Learn How To Create LEGO Material With Blender & Substance 3D

Introduction

Hi, my name is Dave Miragliotta. I've been in the game industry for over ten years, and I've worked at Respawn Entertainment as a Senior Environment Artist for the past six years. I've had the pleasure of working on two Star Wars titles, Jedi: Fallen Order and Jedi: Survivor.

I got into using the Substance 3D Designer about seven or eight years ago. I really wanted to get into using Substance 3D because it seemed like it would be the next big thing in creating materials and textures. I really started out by just watching as many tutorials as possible, which was a big help in understanding the nodes and what each node did. Daniel Thiger's tutorials were where I learned the most. It really was the foundation that I needed to progress with 3D Designer.

The LEGO Project

I've wanted to make a LEGO material for a while now. I decided to try a different approach for this one. Instead of doing everything in Substance 3D Designer, as I mostly do, I decided to model out the LEGO pieces for this project.

Modeling

I modeled each LEGO piece in Blender. Then, I assigned each piece a different color material so I could later bake out a color ID map for the base color for each piece to use in Substance 3D Painter.

Once I had the pieces modeled and the materials assigned, I then positioned them, essentially stacking them on top of each other. I positioned them like this because I wanted to use the physics system to drop the pieces into a pile. I used a hollowed-out box to keep them in a restricted area so the pieces wouldn’t go out further than I wanted them to. Using physics to make a pile of LEGO is a lot easier to prevent the intersecting issue that I would get in Substance 3D Designer. 

After I got the right pile of LEGO, I had to make sure the pieces were tiled. I placed a plane on the bottom of the pile of LEGO to act as a guide for the tiling process. I then copied certain pieces from the right side of the LEGO pile that would make sense for the tiling to work and pasted them to the left side in the correct position. I did the same from top to bottom. Once the tiling looked good, I then exported the plane and the LEGO pieces for baking in Substance 3D Painter.

Texturing

Once in Substance 3D Painter, I baked out the mesh map textures. The ambient occlusion, ID, curvature, position, and height are the maps I needed for this project. I then started the texturing process. I used the ID map to get the base color, and then I used some different smart masks like Dirt Cavities and Edges Dusty to put in some roughness variation and some wear on the LEGO pieces.

Doing the material this way, there really aren't any parameters that can be adjusted, but I knew this going in. I really just wanted to make the material and wasn't really worried about being able to tweak parameters.

Conclusion

This material took me about two days to complete, and the project took about four or five hours altogether. The main challenge was getting the LEGO to tile. It took a little bit of adjustment, but it wasn't too bad. I really liked this approach because it eliminated two really difficult steps that would have been hard to do in Substance 3D Designer. One is the intersection of the LEGO pieces, and the other would have been the color map. Both of these would have been really time-consuming in 3D Designer.

For anyone trying to get into Substance 3D Designer I would say watch as many tutorials as you can. As I said, Daniel Thiger has some amazing tutorials. Also, what I love about Substance 3D Designer is just getting in there and experimenting. Try to use new nodes and see what they do. I've had a lot of happy accidents trying out new nodes.

Practice is really the key. The more time you spend making new materials and expanding your knowledge of the nodes that can be used, the more you will progress your skills.

Dave Miragliotta, Senior Environment Artist

Interview conducted by Gloria Levine