SUBSTANCE Designer - Sand Tutorial

hi comrade welcome on cgma channel my name is alex say i'm environment artist in game development industry and on this channel i share my experience about everything familiar to 3d in games in this video i will teach you how to create a send material and how to render it okay so first thing you have to do is to collect some references and i highly recommend you to first of all grab some uh close-ups okay i like this one this one i think is fine as well maybe yeah this one i like this one this one this and that's my board here i will just drag it to my second screen so let's go ahead i would like to change some some nodes here near the output for example i don't like normal node i prefer height to normal now let's create a blend node always if you work with height map switch it to 16 bits per channel let's connect it here here and here and the first thing i always do is uh trying to find the best you know base of my material just by choosing from one of the existing nodes uh noises uh from substance and let's try clouds too fractal thumb for gaussian noise moisture noise maybe plasma all right that's enough it's definitely not clouds three maybe clouds two i think this one is looking more like mud not sand let's try plasma moisture noise i think it's a good one but probably for a final surface details you know let's check this one fractal sum four i can scale it down no it's not working for me it's too noisy let's try gaussian noise i think those uh three notes what is it but plasma i will need to blur it and they're almost same with gaussian noise but i have to work on it more ah i can scale it down it's not working so let's try with gaussian noise now let's slightly warp everything for now it's looking too clean i need a smooth warping so i will use same noise gaussian noise but with a different random seed now let's duplicate this warp apply safe transform here to increase the scale and let's decrease the intensity now let's get back to our references and references are very important thing for example if you will try to create a 3d cat without references instead of this you can get this let's take a look at sand as you can see here we have on each sample we have um sort of pinched areas and we need to somehow do the same and i know the way and the way is the slope blur you have to slope blur uh ascend with itself but with a small difference and as you can see now it's not pinched but instead it's inflated and we can easily fix it by inverting our slope input here this way and that's it as you can see now we have our pinch but it's a bit too sharp so i will blur it for this amount i guess switch it to minimum and reduce intensity now let's take a look at our height map what i see here is that my histogram is shifted to left side i have a lot of space in white in high areas of my height map so i can easily add some relief and details to hide map but i don't have enough space in low areas of my height map so i can't subtract maybe it will be just fine but just to ensure ensure let's just to secure myself i will shift this low thing here and i will have and now i have some you know extra space just trust me it's uh it's really helpful thing my pinched area i mean this pinched things they're very sharp like a blade maybe for sand it's okay but i just want to slightly blur uh only my high areas just a little bit and i want to show you how to do it and i always do it with um with non-uniform blur grayscale just blur it with itself just a little bit you see it only affects my high areas and it's awesome in case if you don't know how such nodes as slow blur or non-uniform blur works i will explain it in one of my next videos there will be there will be a specific video for that so stay tuned stay with me and now i want to break down some areas of my surface with the same non-uniform blur node if you don't know how to duplicate without connections this duplication is ctrl d and this duplication is ctrl plus shift plus d and let's break some areas let's use moisture noise i really like this noise it's actually one of my favorites scale it up not much and another trick i want you to i want to show you is the press space bar and zoom out you can see that this very obvious repeating because of those small you know dots here and if you want to avoid tailing visibility of your material just tweak this random seed attribute in very every noise nodes let's try this one is better this one is same this one is good okay i think this one is much better in compared to our first one let's plug it here as our blur map ah now i will hold shift key and drag it here that's how it works in case if you want to switch your input and now let's blur and as you can see it blurs almost everything which is not okay for me i will apply levels now i think it's okay a bit too intense i will create extra one with the same noise but i will scale it up and that's how i break my surface and now let's add some micro details of surface of our scent surface and i know the exact notes i would like to see here it's moisture noise and black and white spots too i will scale it up to something like four i will do the same i shown you before and i will blend it here with my surface in add sub mode and i will change my opacity very much let's plug it first oh that's so bad and let's just play i guess 0.5 i think it's okay as i said 16 bits let's duplicate and apply our black and white spots too same way but we have a problem here as you can see uh we have let me show you we have some bright areas like this area and we have some dark areas like like this one and it's not okay for me uh because i want just this small interesting surface details