Tree Bark - from a Single Image with Substance Alchemist

[Music] [Applause] hello let's start with this part one of the three bar tutorial the goal of this video is to take a single photograph of a tree bark plug it into substance alchemist process it there a little bit and get a final seamless pbr texture in the end this is the easiest technique and if you follow it you will see how easy it is to get quite impressive result just by using a single photo since we are on the topic of taking photos for substance alchemist let's discuss some tips and tricks first the idea of this tutorial is to quickly get the best possible results you can in that context i think that any camera phone would work just fine because if you ask me the best camera is the one that you have with you so you can actually take the photographs technically you can feed any photo to substance alchemist and it will try to detangle all the information it can but i think that if we follow some simple guidelines we can help alchemists get way better results so let's quickly go through some of the basic concepts when taking photos for these workflows one of the things that you should definitely avoid is direct sunlight and harsh shadows alchemists can delight the photographs even with direct sunlight but it's better to avoid that if you can better approach is to take the photographs either in shade or during overcast days basically only with ambient light when framing the photograph try to take the photo straight on as you can see in all of these examples since we are extracting data to be used as a texture the best way is to frame it and take the photo straight on like you would for any texture reference but be careful don't go too close like in this example over here because yes you might get all the micro and fine details in this tree bark but the problem with this is that once you start tiling the repetition pattern will be very visible on the other hand don't go too wide as well because you won't be able to extract the details you might need to get a nice texture some kind of a medium distance is by far the best option try to avoid any kind of digital zooms as well modern phones usually have more than one lens so try to use the one with the highest focal length or the highest optical zoom so we can compress the perspective and get a better image for our extraction turn off any filters or aids that you might have enabled in your camera application for example modern phones have that blurry background effect which will only be detrimental for the workflow we are trying to achieve here these are some bad examples direct sunlight too close or too far away and here are some well not perfect but good enough examples these are some of the three bark photographs that i have taken during my travels in the past couple of months and they're all available to you with this tutorial in the raw state as they came from my phone i was using the samsung galaxy s20 when taken feel free to use them for your own learning purposes and see what you can make out of them there is a multitude of various types of tree barks here as you can see like the naked ones the ones with more or less moss or liking different structures and different scales of details but we're going to focus our efforts on this photograph right here it's a very straightforward example to start with it has a nice structure of the bark and these layered chunks of dried wood now let's switch to alchemists and start working on it if you haven't used substance outwards before you can find a lot of tutorials right here on the substance academy that will definitely help you with to get up to speed with the basics i'll just recap the most important elements of the interface substance alchemist has four tabs or four contexts one is called explore which is for exploring into your materials second one is create this one is used for actually creating new materials and blending them together next is inspire tab where you can tweak the colors and get some inspiring variations of materials and last is the manage used for managing your whole material library since we are creating new materials we are going to spend all our time in the create tab here on the left hand side you have your resources materials that came packaged with substance alchemist and the filters which are grouped by their purpose you also have settings for your viewport that you see here in the middle on the right hand side of the create tab is where your layer stack will will be once we start building the material and we will get to that really fast let's quickly set up substance alchemist for our work first thing we create a new project called treebar architecture project this bottom part of the alchemist interface is the part where you have your materials that you created for this specific project alongside with all the folder collections next we're going to set up the viewport to help us see things a little bit better in the viewport settings under global parameters make sure that you're working in 2k resolution this is to me a nice balance between speed and quality then switch to plane mesh as that is the best way to see the tiling for the materials you can leave the environment set to panorama that's completely fine some of the settings can also be found as shortcuts in the viewport specifically controls for camera displacement tiling and shadows make sure the shadows are disabled so that icon is not blue set the tile into two by 2 so we can see how it had material style both in vertical and horizontal fashion and crank the displacement quality all the way up we can leave the amplitude at 0.25 as we can easily tweak it this later with this the table is set and we can finally