Allegorithmic and Nikola Damjanov have recently shared an article that shows the way you can make awesome abstract doodles with the help of Substance Designer.
Allegorithmic and Nikola Damjanov have recently shared an article that shows the way you can make awesome abstract doodles with the help of Substance Designer. The idea here is to go wild and let your imagination take over the tool. It a good way to practice your skills, but it’s also a kinds of self-therapy.
Here is a short piece of the tutorial:
I start with a custom mesh from any DCC app. I suggest you limit yourself to primitives at the start as you’ll get UVs out of the box, and so you’ll be quicker. I tend to abuse modifiers at this point – whatever it takes to get me an interesting shape and a good starting point. This scene can be as complex as you wish but you shouldn’t overthink it; just go with the flow, as the whole point is to experiment. I even have this strange habit of deliberately not saving source files for those meshes so as to force myself to come up with something new every time.
Before you export your scene make sure you have a separate material assigned for every part you want to individually control in SD. I usually have two or three materials set up. One of them is for some light-emitting object, and that one doesn’t even need UVs. You can also plan ahead a bit and set up some cameras upfront. Those will get exported with the FBX so you can access them in Substance Designer’s 3D view.
Let’s go through one of the setups. Everything started from a simple Cube3D. The first layer of details came from the main shape, but it used Shape Mapper and Swirl to modify the ornaments.
Nikola Damjanov
Make sure to check out the full guide here. You can some of the meshes and source files from Nikola on Gumroad.