Studying Complex Materials in Substance Designer

Mastering Substance Designer is not an easy task. But the good thing is that the internet is full of amazing breakdowns and tutorials. Karen Stanley, Environment Artist at Ubisoft Massive, is one of the Designer gurus. She creates marvelous complex materials and shares breakdowns for free.

Creating Lava

The basics of creating a Lava tileable in Substance Designer with maps that can later be used for tessellation and creating your colour maps. It will cover:

• Creating the large base forms 
• Adding medium and small detail such as rolls and cracks to give your texture character.
• Using the warp nodes to create flow
• Creating the colour map using gradient nodes.

You get a PDF written tutorial and Large .JPG close up images of the node graph + .PNG’s of before and after shots.

Get the lava breakdown 

Creating Roof Tiles

The basics of creating a nice clean height map in substance designer that can later be used for tessellation and creating your colour maps. 

• Creating the main shape of the Tile
• How to use gradients to create a profile curve in your height map
• How to Tile your shapes and add some variation.
• Adding in surface detail from grunge maps
• Creating damage using the edge detect node
• Creating the Diffuse map using Gradient nodes and AO masks.
• Creating the gloss maps with various levels of detail. 

Get the roof breakdown 

Make sure to check out Karen’s other projects here.