Matthias Schmidt has recently written a post on his experiments with Substance Designer.

Matthias Schmidt has recently written a post on his experiments with directional bevels in Substance Designer. The artist wanted to test the feasibility of procedurally generated sci-fi walls/panels that look like something originated from high poly models.

For the directional bevels a number of custom nodes from the community have returned interesting results:

1. Directional Bevel by Fabien Forestier – straightforward, not much computation time, therefore good for quick iterations

2. Perspective FX by Alexander Prokopchuk – more versatile options

3. Perspective Tool by Vincent Dérozier (purchased on his Gumroad) – similar to Alexander’s node

Other nodes that found very helpful in this endeavor:

1. Masked Edge by teto45 – creates a smooth edge where two blended height maps meet so very useful for that subdiv modeled look

2. Stack Auto by teto 45 – blend node that stacks two height maps on top of each other

First, I just messed around with some patterns to see where it leads me:

Then I dug deeper and tried to combine some directional bevels with tile sampler inputs to create actual walls:

Some more examples:

I will keep experimenting. It’s definitely a good way to get a good base to start with.

Matthias Schmidt 

You can learn more about the artist’s experiments here.