Create Grass in Substance Designer from Scratch

Today we're going to create a grass field texture in Substance Designer. We also work on managing our grayscale height values by optimizing the use of our histogram using the "histogram range" node.
Download the finished graph to explore the nodes and play with the parameters: gumroad.com/l/dtAvW
Create Stylized Rocks in Substance Designer: • Quickly Create Stylize...
Chapters:
00:00 - Introduction
02:00 - Starting a new graph
03:53 - Blade of grass base shape
12:20 - Clumping the grass together
16:50 - Scattering the clumps into a field
20:11 - Curvature nodes and starting roughness
24:33 - Starting the albedo/color
26:48 - Dead grass
28:31 - Starting blend line and histogram explanation
35:16 - Dirt/mud
43:34 - Rocks/pebbles
53:59 - Graph overview
55:13 - Finishing touches
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Website:
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Software in this Video
Substance Designer

[@JeremySeiner]

What is your favorite outdoor environment to create materials for? Castles? Beaches? Underwater?

[@eugenestrahov1200]

Parks and my architecture projects C: But castle is a great idea, will have to try

[@JeremySeiner]

@@eugenestrahov1200 awesome!

[@mangoeater6919]

Finally! A substance designer tutorial where they actually show things step by step

[@marsmotion]

oye yes!

[@sudokun9738]

Very useful tutorial. Easy to understand and learn from it since explains every node. Not rushed and not too long either.

[@JeremySeiner]

Thanks!

[@marsmotion]

wish more people would take their time like this. well done

[@fingerprince_]

Great tutorial, found the roughness section really useful. I've found grass is quite tough to get looking good, so doing the height blending like this with masks going into the albedo blends, and getting roughness detail on each shoot of grass is a big improvement. Thanks :)

[@JeremySeiner]

Great! Thanks! =)

[@user-zp3ej5tz2p]

Thank you for your lecture !! :)

[@OfficialCloverPie]

thank you so much for this, i'm working on an environment and i needed to learn to make tuft for carpet..., thank you so much!!!!!!! it really helped

[@JeremySeiner]

Awesome! So glad it helped!

[@gorytechno]

Your are the BEST!!!!, great video, very helpfully for me. Your deserve my like!!!!

[@JeremySeiner]

Thanks!

[@damian_madmansnest]

I came to revisit this tutorial after a while, and now i have some comment about it. - Adjusting levels at 8:30 seems to remove most of height information coming from noise texture added at 5:52 - Stripes detail added at 11:09 seems to be completely lost after plugging it into the Tile Sampler at 13:33 (unless you use 8K for output)

[@daironperezfrias7819]

This is Great, Saludos desde Cuba, estoy comenzando en Substance Designer y bajo cada video tuyo de youtube para guardarlos como tesoros :) Gracias por estos conocimientos

[@JeremySeiner]

Thank you! I am so happy I could help. =)

[@daironperezfrias7819]

@@JeremySeiner now the internet is coming to my country and I have started learning texturing to help some friends in their 3d modeling business, so I said to myself: it would be great to learn how to make my textures with designer :) and I found your videos that are spectacular

[@TheSatzy6699]

Superb 👌🏼

[@JeremySeiner]

Thanks!

[@tarialorehand]

How did you make it show up in the 3d view after you plugged in the final blend? Mine is still black.

[@arespin35]

Underwaterrrrrr

[@duane7032]

This was a great Tutorial, I learnt a lot, the grass came out looking so nice on myside. However I have one issue when ever I flick over to the Iray Renderer it does not look the same as in the video, its almost like its just displaying the base color and and I don't get any of the dark bits and it looks way better in openGL even if I let the Iray finish all of its Iterations. Any Ideas why ? I have think I have played around with all the settings on it and even tried to find information on google and could not find any.

[@JeremySeiner]

You might need to switch the shader from the Adobe Standard shader to the other PBR one. Sometimes the ambient occlusion map doesn’t work. You should be able to switch it in the Materials menu for the 3D viewer

[@duane7032]

@@JeremySeiner Great ! thanks thats was the problem it looks correct now

[@JeremySeiner]

@@duane7032 great! So glad that was the solution.

[@TFGTrailers]

Your videos are really helping me out with uni, do you have a patreon or something similar so I can support you there as well?

[@JeremySeiner]

So happy I can help! That’s really nice of you to ask. I’m looking at various things like Patreon, but right now I have a Gumroad page where I sell some graphs and training. gumroad.com/jeremyseiner My first premium training series called "Fabrics Essentials: Wool" is about creating high quality wool fabrics and I just started a Black Friday sale on it a little early 😄 the code is “bf2020” at checkout if you’re interested. Let me know if you have any Substance Designer questions. I’d be happy to answer any that I can. 😊

[@TFGTrailers]

@@JeremySeiner Sounds good, I'll check out your Gumroad page for sure! You're actually one of the few material artists on KZbin that I don't have questions for after watching the tutorial, you just explain everything so well! And if you ever make a Patreon page, shoot me a message, I'm sure a lot of other people would love to become patrons as well!

[@JeremySeiner]

@@TFGTrailers much appreciated! Thank you! I’ll be sure to let you know 😊

[@j3nn_3d]

This is great! When making textures for unreal landscape materials, there does not seem to be a lot of easy support for height maps or roughness maps. I've seen some tutorials where they only plug in the color and normal maps, leave roughness as a single color node and ignore height. Do you omit the bitmaps as well? I'm trying to get a good workflow down for unreal. Thanks for any information!

[@JeremySeiner]

I’m glad you like the video! Hmm good question. I’m not sure. I haven’t worked very much with Unreal landscape materials. Sorry, I wish I had more info.

