Breakdown: Stylized Clover Material In Substance 3D Designer

In July, Substance 3D Designer unveiled several powerful new nodes, including two for color manipulation: the Quantize Color node, which reduces the number of colors in an image, and the Kuwahara Filter node, which adds painterly effects to a material.

Celine Dameron designed a project to test out these new features and showcase their potential, with the ultimate goal of finding an easy way to create a stylized material. She defined stylization as the efficient simplification of shapes and colors. Any shapes or objects involved must be recognizable and clear, even when they are nonrealistic.

In her breakdown article, Celine shared that the process of building a stylized material differs slightly from creating a realistic one since she believes that, in many cases, the base color alone can be enough to achieve a strong stylized effect.

The way the base color is built is very important in this context because the role of the Quantize Color node is to reduce the number of colors in the material, so the artist had to ensure that, no matter how many colors were ultimately set, the clover still needed to be recognizable.

Below are some of the results obtained using the Quantize Color node:

Celine could see that the Quantize Color node generates a good base for a stylized effect, but it seemed that combining it with the Kuwahara filter would push these results even further:

She then used ambient occlusion on top of the result from the Kuwahara Filter node to fake depth, and add the dark outline. And with that, the stylized clover material was complete:

Read the breakdown here and visit Celine Dameron's ArtStation page for more Substance 3D art. Also, don't forget to join our 80 Level Talent platform and our Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Reddit, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.