 1 now we just want to thicken this line up a little bit so we'll just kind of modulate this pattern so here we have a blur so we have to blur nodes here and we got just a little bit of a change on the intensity to this and what we're going to do take this first blur node and we're just going to warp it and it's going to be blended with this second blur node and so this is what we get so the lines are just a little bit thicker through going through this modulation now we have another warp node and let's take a look at this this warp node starts to just warp or distort these cracks a bit and so this warp is simply driven by this Perlin noise and this is the effect that we get so then this pattern is then piped into the slope blur as you can see here and it's just simply modulated with a slope input of this noise and so this is what we get to create these cracks now again if I just kind of move back here to my pattern so let's come back over to probably our edge detect and if I wanted to increase this let's say that we take the edge width and maybe go from 1 to 2 here in the 3d view you can see where that has just increased that width of that crack now this isn't what we'd want to do but as you can see this combination of utilizing the distance node and edge detect allows us to create specific patterns that we can then further modulate to create crack effects like you see here

Channel: Adobe Substance 3D

Views: 53,088

Keywords: Database (Software Genre), texture, textures, materials, PBR, texture library, texture collection, game texture, Game Artist (Profession), Game Arts (Video Game Developer), Video Game Development (Conference Subject), game development, 3d art, Animation, Blender, Unreal Engine (Video Game Engine Family), Unity (Software), autodesk maya, autodesk 3ds max, Modo

Id: f76shQFfqvI

Length: 9min 49sec (589 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 03 2015