Breakdown: Creating Five Stylized Materials in Substance 3D & UE5
Radu Sircu joined us to explain the process behind five stylized materials, from cracked earth and tiles to moss and notebooks, with step-by-step guidance and detailed node setups.
Introduction
Hello, my name is Radu Sircu. I'm an Environment Artist with a master's degree from New3dge in Paris, and I currently work at Brain Jar Games on Dead as Disco. My main specializations are stylized environments and, above all, procedural textures made in Substance 3D Designer.
It's been a long time since I posted anything new on ArtStation, so I wanted to do some stylized material studies for fun and, at the same time, improve my personal workflow with different subjects.
I browsed the web for references and inspiration and picked a few subjects that felt interesting to take on. I spent around 2-4 hours on each texture in my free time, after work in the evenings.
As it's a breakdown of five materials, I'm going to focus on the key nodes in each one; hopefully it'll be useful enough to see my workflow!
Cursed Land Texture
On the Cursed Land texture, Height Extrude was a powerful tool for quickly creating rock shapes; I used it for both the ground and smaller rocks.
Multidirectional Warp feels messy most of the time, breaking the shape too much, but in this case it was a game-changer between "artificial" cracks and natural ones.
Most of the time, people use height directly to create the base color, but the Ambient Occlusion node is very effective for getting a good base color with lots of tonal variation (sometimes it's nice to simplify it with a quantized grayscale).
Have a look at the entire process:
Bathroom Tile Texture
I often make my Slope Blur pattern by blurring a scribble shape that I made in Photoshop; it gives a nice painterly pattern that works wonders for color splatters and more!
In this case, the Slope Blur was used for edge deterioration.
Often, to get normal map variation, it's useful to put a sphere shape in a Normal node and extract the color to a Gradient Map; that way, I can use the grayscale of the tiles to vary the normals.
Take a look at the process:
Soviet School Notebook
The first challenge of the Soviet school notebook was giving the book a nice depth. I was considering sculpting a book and baking it, but I wanted to stay in Designer as much as possible, so I used Height Extrude, which did the job perfectly.
The only imported texture was the Russian text that I took from Google Images, and I extracted the alphas in Photoshop and arranged them on a 2K texture.
I used Alpha Merge with the Tile Sampler color to control the overlap between the pages more effectively. I needed two samplers: one only for the grayscale height and another for textures such as the page pattern. To give both exactly the same tiling and settings, I exposed the main Tile Sampler parameters.
Check out the overview of the process:
Rocky Moss
On the mossy rock material, I scattered the moss with the Tile Sampler, and I masked most of it using the cavities in the rocky base.
When I make rock materials, I try to think of them like a sandwich; I keep the same direction and a harmonic overlap across each shape.
Ambient Occlusion plays a crucial role in the depth of the material. For stylized materials, I try to get the most depth from the base color, and the normal map only supports the texture and isn't essential.
Here's the GIF showing the entire process:
Generic Moss
The generic moss material is the simplest one. I mostly just made a leaf shape, blurred it, and scattered it by using the coordinates of a blurred normal map.
Most of the workflow was exporting this texture over and over with different variations until it felt right in Unreal Engine; it was one of the few textures I had to check in UE because the Designer preview wasn't accurate enough.
Have a look at how it was created:
Presentation Setup
On the presentation side, I try to strike a balance between a sober environment and some art direction; one of my main inspirations was Eric Wiley's material showcases. I used a character I made a long time ago and put it in an unlit material; it helps a lot to make the material feel more grounded in an existing universe. The materials are presented in a basic parallax master material that I made myself for the ground to have more depth, and the shader ball has a displacement master material with Nanite. I kept the Unreal master material as neutral as possible in the parameters to have a genuine showcase of the original texture made in Substance 3D Designer.
All of the materials are on a simple plane with an alpha beside the moss, where I made a plane with a bit of wireframe to simulate swollen ground. And that's about it.
Most of the breakdown is aimed at more advanced users, but if anyone is still at a beginner level, I strongly recommend Daniel Thiger's tutorials to understand the shape manipulations and Jimmy Malachier's breakdowns to learn the basics of the stylized materials workflow. Substance 3D Designer is an amazing tool, and I can't wait to share much more work made with it! Thank you for reading!
