Month: March 2023

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gkzxq7SV1Gw&ab_channel=LouiseMelin

I follow the tutorial above. The lady who did it explained everything so well and really pushed for making hyper realistic things have some randomized flaws in order to make it look more natural. At almost every step she layered noises and blended multiple nodes.

The major issue I ran into was using the blend nodes to make sure the two types of fabric layered properly with the pattern mask. I ended up needing to adjust a lot of levels and the map strengths to keep it looking like it had some depth.

Something that I would like to explore more, is making my own masks. The tutorial mentioned using various methods to do so such as in photoshop or procedurally.

The tutorial I found is a video that teaching simulates the material of a vase. I haven’t changed much of the techniques taught in the tutorials, but I’ve summed up some experiences during leaning period.

Inspired picture

Texture I made

   The production of this material mainly consists of two parts, the first is the golden decorative line, and the second is the basic color of the vase. “Crystal” shape node is suitable for making this pattern. With “edge detect”, you can create decorative lines, while mixing “clouds” or “cells” shape nodes can soften those stiff segmentation lines. I mentioned it because I feel that dividing complex patterns into multiple simple parts and then combining together will make your idea clearer.

Render display

   The second thing I think essential is to focus on the role of “normal map” in material making. In the 3D model, the gold decorative line looks convex, but from the plane, it can be seen that I did not add height. This is because I increased the intensity of the “normal map” to 40. Conversely, when the intensity is 0, the edges appear very flat.

Plane

Intensity 40

Intensity 0

This week I completed a leafy/muddy pond texture using this video.

This was so fascinating! I feel like I’ve learned so many different techniques and found new and interesting ways to approach creating shapes and patterns in Substance.  The tutorial began with using a waveform as my base leaf shape. The process of deconstructing the parts of a leaf and reconstructing them using layered nodes was really eye opening. Using gradient maps and picking my colors directly from a real pond image made for such a quick workflow towards the end of the texture. This video also covered the water node which is super fun to play around with. It adds so much to the base terrain that I created with just its default settings.

I think this also demystified a lot of conceptions that I had about Substance and procedural textures in general. It’s a whole bunch of nodes but it’s also just a whole bunch of nodes. Once the understanding is there, it’s possible to envision a texture and chip away at it, adding little details to create the end goal. ((I no longer feel like I need to have 300 iq points to work with the program.))

As for hiccups, there are some funky sinusoidal patterns going on in some of the leaves that I’m not too sure how to fix, but hopefully I’ll go back in and tweak some blur nodes and they’ll start to straighten themselves out. Really excited to make more organic stuff and use this in my final project.

“Carpet with shine”

Before beginning my material, I had the idea of making a carpet or blanket. I followed this tutorial of a medieval fabric and deviated from it. The main parts of the tutorial’s medieval fabric was followed. On the medieval fabric, the ornaments were shiny and had shiny laces, I kept similar to that idea and instead made really reflective stripes on the cloth that I made. The blue parts of the cloth are textured with a cloud node with a perlin noise, making it look very soft, and there is also a wave-curve node into it giving it a sort of wave.

This tutorial was really great for beginning because it featured all of the maps, and showed how to make two separate materials onto one. It went over perlin noise, randomness, gaussian noise, and there were a lot of blend nodes.

I followed this tutorial: https://youtu.be/Gkzxq7SV1Gw

Screenshots of work:

Zoomed into the material. Had to change the resolution before uploading as the website has a max of 5mb. Zooming into the material you can see all the laces and overlaps of the wool.

The weaved wool on the blue material: This was made by combining the “weave” functions with blend. Gaussian noise was added and it was warped with the combined weaves to look natural like a fleece of sorts.

The weaved wool on the purple material: This was made very differently. This was made by first getting a shape and stringing it into a straight weave, then it was gridded sideways.

The purple and blue material were both made differently and treated differently throughout the tutorial. I deviated a bit to make my own sort of fleece as I didn’t want a medieval look but rather a more natural sort of carpet or blanket. I also really enjoyed the shine, and added thicker lines instead of ornaments like flowers or small animals. You can really see the reflections and difference between the two materials when both are nearly evenly thick across the material.

