Peter Sekula has shared a breakdown of a complex Cypress Bark Substance material created in Designer.
Time for a complex one. Every environment artist needs a tree bark at some point. Cypress trees are iconic of Italian landscape, so it was fitting to construct one for my Rome: Fantasy Pack I project in Unity and Unreal. It turned out the heightmap came together pretty fast. Getting the albedo to look the way I wanted was the real challenge. Making sure the grey-to-reddish-to-tan transitioning felt right took some time.
My custom nodes, Get Slope and Height Selector, are required for this exercise. Get them here.
The Height Selector isolates pixels in a greyscale heightmap based on their value. Useful for when you want to texture the “tops or bottoms” of a heightmap. The Get Slope node generates a slope texture where black pixels on the resulting greyscale map are considered flat planes and white pixels are considered vertical angles.