Complex Architecture with Substance Designer 6

Mark Foreman had sometime to check out the beta of Substance Designer 6 and make some doodles, which take our breath away.

As you might have noticed, Algorithmic has finally launched Substance Designer 6. It’s a powerful new release that has a lot of updates and cool features. During a period of time, some prominent game artists had a chance to check out this project and figure out the perfect way to use the new technology. Now they can finally share some of the things they’ve created with SD6.

In this post, we’ll show some of the astonishing work Mark Foreman has done with SD6. The biggest feature here is the introduction of architectural elements. With the clever manipulation of the graph, you can literally build very complex stones, bricks, and stained-glass windows.

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A Substance for generating a Gothic Rose window bedecked with Roses. The graph could now quite feasibly be modified to generate variations of the architectural elements, then used to create a whole texture set.

I made a lot of use of the new Curves node which proved invaluable for creating the carved masonry. A lot of the shapes I made with the Curves node would have been practically impossible with simple gradient adjustments, or at the very least a lot slower to perfect. The text node made adding flavour with the inscription a breeze.

Apart from an imported bitmap for the Substance “S”, everything was created entirely inside Substance Designer 6.

Mark Foreman, CD PROJEKT RED

Easy. Well, not really.

Mark Foreman: These are the basic steps I took to shape the masonry elements of the rose window ring. Every other masonry shape used variations of these steps to create their specific shape.

Mark Foreman: Apart from the contours of the masonry I made use of the curve node to shape the petals of the roses. Which I then arranged using a couple of Splatter Circular nodes.

Mark Foreman: The curves also came in handy when shaping the leaves for my roses. I used the nodes to add volume to the leaves, such as a slight flick at the end.

You might say it’s insane. It is. It’s insane.

Complex Architecture with Substance Designer 6

Mark Foreman, CD PROJEKT RED

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