There are also folds in the material, but they are made very subtle and it is difficult to tell immediately.

For my week 9, I decided to choose the Forest Ground recommendation on the homework page.

Throughout the tutorial, I went along with it to the best of my ability, yet I didn’t like following it 100%. In the beginning I did what was done, yet changed the numbers around a bit, working with what I think would be fun. This was done in a very miniscule way, changing decimals and numbers. Yet throughout it, once I learnt how things work and what I was doing, I decided to take things into my own hands and play around. Noise layers were I think my favorite part to play with, and as well, the colors in general. It was interesting seeing how depending on the color and shading, it can determine the quantity of an item. For example for the rocks, it was determining the lighter parts of the Plasma node, the lighter the slider is, the more rocks. Yet bring it down, it determines that the darker parts of the Plasma node will get rid of the rocks in that area.

Nonetheless it was a very fun learning experience, and I’m quite excited to be working with Substance Designer. The only obstacle that happened for me was the fact that it takes a long time for things to load. When reloading the Substance Designer, it took a long time for the height to show again, and the colours would take a bit to load- yet aside from that, not many problems!

This is how it ended up.

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I am not going to lie I see all my classmates posting full scenes with your shader. Were we supposed to do that? This is my render so far, if anything an update will come in the near future of it being used.

This effigy of nightmares is what I like to call my Week 8 homework. I played around with some textures, and learnt a lot about what goes where in regards to the surface input. It’s fun ! I liked this experience a lot, and although pretty straightforward, it helped me understand a lot better on what and how to put shaders on a 3d model.

The 3D models I used were either ones made by myself, or ones I found online. I’ve linked them all down below! The same goes for the shaders and the skybox, except for two very specific ones (the rocks one I downloaded through the class module, and the red one I made myself from scratch!)

It wasn’t super easy for the guitar though, the guitar and the shader I chose for it didn’t look super good, but I stuck to it! It may be ugly, but at the same time I kind of like the aesthetic it brings.

Lastly, for the skybox, I don’t know why I chose a basement boxing ring. I just thought colour wise it fits, so why not?

Credits:

SKYBOX : https://polyhaven.com/a/basement_boxing_ring

GNOME: https://polyhaven.com/a/garden_gnome
UKULELE: https://polyhaven.com/a/Ukulele_01
WHEELCHAIR: https://polyhaven.com/a/wheelchair_01
CLEANER TIN: https://polyhaven.com/a/cleaner_tin_01
STRUCTURE MADE BY ME.
GUN MADE BY ME.

Materials:

SPACESHIP: https://freepbr.com/materials/space-cruiser-panels2-pbr/
GLOSSY BLOCKS: https://freepbr.com/materials/glossy-stylized-blocks/
BAMBOO WOOD: https://freepbr.com/materials/bamboo-wood-pbr-material/
BRICKWORK: https://freepbr.com/materials/muddy-scattered-brickwork1/
COBBLESTONE: https://freepbr.com/materials/rough-wet-cobble/
ROCKS FROM CLASS.
MY OWN CHERRY LOOKING SHADER.

For my week 5 I made the Crazy Frog Crazy changing model.

First off, I modeled both a strange structure that I thought would be fun to see move around in the bump mapping noise slider shader. I went to Maya and did some fun stuff, dragging vertices around and expanding and making things smaller, with the goal of putting a picture of Crazy Frog, for this structure to move around as crazily as possible. I then put it upon the template and messed around with some of it. I then made it to have an ethereal white glow to it the more crazy it gets, and made the texture a serene and beautiful image of a crazy frog.

https://editor.p5js.org/dragonbornbestie/sketches/DUZL507uw

This homework actually started with me getting stressed about the bump mapping shader as well, and yes I did play around with the same crazy frog image. Nonetheless although it took me a bit to understand the full lengths of it, it still was a good learning experience!