Desirable Patina: How to Make Realistic Rust in 3D
Loic Anquetil explains why, with rust, studying the physical complexity of the material comes before anything else, shows that Substance 3D Designer is not as complicated as you might think, and demonstrates how his exploratory approach helped him create a diverse set of realistic rust materials.
Loic Anquetil is a Senior 3D and Material Artist at Ubisoft Montpellier, where he has worked on titles including Rayman Legends Retold, Ghost Recon Breakpoint, and Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown. He also has an extensive background in teaching 3D at institutions including Rubika and CG Academy. Loic recently created Desirable Patina, a rust-themed Signature Collection of materials for Substance 3D Assets, and told us about its development.
Introduction
I've always been more drawn to Substance 3D Designer than to Substance 3D Painter. Painter is an incredible tool, but I love constructing the material itself – building the logic behind a surface, understanding how it forms, evolves, and can be controlled procedurally. A material should look good, but it also needs to be parametrized, reused, and shared.
For this collection, I created 24 assets themed around rust – a range of rust, paint with rust, and 3D materials, along with procedural texture generators. My goal with this collection wasn't simply to produce 'rust materials.' It was to explore the visual language of rust.
Corrosion Up Close
Rust is something I've wanted to explore for a long time. The most difficult part of creating this Signature Collection was learning to decipher its surface language and recreating that grain and relief convincingly. When you look at rust casually, it all seems the same – brownish-orange, rough, oxidized metal. But when you study it, there are countless nuances. Even within a limited color range, there are subtle micro-variations: tiny shifts in tone, small accents, unexpected transitions.
It's surprisingly hard to find reference images that clearly reveal that material structure. Many photos are too distant or stylized. So I began taking my own pictures whenever I encountered interesting rust in everyday life. The real challenge was translating that surface vocabulary into a procedural system, recreating that organic buildup while maintaining artistic control.
In production, especially in games, materials have to serve art direction, gameplay needs, and realistic constraints. There's a defined framework. But real rust can be wild, expressive, almost painterly. I found references with fluorescent tones – vibrant oranges, greens, blues – that almost seemed like contemporary abstract paintings. That contrast fascinated me.
At first, I thought color exploration would be the main area of research. In the end, I shifted toward granularity and microstructure, the physical complexity of corrosion. I realized I needed to understand rust structurally before fully tackling its color range. Rust is incredibly rich in micro-detail.
At the same time, my professional mindset returned quickly. I didn't want to create materials for self-indulgence; they needed to balance artistic exploration with functional utility. The collection had to be expressive but production-ready and adaptable. I also wanted the Substance 3D Designer graphs to be organized and readable. In production, I sometimes encounter chaotic 'spaghetti' graphs; these aren't helpful to other artists. So I approached this collection with discipline: clean structure, logical grouping, clarity. Even if the result looks complex, it shouldn't feel intimidating.
One material, Coarse Rust Pitting, laid the groundwork for everything else. It's probably the one I struggled with most, but it established the structural logic: breakup patterns, the relationship between height and roughness, and how color variation interacts with surface detail. Once that foundation was solid, the rest of the collection could become more fluid and playful. I could introduce peeling paint, blend stages of corrosion, and add subtle dirt and accumulation. Those layered materials are satisfying because time, exposure, and environment begin to tell the story of an object.
Demystifying Substance 3D Designer
One of my goals with this project was to show that approaching Substance 3D Designer for the first time doesn't have to feel intimidating.
Designer speaks to both technical and artistic profiles, and those mindsets don't always overlap. For some people, seeing nodes, parameters, and functions can cause a bit of panic. That's less true today, since students encounter node-based tools like Unreal Engine or Houdini quite early on, but in texturing, many artists rely heavily on Substance 3D Painter without diving too deeply into Designer.
I wanted to show that you can do almost everything with a relatively small set of nodes used intelligently. You don't need ultra-technical graphs, custom functions everywhere, or Pixel Processor nodes in every direction. You don't need to overcomplicate things. You can create strong, compelling materials without disappearing down a technical rabbit hole.
I also wanted to show that Designer can be a creative toolbox. During my time at Ubisoft, particularly on Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, I realized I'd become so comfortable with Designer that I'd lost some creative spontaneity. I could visualize a material and instantly know how to build it. There was no room left for accidents or surprises. That's a dangerous place for an artist.
For this collection, instead of working in my usual controlled, analytical way, I tried to be more experimental. I mixed noises instinctively, plugged nodes together just to see what would happen, and stopped overthinking. Sometimes the result was terrible. Sometimes it was incredible. Some of those experiments are now part of my daily workflow.
That's where Designer became more approachable for me: I treated it less like a technical system and more like a creative toolbox. Each node became a brush, a pair of scissors, a texture stamp. You mix, you test, you react.
Inside the Noise
Rust, especially painted and weathered metal, relies heavily on patina, erosion, and water streaks, all driven by noise structures. In production, I use noises often, but I've rarely had time to build them from scratch. This project was the perfect opportunity.
I worked primarily with single grayscale outputs, focusing on blending noises together. I would study references, take photos, create quick mockups in Designer, and once I liked the result, rebuild it properly in procedural form.
That approach comes from my graphic design background. During my studies, we did a lot of manual work: painting textures, scanning them, integrating them digitally. In one of my previous jobs, we sometimes created backgrounds by physically painting and scanning surfaces. The rust collection isn't made from scanned paint, but the mindset is similar: take disparate elements, mix them, transform them. If I take a wood texture, recolor and distort it, can it become rust? The challenge was creating noises that simulate water streaks or corrosion flaws while keeping them fully procedural.
Noises are fundamental resources in material creation. We always need them. Building them from scratch is surprisingly satisfying.
Nothing Is Closed
One of the strengths of Substance 3D Designer is that nothing is truly closed. You can open graphs, reorganize them, study them, and rebuild them differently. The base noises are excellent, but sometimes they don't do exactly what I need. So I opened them, accessed their internal data, modified them, added parameters, and rebuilt parts of their logic. All the noises in this project went through that reinterpretation.
It ties back to approachability. Taking shortcuts when they make sense isn't cheating – it's efficiency. In production, you don't have weeks to build a single material in an overly elaborate way. Deadlines are real.
That's part of Designer's beauty. Materials can be opened, studied, reorganized, hacked, and rebuilt. I hope artists will do exactly that with this collection. That's why I ensured the graphs are clean and organized. If someone opens them, modifies them, and creates something new, the work continues beyond the collection.
Reverse engineering is one of the most powerful ways to learn. You grow not only by experimenting, but by dissecting how something was built, understanding the decisions and logic behind it, and reinterpreting that knowledge in your own way.
If you like these assets or want to make them your own by tweaking some parameters, you can get them on Substance 3D Assets.