start working as we discussed we're going to start with this photo over here by drag and dropping it into substance alchemist interface once you do that especially if you're in the create tab alchemist is going to present you with a pop-up choice it has recognized that you are drag and dropping an image and it's giving you a couple of options to tell to tell it what to do with it you can choose to convert it into a material import it as a texture or just use it as a bitmap for our use case we want to convert it into material so let's choose that option just want to make sure that you're using the ai powered one not the old bitmoto material alchemist will immediately start creating the material that we need making the base three layers already for us base material is the default background layer then we have the imported image and the third one is actually the image to material filter which has finished calculating and extracting the data from the photo and as you can see right out of the box the results are not that bad it has managed to properly extract the high data recognizing the peaks and valleys now we can tweak the displacement amplitude to make it more true to real life if we want we can tweak the settings of the image the material filter itself select the filter and let's check all the parameters that we can tweak first batch of tweaks are the geometry details where you can balance the micro medium and large details when extracting the height map from the image for example you might reduce the micro details or increase them if you want same goes for the rest of them there is also an option to equalize the geometry details since i quite like how it turned out with default options i'm going to keep it like that for now we can also tweak the ambient occlusion the best way to see ambient occlusion is by pressing tab on your keyboard which will switch from 3d to a td view or a combined one and then you can cycle between those views using the same tab button special thing about the 2d view is that here at the bottom part you can toggle between the specific channels of your material for example base color normal roughness metallic height map ao opacity and the scan which is the original image that we imported let's take the ao channel and tweak it as we wish next option is the lighting intensity if you switch to the base color channel you will see that alchemist has already removed a lot of lighting information from the photo which you can track by switching to the scan channel here the crevices are way darker because it's very hard for the light to reach them compared to that the base color south's alchemist ai has removed a lot of those shadows if you don't like that or if you think that the effect is too strong you can balance it out by using the delight intensity filter last option that we're going to tweak is the roughness one switch to the roughness channel and tweak the base value we can all agree that the tree bark is a very rough type of material so let's be it increase the variations little bit and make them a touch sharper we can also mix in some more information from the albedo which adds nice variation in this case if we need to we can even invert the roughness but the values are okay for this material going back to the material view like we discussed out of the box the results are all cache but there are a couple of problems that we should fix the most obvious problem are the seams which you can see over here so we need to fix them the second problem i would like to fix is this piece of the texture right here this dark patch the problem with this is that once you start tiling the texture it will immediately become recognizable tiling pattern let's remove it by cropping it out from the material using the filter by the same name there are two ways that you can add a filter to your layer stack one ways is coming here to the left side where filters are and choosing the filter that you want to add the filter that we need is the scan processing group click on the crop filter and drag it wherever you want in your layer stack that's option number one option number two is similar to the way you add nodes in substance designer while you are in in the layer stack press space bar and start typing the name of the filter you want to add click it to add it to the layer stack but we don't want to crop the image after it had generated the material we actually want to do it before but so what we're going to do is temporarily turn off the image to material layer so it doesn't calculate while we work then move the crop filter below it this will crop the imported image before it gets processed through the ai in order to adjust the crop switch to the t2d view go to the scan 1 channel so you can see the imported photo select the crop filter and adjust the transform box what you want to do is to crop out the parts that we don't need making sure that we keep the original aspect ratio of the imported photo if you press the keyboard t you can check how the texture looks when it's styled no need to make it perfect for the first try and you can always come back and tweak it we can go back now to the 3d view and re-enable the to image to material filter alchemist is now going to take that corrupt version of the imported photo and regenerate the materials through the ai the dark patch is gone and the seams are also a little bit better as well and now we get our very nice high details back that's over the first problem so let's deal with the second one the seams there are many ways that you can tweak the seams in substance alchemist the simplest way is using the tiling filter they can also be found in the scan processing group there are some more advanced ways