Author: Tenzin Tsephel

For the Week 09 homework I followed Adobe’s Youtube tutorial for wooden planks. I chose wood planks because I personally love the look and feel of the texture of wood in real life.

This was my first time using substance designer and due to the really well made tutorial, I was able to follow along much better than I thought I would. The use of nodes was familiar to me through creating shaders through Blender so that helped a lot but I also learned many new ways to create textures that seemed much more detailed than what I have previously done.

Some difficulties I ran into were the fact that Substance Designer had been updated since the year the tutorial had been made or links to tools that the tutor used were missing so I couldn’t exactly follow the tutorial exactly as it was. Therefore through the use of research and helpful comments on the videos, I was able to utilize new ways to generate similar materials as the tutorial and tweaked some in my own way.  I would also sometimes mix up nodes due to how many was used in for this tutorial which would be a bit of a bother to go back and fix if you made one small mistake.

Overall I found the process very enjoyable and loved seeing the final material form.

Tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLz8ZyduQi0&list=PLB0wXHrWAmCzTXeyYT5Vy3ds711ZRHRYh

For my diorama, I was inspired by weirdcore and vaporwave aesthetics, the feeling of emptiness and surrealness from the combination of random  objects in an abandoned yet nostalgic environment to create a feeling of alienation as well.

For my skybox, I used an hdri of an abandoned powerplant that was painted with bright pastel colours. I finally understand how to make a custom skybox with any hdri. For the models, I used a combination of stuff I found online and my own.

Because the assignment required both metallic and non metallic materials, I believe it was perfect for the weirdcore/vaporwave aesthetic because of how surreal it made all the objects in the scene appear. I wanted to implement metallic materials on objects that aren’t metallic realistically such as the dented metal on the bed and colourful tiles for the wood frame. I also wanted to mimic organic materials such as snake skin by using a fabric material on the snake model.

For the statue, I was thinking of the past connected to the future hence an antique sculpture made of alien technology to support that feeling of alienation and surrealism. I used both the spacecruiser panels pbr for the whole statue but opted for the albedo and normals of the spaceship panels pbr because I thought the mix made it look much better.

I didn’t quite run into many problems with this assignment as it was fairly straightforward. Though I learned a lot about the pbr workflow than I previously had where I was just following tutorials and not fully understanding what was happening to make those materials possible.

Skybox:
https://polyhaven.com/a/peppermint_powerplant_2

Materials: 
Burlap Stained – https://freepbr.com/materials/burlap-stained-1/
Wrinkled Paper – https://freepbr.com/materials/wrinkled-paper1/
Dented Metal – https://freepbr.com/materials/dented-metal-pbr/
Preschool Tiles -https://freepbr.com/materials/preschool-tile/
Water Worn Reddish Rock – https://freepbr.com/materials/water-worn-reddish-rock-1-pbr-material/
Dusty Cobble – https://freepbr.com/materials/dusty-cobble-pbr/
Wispy Grass Meadow – https://freepbr.com/materials/wispy-grass-meadow/
Space Cruiser Panels – https://freepbr.com/materials/space-cruiser-panels2-pbr/
Spaceship Panels – https://freepbr.com/materials/spaceship-panels/

Models:
Snake – https://free3d.com/3d-model/rattlesnake-v04–784635.html
Mushroom – https://free3d.com/3d-model/short-fat-mushroom-v1–152017.html
Statue – https://free3d.com/3d-model/statue-v1–541832.html
Door – https://www.cgtrader.com/free-3d-models/architectural/door/abandoned-wooden-door-low-poly
Bed (Mine)
Tree (Mine)

For Week 04 I use the displacement shader example as a guide and edited it to create a shader where if the mouse moves over the center, the blue blobs would separate into new ones. If you keep the mouse at the center, you can view the yellow figure in it’s whole form.

To make the shader move, you have to press both mouse and key at the same time and when you let go of the mouse the shader will brighten and become more contrasted. If you only press the key, the shader will brighten at where the animation has stopped. If you let go of the mouse and key at the same time, the animation will stop at wherever you like to get an unique displacement, almost like snapping a photo. By clicking the mouse in increments, you can control the brightness of the contrast.

I was confused when I first started out but as I tried different methods and learned from my original goals, it began to make more sense.

https://editor.p5js.org/rolangs/full/9dH1NRhoZ

Using the layer 1 example as a guide, I put the circles side by side and multiplied 2 of them to create a pink gradient on the overlapping parts. I also added a fourth smaller circle. I had a bit of a difficult time figuring out how to create that transparent layer until I used my past shader as a reference.

I was inspired by eclipses. By experimenting with blending colours and also adding animation, I made the curved line on the bottom left rise up and down which changed the value of the gradients as the layer passed through the circles.

For the grid, I was inspired by pop art like Andy Warhol’s art so I made sure to use contrasted colours. I played around with the size, positions and colours of the circles. I also scaled the grid up and down but ultimately decided to go with this size. Lastly, I animated it so that a pink colour would pass through it and then return to the state above.

#1 RGB Gradient

I thought this shader was the easiest to create. I first created a horizontal gradient with 2 colours, orange and yellow, being inspired by a sunset. When I played around with the values, I realized I could make the pink colour layer horizontally on the orange which blended really well and made the gradient into 3 colours. I also introduced a hint of green towards the top left.

#2 Mix Gradient

I thought this was also pretty easy so I just experimented and played around with colours/coordinates. I was inspired by watermelon colours for this one, so a green colour for the watermelon shell and pink for the inside.

I also created a third shader using the time loop and this one was the most difficult to figure out because after I got the loop working, I got stuck on how to make the loop create gradients and then transform into another gradient. When I finally figured it out, I played around with the coordinates and got many weird loops such as when there was a hard definitive line in the middle and the colours would fade into it and then fade out. I didn’t like how the colours didn’t fade into each other and when I used ‘sin’ instead of ‘tan’ or ‘cos’ for the time, the colours would stop right before the hard definitive line formed and fade back out which made it look much smoother.