Since the theme of my final work is relative with the natural and forest features, I chose the cobblestones tutorials of substance designers for learning. Since it includes part of the leaves which belongs to another video, I did not include the leaves features in this assignment.
The process of making cobblestones path could be broken down in to several main parts. The first steps is to create the basic cobblestones shapes by using arc pavement, and flood fill series are helpful on making variations on the patterns, gradients and shapes, which also been used a lot in other steps.
Then we use some textures to generate the edges wear for the textures of cobblestones, and dirt ground. Blend is widely used in the project for changeably and appropriately mixtures between two nodes. Then we could generate the scene that parts of the cobble stones are sink into the dirt ground. I do not do the leaves, so I only make the twigs and also blend them with the dirt ground. An important hint here is that, when we use the tile generators to making abundant random twigs, for natural-like twigs, changing the blend mode in parameters page into Max is helpful on making lively intersecting twigs.
And finally, the most complex part for me is the setting of base colors and cavity for the map. Some questions here come into my mind while making them. If we would like to give different parts of the textures with specific colors, what could we do for splitting colors and distributing them on different part of textures? There is a part that to give specific color to the twigs, we could use mask. There are too many connections happened so these are pretty hard for me to completely understand how it works.
I did not completely follow the tutorials, and I changed some parameters based on my preference and some consideration of my final works. It does take me a long time to carefully follow every single step, or it may cause some missing nodes and effects. But I learn a lot through it! The process is very interesting and organized.
And here is the video link cited of tutorials: https://youtu.be/A1lEgPv8sNM