for example using a mktile advanced or even doing it through the material content to wear field let's try a couple of them starting with the tiling filter this filter crops in a little bit more and tries to blend in the edges of the of the texture itself we can play with the settings to see if we can get a nicer transition the filter will try to detect how the edge of the texture looks like and how it can blend with the neighboring edges adjusting the threshold controls the amount of edge overlap you can also blur that transition to iron out potential problematic areas you could even choose which material channel will guide the edge blend i chose to only use the height information this is looking way better now and we can check before and after to see the effect and do any additional tweaks if needed even the simplest filter has done the job for us in this case maybe we'll explore some different ones in the following tutorials moving on there are a couple of more things that we can tweak looking at the height channel that i got from the ai it has done an incredible job of extracting all that information from a single vote but to my liking i would like these individual segments of the tree bark to be a little bit sharp for that we are going to utilize the custom filter that i made for substance alchemist which you can find among the assets that come with this tutorial or you can check out the bonus video that comes with this chapter and that video teaches you how to create your own custom filter for substance alchemist using substance designer the filtering case is just a software designer slope blur applied only to the height channel by default the density of 10 is way too much so we're going to tweak it if we zoom in and start increasing the intensity we'll see how the shapes are getting inflated and sharpened up which works really well especially for this type of tree bark to bring out all the sharpness of the individual chunks for the intensity 0.3 seems like a nice value it's probably a very subtle thing but those subtle elements really add a lot in the end we're now almost done just some final adjustments by using the adjustment layer little bit of sharpness helps with the mobile phone images which sometimes can be on the soft side and we can do some final tweaks to the roughness and more importantly since we modified the height we should also recalculate the normal map we can do that under the height category just scroll down and click apply modification to normal which basically re-bakes the normal map from the kite information bringing up the sharpness from the slow blur filter same thing goes for the ao channel which you can also recalculate from the height information and tweak the values depth of 0.2 does the trick as a final touch let's add a little bit of dust before we finish off this material apply the dust filter and tweak the values lower the quantity to 0.3 as we don't need as much increase the opacity to like 0.6 or 0.7 and set the depth to 0.8 let's also pick a different color a warmer wooden one dust filter will also blur out the height map a bit where it's applied and we're done let's say our material call it treebark01 and click save alchemist is now saving this layer stack and it's going to generate a thumbnail for our material we can double check to see how the material looks let's switch the mesh to the rounded cylinder and we have a small problem the texture is going the wrong way there are two ways that you can fix this one way is you can rotate the texture in your dcc or rendering tool of choice wherever you are applying it to or we can also rotate it in alchemist by applying the transform filter to the top of our layer stack enable step transformations and put the rotation value of 0.25 which is actually 19 degrees let's quickly enable the shadows as well to see a little bit more of depth for a single photo extraction if you ask me this is quite impressive don't forget to save the rotating material as the new version as well last thing is to export the textures that we can use them in the end click on the export button and then on the export current view default text parameters are everything we need for now choose the folder where to export these textures and enable subfolders set it to export as png 4k resolution and click export the material will be added to the export queue and alchemist is going to recalculate and operate the entire material in the background exporting it once it's finished if you go to the export folder there you will see all the textual channels that alchemist has exported auto base color height normal and roughness so to recap we talked about the good and the bad ways to take photographs for this kind of material extraction then we imported the image and extracted the data using the ai method of image to material after that we cropped out the details that we didn't want to appear in our texture and fix the tiling in the seams adjusting the sharpness height map and the ao along the way finally we added a little bit of dust as a final touch which brings us to the end of this video see you in the next one where we will be creating a custom filter for a substance alchemist using substance designer bye

Channel: Adobe Substance 3D

Views: 15,621

Keywords: materials, procedural, PBR, Physically based rendering, Scans, Photogrammetry, scanning, environment art, 3D texturing, realistic, texturing, 3D material, tutorial, tree bark, tree bark substance designer, substance Alchemist, substance, texture, material, substance designer, substance alchemist tutorial, game dev, how to, tree, easy, game

Id: N01PdhIR-EQ

Length: 17min 16sec (1036 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 22 2021