Breakdown: Clay Bricks in Substance

Daniel Swing has presented his new Substance project and shared a couple of screenshots that give some production details on his brick materials.

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100% made in Substance Designer and rendered in Marmoset Toolbag! Here you can find 16 alternate configurations of my VERY toggle-able brick material. Screen-shots included for a micro-tutorial!

This is my 7th and (so far) best attempt at a brick material. I don’t know why but I always go back to it and find new things to improve up on, every single time.

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Please note: I will not show how to make a herringbone pattern, since I…”borrowed” Josh Lynch’s method. So I will refer you to his tutorial instead.

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Also, I believe that some credit to Kyle Horwood is due, for his substance challenge over at polycount which kicked off with a brick material challenge and the very start to my substance journey!

Daniel Swing

Here goes the breakdown from Daniel:

This is how I generate the general shape and the start to my height-map.
The ‘blend’-node has exposed parameters for the ‘Cropping Area’ (Float4), so that I can mask out where I want which pattern.

I then plug the gray-scale pattern into an ‘Edge Detect’ node, to mask out the grout between the bricks – This allows for very precise control over the grout shape.

I also generate patterns for slopes and bulges, which I blend into the height-map.
These tile generators are exact copies of the first one and are connected to the same exposed parameters, so that I don’t have to toggle them individually.

I use the ‘Height Blend’-node to add in the actual grout details to the height-map, with the ‘height-offset’ exposed so that I can toggle the amount of grout. I use the height-mask as a secondary control to the height-intensity of the grout.

This is how I generate most noises that I use in this graph. The ‘radius’ parameter in the ‘Highpass’ node determines the island size of the noise while the Histogram determines amount and sharpness.

I credit Mark Foreman for giving me this idea!

And the last little bonus that I wanted to show. I multiply a ‘Vertical Noise’ into the gradient pattern and adjust it to create this kind of rain mask that I feather in to my Base Color and Roughness.

I credit Wes McDermott for giving me this idea!

Daniel Swing, 3D & Texture Artist

The breakdown was originally posted here.

Breakdown: Clay Bricks in Substance

Daniel Swing has presented his new Substance project and shared a couple of screenshots that give some production details on his brick materials.

Daniel Swing

Daniel Swing, 3D & Texture Artist

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