The Rookies published an awesome tutorial by Kyle Horwood on the creation of photorealistic surfaces.
Now that I had some stone shapes, it was down to working on their edges to create a more realistic look to them. I also created some undulation within the stones.
As well as sculpting the edges, I wanted to make sure the stone surface was looking better so I sculpted them too. Though I’m just using Substance Designer to create this material, I will use the term “sculpt” because blending these procedural noises together is similar to sculpting in software like Zbrush.
After sculpting the surface and edges, I worked on the chipped and cracked look and other surface details. With this I mostly used the nodes that came with Substance Designer with little authoring to them. It was mostly down to getting the right shapes from the nodes. I used nodes such as the histogram scan to pick out certain details in the height.