ROCKS: Gorge Cliff in Substance Designer - The Rocky Series 5/5 - full tutorial (END)

This is the end of our five part series on making rocky stuff. Today I'll show you a rock formation that can be part of a complete texture. It's then up to you to blend this with other rocky parts to create a full rocky texture.
This technique is ideal for making cliffs in my opinion.
My ArtStation: www.artstation.com/danieljrga...
My Twitter: / danielrobichon
Bonus: A timelapse of this material creation is coming next!

[@tr4mp162]

This content is PURE GOLD! Thanks for sharing the knowledge!

[@andreybulatov7097]

Thanks for tutor! It's great! Very helpful

[@endrisyoung6060]

So great !!!

[@Chris-ik5lh]

Thank you so much for sharing. Really helping with my university project I am doing at the moment. This tutorial and knowledge you share for free is immense. Amazing work and skill sir

[@electronatasha8901]

Really awesome, thanks to your tutorials im starting to get the hang of SD, i love how this one has turned out, and with only a few changes you can make so many vaiations. Super cool, tres bien.

[@danieljrgameart]

Merci beaucoup :)

[@derphitmanplays]

Fantastic videos Daniel! keep it up man!

[@danieljrgameart]

Thanks for your support Felipe!

[@careifyoucry1783]

Good realistic texture teaching! Looking forward to your next instructional video

[@danieljrgameart]

Thanks! I'll take time in the middle of the year to make a good batch of new tutorials :)

[@Luminosus2012]

great!!

[@SuperMontana2008]

Great tutorial , thanks very much

[@danieljrgameart]

Thank you Scott!

[@caminanubemusiclist2326]

muy buen tutorial, gracias man

[@danieljrgameart]

gracias a ti

[@TimTylor]

Great tuorial. Much thanks for it! VectorMorph only seems to come as a color node in Designer 2020, so at 9:37 it needs a Grayscale Conversion node after it to work properly.

[@danieljrgameart]

It still exists in grayscale (version 2020.2.1)

[@TubeDxDen1004]

Fantastic tutorial, extremely well explained and useful. I wanted to ask a question: what is the difference between creating a material with Designer or using Painter? I always used Designer to make simple stuff to learn, but never used Painter as it seems quite a different workflow. Thanks again for the tutorial!

[@danieljrgameart]

Thank you very much Dennis! Yes the two software offer two different workflows. Simply put, Substance Painter is more intuitive, and is not so much about authoring a material from scratch, but rather about texturing an asset with materials made with Substance Designer for example. You can also paint on the different channels of the material, in Substance Painter, and that way create a unique material, specifically tailored for the asset, while texturing/painting it. I'm not an everyday user of Substance Painter but I always use it for texturing stylized assets.

[@thomaseichler2368]

@@danieljrgameart SD is used for generating stunning materials for SP - thats my perspective on both. I first started with SP but at a certain point you cant handle materials in an effective way without generating general materials in SD. I'm no professional, but if i would be, i'd do a tons of materials for the artists in SD which they can simply use in SP later on.

[@cgunnification]

Another fantastic tutorial! A suggestion would be to provide the images that you use as a resource. thx.

[@AwakeningAnimations]

Its not always possible to provide images. I suggest that you pause and use the gradient picker from youtube while he has his picture showing.

[@danieljrgameart]

Very good suggestion. But in the future I'll use freely available scanned resources and will put the link in the description.

[@ghua]

Hey Daniel, I have a question: How to use such material in games? Afaik heigh maps are not used often in games as being expensive (am I wrong here?) So what should I do to have such nice rock material displayed in my game? Best regards!

[@danieljrgameart]

Hi Martin! Excellent question. Different routes are possible. One I explored recently in my studio: We don't have a lot of cliffs or big rocks, but when we do, we usually sculpt a detailed high poly model and then bake a low poly version of it from the high poly, to get different maps. I then recently created a Substance Designer filter, to get several features with exposed parameters, to be used in Substance Painter. SP allowed me to create a smart material, that we can use on our low poly rocks, freshly baked in Substance Painter. We then put the low poly asset in the engine with the final exported maps. I hope it's clear. It's a process, but gives good results.

[@babi92100able]

Tu viens de me faire télécharger Designer, je vais apprendre les bases et revenir très vite ici :)

[@danieljrgameart]

Ah, excellent. Il y a tellement à faire ! Bienvenue au club.

[@Joeyvm94]

Very nice tutorial, great work and thank you! Appreciate informative videos like this! I've got a question about how to make a full texture out of it, can you just "copy the Main Row and 1st Sculpt nodes" and then by adjusting the 2d transform nodes create the top and bottom rows?

[@danieljrgameart]

Hi and thank you! Yes you could do it that way. But I realize it's more of a manual task than a procedural approach. If I find a better idea I'll share it!

[@Joeyvm94]

@@danieljrgameart Hello! Thank you for your quick answer! I'm curious if you can find a better way to do it and thanks for sharing if you do! But if it will be a manual task if you do it like mentioned above will not be a huge problem it only takes a bit more time, but usually if it's manual it only means there will be more control for the final result. I'm going to finish your tutorial now and then give it a try! Again thanks and keep up the awesome work! :)

[@danieljrgameart]

I agree about the control that you get when it's more manual and less procedural. It can yield better looking results. In a professional environment though, I recommend the procedural approach.

