How to Create a Wall of Faces Material Using Substance 3D
Ilana Katz joined us this time to talk about the Wall of Faces material, explaining the nodes she used to create the faces and how she managed to achieve a hectic look, but without letting the faces lose shape.
Introduction
Hi, I'm Ilana Katz. I'm a Material and Environment Artist for games. Since my previous 80 Level interview, I worked at Lost Boys Interactive on Amazon Game Studios' New World MMO, and most recently an unreleased title with PlayEveryWare.
Wall of Faces
While looking at references for another project, I got the idea to make a stone face material when I found an image of "Kathedra", a sculpture by Colin Wilbourn in Durham, England. I remembered trying to make a face in Substance 3D Designer once as an experiment, and decided it would be fun to turn it into its own material!
The faces are mostly made of simple geometric shapes that are warped and mirrored. I looked at reference images for sculptors showing the planes of the face and aimed for something similar.
Creating the Faces
I created the faces in a Node Graph separate from the main one (with all of the moss and general rock/brick shapes, etc.) so I could change the parameters around to create a variation of faces without cluttering the main Node Graph. Doing this, I could avoid having many duplicate Nodes when I wanted eyes to be looking in different directions and have variations in cheekbone size, etc.
One challenge I ran into was having the rocks stacked in a way that felt disorganized but still worked with the variation of faces I plugged in. It was a bit difficult trying to prevent faces from clipping into each other while aiming for a hectic look!
The faces can all be individually tweaked to create variation in the stones, stone and plant density can be tweaked to find a nice balance, and the moss level can be adjusted.
For the presentation, I wanted something fairly simple since this was meant as a more standalone material than the usual generators I make. It was a fairly short project that took about two weeks in all to complete, with a little extra time to get the presentation and renders done.
The part I enjoyed working on the most was the face generator itself. It was a fun challenge to throw a bunch of shapes together and morph them into a face.
Conclusion
For tutorials, I would recommend Substance 3D Designer's official YouTube Channel. But I would especially recommend looking up a beginner tutorial, going over how to make a brick wall or stone planks, etc., to understand how material-making works. Once you get the hang of it, you see that it's basically like laying a bunch of Photoshop filters on each other until you get the result you're looking for!
