Substance Painter Materials

These images are from my class demos today. We were learning about procedural textures and how to build materials from scratch in Substance Painter. So for the laypersons explanation, a procedural texture is a sort of image creation tool inside 3D software. They'll usually have some broad purpose, but then lots of adjustable parameters to customize them to be useful for a lot of applications.

For example the base of this tile material is a brick procedural texture where the user can define how many "bricks" in either the x or y direction, the width and height of the bricks, the offset, which will define whether they look like tiles or bricks, etc. By layering lots of procedural textures on top of each other you can create just about anything.

In this buildup, I started with what's called the Height information, which basically defines the forms, then the roughness which defines the shininess, then last the color.

I made several more, but not all of them are all that interesting.

So the goal here was just to create all these 100% inside of Substance without relying on any outside resources. It's a fun exercise. This sort of demo is, I think slightly less boring to watch. The results come relatively fast. One of the big challenges with teaching 3D, is it is just plain BORING to watch. When I teach painting it's easier to keep people attention. Watching someone paint can be a sort of entrancing thing, but watching someone laboriously move around digital points for like an hour to ultimately end up with something like a totally unexciting grey crate or something is pretty boring for all parties involved. With this at least at the end you've created something that looks like something.

That's about all for that.

Beyond that I must say again...WHEN COMMUNITIES? Can one of you insiders hook me up with access? I thought we were cool? I won't break them, or complain too much about how the UX sucks I promise! Same name on discord, just sayin...