exactly dots spots black and white spots not big areas and here's easiest way to fix it high pass grayscale and as you can see it removes our big dark and bright areas this way but it keeps those small black and white spots which is great for me let me show you how it works much better however i have to increase scale i think even three times and i want to see just a little bit of those surface details here i look at this and i still don't like it and there is the exact reason of why i don't first of all let's increase our normal intensity to 10 and let's get back to our references especially to our close up references and if you look on this it's not that much close up you will see that some of those pieces are shining like this one you understand but we have only 2k resolution even if we'll have 4k resolution we won't be able to create each piece of sand separately uh so we just can't create this amount of crystals but there's a trick how can we reach this result sort of this result let me show you use white noise here is it it's just a noise one pixel each and create a shape just a shape parabola per parabol probably apply normal here increase intensity to something around 150 to our white noise apply gradient map hold alt key and press here you will have your normal map here in your 2d view but you will still be in your gradient map node and zoom in a bit and click gradient editor and pick gradient and do this and that's it you have this gradient take a look here that's what we've got it's just a normal noise we don't need it anymore now let's blend it with our normal map but we don't need everything from here we have to mask it uh duplicate white nose very important change random seed parameter to any create histogram scan increase contrast and use position of 0.05 for example and use normal blend node let's combine that's it and now take a look here you see you probably not seen yet let's increase amount and that's what we've got much better isn't it i know it is i will decrease my opacity and decrease my position now let's compare before and after before and after so now we have sort of sort of a sparkles here and it's great but uh yet our scent is not interesting as i want it to be and i will show you another one more trick it is direction imagine uh that there were a wind here from here to here or any direction it doesn't matter and now i will show you how to reach sort of this effect create a gradient map default this one and just slow blur it but you have to do it before your surface small details it's our final polishing details you have to do it somewhere here grayscale here slope here and that's what we've got you see increased samples and now we can easily see that we have a direction but also it blurs everything and i don't like this i think i will switch my mode to minimum and that's it much better there's a small problem of this trick very strong theme here let me show you how to fix it take a look before after unfortunately our stand is still not as interesting as i want it to be i want to look at i want to add some details uh as you can see on references i mean those it has some sticks small random pieces of everything whatever is near your sand it might be a trees i think i will just add some bigger pieces of sand of rocks or stones and there's another easy way how to do it and it's just a tile sampler node with uh a lot of in my case this amount paraboloid patterns with uh this color random mask random and i don't want them to be everywhere it's not okay for me i don't like it blend add 16 bits don't forget it here and here that's what we've got oh it's too intense just a bit that's enough the thing uh i don't like is that as i said they are everywhere but in fact they shouldn't be and i will use the my height map this one as a mask that's it i will tweak levels and i will just use this slider mask map threshold or threshold i don't know and now it's good i have the this small pieces only in my deep areas and now our small pieces as you can see are very and very clean and perfect i will just slightly warp them now it's good i just noticed that i left one mistake here that i applied my direction after this surface damaging nodes and now i can see some sort of leaks here i will just change its place from here oops to here and i i finally like my sand i mean height map of my sand and here's another good trick for you in case if you would like to add some this sort of uh smooth concaves to your sand here's easiest way how to how you can do it tile sampler slightly warp it like i did here a bit of blur and blend it to your surface in a subtraction mode you can also add a mask from the input itself to subtract the tile sampler stuff only from high areas of your height map and that's how it looks like and after that just play with uh parameters here in tail sampler scale amount i mean scale and mask random but for me i don't need it so i will skip this step i like it as it is in fact it's really easy to create a base color for send first step open photoshop i have three images of my close-ups here i will skip this one and i will use them in photoshop this way first one oh canvas is too big image adjustments shadows highlights i don't need this eye here same thing this one few times now you see the difference we will just do the same like we did with sparkles on normal map with a gradient node with a gradient map node let's choose one of our noises this one for example moisture noise click on gradient editor and just paint over here that's it for now it has a big areas i don't want them to be here let's try again and now it's better it's more noisy as you can see let's keep this one create another i will do the same with