Check out a quick guide from the artist and Allegorithmic to learn how Rens creates his beautiful works with Substance Designer.
Here is a small piece of the guide:
To create the plants in my environments I don’t rely on photogrammetry. Instead, I use top-down photography to build my textures and create the models afterward. By constructing a rig with various light sources, I can take photos that each have a different light direction. These photos are then processed together using Designer’s multi-angle nodes.
You can set the Multi-Angle to Normal node to your preference. In this example, I set it to have four light directions, meaning each image is 360 / 4 = 90 degrees from each other.
Having more images would produce a more accurate result. You could use eight samples, for instance, one photo at every 45 degrees.
The settings in the image are set to Clockwise at 0 degrees with four samples. Looking down, it will start on the left side, followed by top, then right and then bottom.