[@Joeyvm94]

Yes that is true I agree on that, also because if it's procedural it is more applicable to most objects / situations and has faster + more randomized results right? Yesterday I gave it a try and copied the Main Band nodes and changed the offset in their final Blend Node to create the Top and Bottom Bands for the rock, then after the Sculpt Base node section I've added 2 more blend nodes for the Top and Bottow rock rows and blended those together with the Blend node that already added for the Middle Band during your tutorial, after that I've combined those 3 Blend nodes together with 2 more blend nodes and connected the final one to the first 2 nodes of the 1st Sculpt section again like in your tutorial, this gave me a full tileable texture and then by adjusting the 2d Transform nodes in the 2nd Sculpt part I could change the look of the entire rock. But do you think this is the right way or should I also have "copy-pasted" the 1st Sculpt & 2nd Sculpt sections separately for the Top and Bottom band and then in the end combine them all just before the creation of the Color and Output nodes?

[@danieljrgameart]

It's too complicated for me :) I can't answer without looking at the graph. But if you're satisfied with the result and the texture is actually tiling, then it should be good. Bravo for having completed it!

[@thomaseichler2368]

Which environment map did you setup? its hard to get similar results without using the same one. Was it studio_04?

[@danieljrgameart]

Try Tomocco. I'll check it tonight.

[@danieljrgameart]

Yes it's tomoco_studio .

[@thomaseichler2368]

@@danieljrgameart Thank you very much

[@Seiku]

Sorry for the dumb question but how would I go about making it tillable as a square texture since this comes out as a horizontal band? Do you repeat the stripes somehow? Thanks for the tutorial.

[@danieljrgameart]

Hello Seiku! Yes exactly. As I said in the video, the end goal is to make other stripes of rocks to get a square texture. With the right amount of variations, it can look good. I just made it this way to keep the video short.

[@MrMagicPenguin12]

How would you go about layering this material? Would you create multiple graphs or do you simply duplicate the 2nd Sculpt area and tweak it a few times? I've been experimenting with the latter, but its not looking really great.

[@danieljrgameart]

Today I'll try a more procedural approach, with multiple tile sampler probably.

[@MrMagicPenguin12]

@@danieljrgameart i figured out layering the materials, great call with the opacity mask: that helped a lot! I ended up instancing the material and using material blend/material transform nodes to blend a few layers together. One thing i noticed is that I needed to blend the Base Color and Normal maps individually. Excited to see how you approach this with a tile sampler. I am creating a canyon scene so this has been a helpful idea. imgur.com/a/EjxVHEU

[@danieljrgameart]

Oh, a canyon project, that would be something. Please share!

[@AwakeningAnimations]

Parfait! :) Merci beaucoup!! Could you possibly in the future make a tutorial where you texture a 3d model made in another program? For example: I am making a ruins environment in Houdini. Some of the detailing there like cracks,edge damage etc is complicated for me to do and intensive on my computer (using OpenVDB). So for these details it could be better to make it in Substance designer. The problem is that i would prefer making a substance material which i can use as a substance plugin in Houdini. The environment pieces are all procedural. I hope i make sense :)

[@danieljrgameart]

You make perfect sense and that's a good suggestion. I'm making a list of tutorial ideas for 2020 right now. So If I sculpt a hi poly and import it in Substance Designer (along with a low poly), and if I make a complete material in Designer, with this baked low poly mesh visible in the 3D scene, that would work for you right?

[@AwakeningAnimations]

@@danieljrgameart Yes that would be perfect :) Thanks a lot, your tutorials and courses are very useful !! :)

[@siddharthpaul6539]

3:33 , sir when you plugged the main band with the normal, you get the good amount of intense normal...but when i'm doing it, it just moved a little bit...so i increased the default normal intensity to 12 to match yours but it is showing some artifacts, can u plz help? is something wrong with default settings of my designer?

[@siddharthpaul6539]

i did same like you but am not getting any satisfied result :(

[@danieljrgameart]

Don't hesitate to send me your graph. I can have a look at it and help you understand what's going on.

[@CasiyKNguien]

I am also facing the same problem now, anyone has an answer to this?

[@danieljrgameart]

It could also be that Substance Designer, with the different updates, does things differently (I don't know). But it seems that you may not have enough displacement scale. Did you activate the tesselation?

[@CasiyKNguien]

@@danieljrgameart I did enable Tessalation. I also think the problem comes from Substance Designer update. Beside this small error, your tutorial is great!

[@todornikolov1473]

That's the only video in the series right? The "5/5" in the title is a bit confusing. Other than that, great stuff! One of the best SD rocks tutorials I've come across.

[@danieljrgameart]

Hi! There are four other videos in this series. But they're not in a playlist I think. And they're not only about rocks. Here are the topics : concrete / soil / asphalt / pebbles. I should have call it the minerals series maybe :) Just look at the videos list.

[@todornikolov1473]

@@danieljrgameart I see, thanks! I'll check them out!

[@jimbeam6620]

i did everything as shown but i have no height information on my material?

[@danieljrgameart]

Do you know how to setup the material definition in order to get the tesselation on the mesh?

[@jimbeam6620]

I'm pretty new to designer but after around 1h of searching I found the Wright setup for my height information yesterday, but thank you for your fast response

[@danieljrgameart]

Ok great. Enjoy Substance Designer!

[@LtdJorge]

@@jimbeam6620 can you tell us what was the solution? I have the same problem. The normal is acting just as normal, not as height for tessellation.

[@danieljrgameart]

@MCdevilkiller Well I suggest that you have a look at this video, it may be helpful. There's everything you need to know about tesselation in Substance Designer: kzbin.info/www/bejne/Z3XEm2awbpZ_j9U

[@mazeillusions]

Can you share the project file of this please?

[@danieljrgameart]

Probably not as it's not a complete material (just an exercise) so I don't feel like putting it on Substance Share as is. But I should make a complete version of it with updated techniques.