another image again again that's it and last one and this one is definitely the best now i create a white noise i duplicate this three gradient map nodes here and plug it this way and now i will just blend them together i think i will copy this note with different random seed and once again this one is more interesting than it was before one more blend node good i like it i will blend those three together as well i did the same thing with a random seed and noise here now that's okay and now i blend them together and there's actually one more interesting thing i can do with my color to make it just to highlight the shapes of my sand i'm not sure that it will work but it's worth trying i plug it here before the actual damage and create a curvature smooth node this one and what we can do with it is uh suddenly blend in overlay mode however i have to tweak levels just a little bit and now you can see shapes of our sand it looks a bit too intensive right now i will decrease it to this amount what else you can do is a high pass grayscale to decrease the range and now let's try plug it to our base color node now i see that it's too intensive i decrease it to 0.1 even less let's slightly increase the ambient occlusion one more thing about sand some of the pieces of sand are transparent or semi-transparent it means that light passes through them so we have to add some sort of subsurface scattering and i will try to add it into my base color as well for this i will use ambient occlusion but different one with strong intensity and small radius this way create hsl node increase saturation slightly increase lightness blend it with itself and use our ao as mask and now you can see that our deep areas are more saturated and brighter before after let's play around with hsl let's try playing with our mask which is ambient occlusion increase radius not that much i played around with uh my settings and that's what i've got uh last thing we have to do with our base color is to separate our sand with those small pieces which are almost invisible now because of the same color duplicate hsl here decrease lightness and saturation blend it and use this small warp details like our mask that's it now i can see them here and on my diffuse map as well and now roughness use the grayscale conversion and plug our diffuse map here that's it for now it's too glossy now let's come back to our normal map sparkles and let's use this noise let's blend it with our roughness in subtraction mode and now as you can see our sparkles are not only in normal but also in roughness and they will shine like like here on our reference by the way if you want to know some extra good tips and tricks just research graphs of good artists i will attach links to few of my favorite pieces in description by the way my instagram substance masters also you can find a few other in-game rod but i've chosen those because i'm a simple man i see 5 stars rating and i see a low price ok i mean i like them especially volume 1 and 4. others are good as well i'm sure but i didn't even open them to be honest let me show you a few materials which i was researching this one is definitely my favorite one this one was helpful for me as well in one of my cases also i took few good tips from this one about fabric and some sort of uh modeling inside of substance designer and this one melting snow good example of how to work with intersection of different surfaces in this case it's snow and stones and snow is great itself for sure and great thing in substance masters that all of the graphs are commented as you can see here so you don't have to waste a lot of time for searching for what you need and in fact i didn't watch any video tutorials about substance designer they are all too long and boring i don't know about substance masters maybe i'm wrong i hope my one i mean this one with sand won't be boring but i'm not sure you tell me is it or not looking good on sphere as well with any hdri map and now i'm finally happy with the result but before we go to presentation i would like to do one thing which i do each time i work with sort of organic materials like sand i just went to the very beginning of my graph here and now i will try different noises here as my first input now it's purely noise and as you can see a result is a bit different let's try to slope it i think it's interesting let's try another one fractal sum four this one is very different but it still looks like a sand and i think it's cool it looks a bit more dirty yet dirty what if we will tweak slope yeah i think it's cool i really like it and now last one this one is good as well and now let's compare them in mama set tool back in the final presentation [Music] [Music] so [Music] do [Music] i hope this video was helpful for your comrade or at least interesting or funny if yes hit like and subscribe buttons it will help both you and me and if you can share it please don't hesitate doing it as well and that's the way i'm planning to record my videos if you don't like something maybe music or overall speed or maybe my speech please let me know in comments it's really important for me this channel won't be like how to create a chair it will be more like how to create literally anything for games in 3d it's actually much more complex than you think to keep it fast and informative at the same time especially to cut everything like this please if you and that's it for now thanks for watching and see you in the next video gun

Channel: Cg Ammo

Views: 25,287

Keywords: painter, allegorithmic, material, shader, rock, stone, tile, free, moss, wood, metal

Id: oPauF1fwZuU

Length: 28min 21sec (1701 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 09 2020