LogInIntroduction
Hi, my name is Chris Hodgson, and I am a Senior Material Artist at Remedy Entertainment. I have been working in the games industry for over 17 years and have worked on quite a few projects, most notably Watch Dogs and Tom Clancy's The Division during my time at Ubisoft, The Last of Us Part 1 and 2 at Naughty Dog, and the recently released Indiana Jones And The Great Circle at MachineGames.
I first entered the industry as a Generalist 3D Artist straight out of university with a degree in Computer Animation. By that point, I had been dabbling with 2D and 3D software for many years. I was even part of a few mod teams, which was great fun at the time, although none of those projects ever came to fruition.
I developed my interest in material art specifically after getting into Substance 3D Designer at the start of its popularity. I used the software extensively during this period, and it unlocked a love for material art that was always there; I just never had the right workflow established to take advantage of it.
The Victorian Floor Tiles Project
The Victorian Floor Tiles Material I released recently is inspired by the floor tiles in the hallway of my childhood home. When we first moved into the house, the tiles were covered in multiple thick layers of carpet, so we didn't even know such beautiful tiles were there. They suffered some minor damage after years of neglect, and that damage is represented in the final material I created.
References
Often, when I create material, it is just from someone else reference, obtained by scouring the internet. This time, however, I used my own photographs of the floor. I took a range of photos, some to understand the extent of the pattern and other close-up shots to expose the details present in the tiles and grout.
I also made sure to get some pictures during the hours of the day when the strong mid-day sun managed to hit the tiles through the glass of the front door. This gave me a good angle to see the specular properties of the material in isolation, something incredibly useful when creating the roughness map for the material in Substance 3D Designer.
If I didn't have the opportunity to get these photo references from a single subject, as is very common with using online photo references, then I would gather many examples from different but similar subjects until I had enough references to replicate the most important material properties in my Substance 3D graph. Good references really can be the difference between good and bad material, but in the end, it is hard to overstate their importance to someone working as a material artist.
Patterns
With material like this, I deviate from my traditional workflow and start by building the pattern itself, focusing on the base color. Usually, I would begin with the material's height, but considering the variety in the material is primarily a result of tile color changes and not tile height, it makes sense to change the workflow a little.
The resulting block color pattern can then be used to derive the height map through edge detection and subsequent bevelling. This process leaves me with a basic setup with which I can begin degradation and weathering to get edge damage, surface erosion, and particulate build-up, a vital component to achieving a material with age and personality.
I now primarily focus on the height map as if I am sculpting material in ZBrush; I want to get most, if not all, of my "sculpting" or height into the material before I begin refining the other maps. Approaching the project this way gives me all the masks I need to accurately target specific areas of the material without much work re-isolating parts with extra node chains.
I use Affinity Designer for all my vector-based work, no matter the project. For the Victorian tiles, I used the software to create the two floral motifs visible on some of the tiles. While doing this kind of work inside Substance 3D Designer is possible, it's much more efficient to create them in a more suitable package with the more powerful shape tools that Affinity Designer offers.
When I build materials, I try to build them in a modular, sequential way, where sections of the graph can be removed or changed without destroying the function of the graph or disturbing later nodes in the chain. With that in mind, it is very easy to change the amount of dirt and aging in the material by editing the correct nodes in Substance 3D Designer. However, I don't often expose parameters for these explorative material projects as it's not intended for an asset pack, they are simply a way of challenging myself and furthering my knowledge of both the software and replicating real life down to a micro detail scale.
Cracks
The real challenge with this material, in particular, was achieving a realistic path for the cracks to follow so they were not just randomly scattered all over the material. In the real world, cracks occur through the weakest part of any material and, therefore, follow the path of least resistance. For tiles, this means generally following the grout gaps between the tiles and only crossing through the tiles themselves on occasion. This was achieved in the final material by using Flood Fill nodes to conform the natural crack patterns to the more rigid layout and structure of the tile pattern.
Rendering
Marmoset Toolbag is the application of choice when rendering my materials. I generally have quite a simple setup, but I do like to have my renders set up in a particular way; here are some of the choices I like to make when setting up my scenes.
- I use proxy geometry outside the camera frustum to create interesting shadows across the material surface. Trees, plants, or window geometry can give my material a greater sense of place and make the final render feel much more believable.
- I render the materials at double the intended final resolution to ensure I can make final tweaks in Affinity Photo and then downsample to keep all the details of the scene as sharp as possible.
- I use EXR 16-bit format so colour correction and tone mapping can be done in post. There are some tools within Marmoset Toolbag, but it's much faster and more controllable to do this in Affinity Photo, where a greater plethora of tools are available.
I created three different lighting scenarios for my final beauty renders so that you can see how the material reacts to different lighting conditions. The initial afternoon render shows the material's color in a neutral condition and is most like the situation in which I found the material in my real-world reference. The moonlight render is there to show how the material reacts to both cold and warm light, cold from the moonlight shining through the window and warm from the implied candles in the room the material exists in. The final neon render is just a bit of fun; I played with the lighting to achieve something you don't normally see: a modern neon lighting setup with a very classical subject material.
Conclusion
The material itself took around three days to finish, but this was spread out over quite some time as I was working on other projects. I don't rush these personal materials, I have plenty of materials I have to do on a time budget with my professional work, so it's nice to indulge myself and try new ways to solve problems I have tackled hundreds of times before. The most enjoyable aspect of the project was successfully replicating something I see every time I visit family over the holidays; replicating real-world references accurately is one of my favorite challenges with material art, and materials based on reference always stand out over those that don't.
I have found that the best way to progress as a material artist is to strive for realism in your work. It can be a struggle to achieve certain materials, especially procedurally using Substance 3D Designer, but often that struggle to achieve something that might seem impossible is actually what pushes you to explore the software, push your boundaries, and ultimately learn new techniques. However, this does not mean you should force yourself to achieve everything within one software package. Substance 3D Designer is just as useful when used in conjunction with data imported from other packages, and this is something that shows strength and versatility as a Material Artist.