How to Create a Haribo-Style Translucent Jelly Bear Candy Material

Introduction

Hello, I am Aiden, and I am a Texture Artist. I have worked at Ubisoft Chengdu and Ubisoft Montreal for many years, and it's been a pleasure to work on Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege and For Honor. Now I am a Lead Texture Artist at Mihoyo.

Haribo Bear Candy

This is an interesting thing that I wanted to do, since it reminds me of my time in Montreal. There are two things I wanted to try. The first one is the SDF function, and it is a very good feature that can be used for scattering elements; artists can easily use it to do rotation, scaling, positioning, and so on.

So for this project, in order to have the best result, I decided to use SDF and ZBrush to merge these two workflows for this artwork. For the second one, I wanted to try to do the whole render and post-adjustment in Substance 3D Designer; it would be a nice procedural pipeline to try.

Workflow

In Substance 3D Designer, the first important step is making a bear model using the SDF function. I used a 3D Viewer node for previewing the result in the 2D View.

First, I made the head, chest, and waist parts and started with an ellipsoid; then I tweaked the radius and offset to place those elements in the proper position. Then I used a Union Smooth node to merge all of them into a basic body part.

Then, I created the ears, arms, and legs; this step is similar to sculpting, refining the shape and silhouette until it looks nicer and smoother.

I created the hands and the feet, and then I merged them with the previous step.

I used Sphere and Cylinder as the start to create the eyes and the mouth, and then I used Subtraction Smooth to add them to the bear's face.

For the dots on the chest, I used a Rock node as the base. Randomness worked well for shape variation, so for different dots, I just needed to copy this group of nodes and give a different value to Randomness; then the shape would change randomly.

Just in case, and also for a better result, I still made a model in ZBrush, and then I generated a few Height maps, which could be used as a base for the material.

Finally, the basic bear was finished; then I just needed to use Shape Splatter as I normally would to make the material with bear elements. The difference this time is that I used Shape Splatter v2 because of SDF. Shape Splatter v2 has many good new features; it helps a lot by using the SDF function.

Then I started to build the color for this material. My goal was to make it look like a good jelly material, but since it's just a simple plane, achieving a real translucent effect was difficult. So I spent more time on the coloring to create a convincing fake-translucent effect. I built up the color as the base.

Adding AO color.

Adding color variation.

Adding color variation (edge specular).

Adding color variation (fake translucent).

Adding more translucent effect.

Then I created Roughness. I just started by desaturating the Base Color, then blending the Noise map and Grunge map.

Adding extra detail on the Roughness.

The material is finished; now it is time to do the render. I decided to do it with a PBR render and all the post-adjustments in Substance 3D Designer; it will be convenient to adapt other materials using this procedural pipeline.

In this workflow, I used two PBR render nodes. The first one is the base one to have a complete render; the second one is for some extra effects to add to the final render to get a better result. This part can be tricky.

The first one is getting a base render.

And I duplicated another one, but I used AO as the Base Color for rendering. It is prepared for post-adjustment.

Blending with a blue channel from the Normal map.

Blending with the render that is a duplicate.

Blending with the Raw Specular map from the PBR render.

Blending with Raw Specular again, but using a different blending mode to enhance the specular effect.

Finally, I proceeded with some extra adjustments as needed, and then the final render was done.

Because of this procedural pipeline, I can change the shape easily, and all the adjustments update automatically to match the new shape.

Conclusion

Overall, I finished this material in a few hours; I think the challenges were in two parts. The first one is creating the bear by using SDF; it is a new feature in Substance 3D Designer, and it's a more procedural pipeline, so it's not as intuitive as painting or sculpting. I had to try different nodes to build them up together, then find the best one.

I usually like to look for special and interesting subjects to practice with, like this bear candy. It's a translucent material, and the challenge is figuring out how to make it look and feel like jelly using only a flat plane, with no modeling involved. I think that's what makes it special: if you can pull it off, your material or artwork becomes much more appealing.

QiYu Dai (Aiden), Lead Texture Artist

Interview conducted by Emma Collins