[@j3nn_3d]

@@JeremySeiner Ah no worries. I'll just go play!

[@rob_meade]

Thanks for this tutorial, it was my first delve into Designer so it was really helpful. I wasn't 100% sure how to get the completed materials "out" and into Painter, managed to find that out separately. In the process of saving out the sbsar file to pop on the shelf in Painter though I'm noticing that the "height" is really pronounced and I can't seem to find a way to drop that down. If anyone can shed a little light for me I'd be very grateful - thanks in advance :)

[@JeremySeiner]

I’m so glad it was helpful! In Painter, if you add a Levels filter to the grass layer and choose to target the height information with the pull-down menu above the levels histogram, you can flatten the formation a little to even it out and make it less pronounced. Hope this helps!

[@rob_meade]

@@JeremySeiner thank you so much! I think one of the biggest benefits of your tutorial was that it has given me, someone who's never used Designer before, a place to start from and that first little bit of confidence. Once I have my current deadline out of the way for my course I will return to your tutorial and start to experiment more and see what I can create/break and hopefully learn even more in the process. Thank you :)

[@JeremySeiner]

@@rob_meade fantastic! I’m so happy to hear that. It means a lot. ☺️ All the best!

[@rob_meade]

:)

[@pavaoakrap5026]

Jeremy Seiner hope I m not boring haha but I was trying to find answer on this matter and so far I found nothing....Still struggling with transportation of exported textures to other softwares but that part is not bothering me at the moment. I finished this tutorial for second time, and after exporting textures i realized those were huge! Like normal map has 150MB...thats insane....so question is: how do i optimize it, and yet keep it still at 2 or 4K quality for textures? Thanks in advance and once more sorry for tormenting with questions! :-/

[@JeremySeiner]

No worries at all. 4K maps are quite big in terms of file size. I don’t know exactly what the outcomes will be but maybe try exporting using a different file type? Maybe JPG instead of TIFF? Also depending on how close the camera gets to your texture you could chose to go with 2k instead of 4k or even 1k if it’s far enough away. Don’t worry about the questions!

[@pavaoakrap5026]

@@JeremySeiner thank you....I was wondering of correlation between texel density of texture and size of mesh and i found this explanation....(quoting here): "A common workflow is determine a pixel per meter ratio and then base the texture on a texel density to achieve this." Does it mean that for example if i want to have 1024 texels on 3m plane, I should create plane 3x3 in substance designer and then use nodes of 1k for texture, and later after all is done in sense of texture I export it at resolution i want, however texel density will remain 1024 on mesh size?

[@JeremySeiner]

@@pavaoakrap5026 I’m not sure. Usually I have an idea of how close the object will be to the camera and then test to see. Luckily for us, it’s procedural so we can always increase the resolution if we need do 😄

[@pavaoakrap5026]

Hy, thanks for tutorial its excelent, and actually my second in designer...so i m noob hehe, and thus here is noob question: at 24:01 you change rendering from openGL to iRay right, right? But in my case, when i make that change, my 3D view gets different display....like it doesnt look same as in your case....i d printscreen it but not possible to attach here....i sort of get fiberglass look, so not sure why is it different in my case, do you have any idea? THanks for tutorial again, its great one!

[@JeremySeiner]

Hello! Thanks and welcome to Designer! ☺️ Some things have changed with a few of the Substance Designer Updates. One of them is the default shader. Try switching the material shader in the 3D view from adobe’s standard shader to the Substance Designer PBR Metal Rough option. It should bring back the ambient occlusion. Let me know if you need help finding this and I can type out the menu path.

[@pavaoakrap5026]

@@JeremySeiner thanks! I managed to get it working, I did use the pbr metal rough option, not sure what happened there, but after restart of SD it was fine. Now, one thing sort of confused me....like we set up graph properties at start right from template...and usually it goes to 2048x2048. Somewhere in tutorial you went in and changed that option "parent x1" from 0 to 12 and it turned to be 4K....does that refer to quality of exported textures, or just quality of preview? Also, in 3D view textures seem so fine....however when i export textures from sd and for example import them to blender it looks sort of....not that good as it is in SD....why is that difference so visible?

[@JeremySeiner]

@@pavaoakrap5026 glad you got it working! By default, graphs are set to be relative in resolution compared to their preceding or “parent” graph. For instance, if I have a node that is set to 2K, when I connect another node to it, it will inherit its resolution. We can either choose an “absolute” resolution where it won’t change or keep it set to “relative to parent” and tell it to multiply that resolution by a value such as x2 or x4 so that regardless of what resolution you choose your main graph to be the nodes that are set to x2 or x4 always have twice or four times as much res. In blender I would check to see what the plug-in is executing the graph at. It might by default be executing it at a lower resolution. If you set up your initial graph in SD to be “relative to parent” then you should be able to change the material’s resolution in the blender plug-in at will. Hope this helps!

[@JeremySeiner]

Nodes and graphs have separate resolution settings. You can set a node’s resolution by clicking on it. To se the graph’s resolution settings after first creating it, you can click on an empty space in the graph and find the settings in the properties panel. If your graph is set to relative to parent, you can use the parent resolution quick setting in the toolbar up top to test it out at different resolutions.

[@pavaoakrap5026]

@@JeremySeiner wow that was fast haha! Yea but the thing that is confusing is the fact that base color and that base map looks more as child's attempt of drawing lol... And no normal or other non color data can help there... So not sure how to make it good

[@fazlikalemci3882]

adam adam

[@TheAshmantle]

Who's really behind this astroturfing campaign?

[@peter486]

thats looks pretty horroble