Tile Generators and Good vs Bad Randomness

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Part of improving at substance designer is learning to embrace the procedural nature of the program. Too many people try really hard to put a specific stone in the exact spot they want. Even though this is the case we still can use interesting methods to wrestle the randomness to create more of the look we're after
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[@conner101howard]

For the engagement

[@austin2890]

very helpful

[@Mark-yg1tt]

Thanks for the great tutorials. I love how you go in depth on how the nodes work. Very helpful. Looking forward to more videos.

[@Mitismagnus]

I waited for this, now i will wait for more :) Hope for more blending tips and coloring

[@JohnnyHalcyon3D]

Any specifics around color/, blending?

[@Mitismagnus]

@@JohnnyHalcyon3D well i still wondering about your cobblestone blending the details and the smoothing on the Stones are soo cool!!! As for the colour: basic methods, different colour blending technics like using mask to make more stylized look or maybe even imitate handpaining. Will be glad to see anything from you really. You are golden teacher for sure! Also on the side note i have some problem with the coloring for materials: the colours in blender for example looks different like a lot and do not have the same depth like the ones in substance preview

[@harrysanders818]

Wow, I was looking for some kind of "Dojo" on ways to use Designer in a more artistic, less procedural way for quite some time. Or to put it another way: I would never have expected to come across such a video discussing more in depth ways and combined measures to get rid of the ever plaguing visible procedurality. After 5 min in, I already know it's the case here, and had some aha moments. Looking forward to watch more! Your Substances also show it's worth while to learn from you, even for someone already versed with the software, which is not always the case. Really love your non robotic feeling, organic Substances. One can see your art background and knowledge in your work with the tool.

[@juanmilanese]

great video!

[@Meitz774]

I found your channel very-very usefull for a newbie like me. You are making great stuff. Thank you!!

[@szamber3d]

I love you dude. Plz keep it going!

[@JohnnyHalcyon3D]

[@satyakimandal6572]

Very informative! Did not realize the value range of cloud 2 until now.

[@JohnnyHalcyon3D]

REALLY? Cloud 2 is goated, I use it probably every graph

[@rahulujjal8245]

so insightful! thank you so much for creating content like this greatly appreciated

[@paulshack]

Great random video! The params one is no doubt going to be useful for me, i feel like i load any program with a param in it with a bunch of nonsense that i forget about, so it'll be nice to see with actual guidance ahaha. also sick shirt, i miss their 2017 stuff but they still have a great sound. Heavy is the head that falls with the weight of a thousand thoughts

[@JohnnyHalcyon3D]

YOOOO, yes! me too :) I dont mind the newer stuff thats just deftones basically (not a bad thing) but those first two go so hard

[@paulshack]

@@JohnnyHalcyon3D oh absolutely not a bad thing! i have a whole playlist that's just basically songs of the same sound

[@TheCrazer666]

*holds up spork*

[@millerbyte]

Have you heard of / used the SDScatter Plugin? It lets you scatter textures with no overlap. Pretty configurable, but the workflow is a bit awkward since you have to run a python script.

[@slb902]

Hi! Just recently found your channel for specific problem that I had about impact cracks, thanks for that! And I have a tricky task of my own that you might be interested in to help me with, I'll try to explain it but pardon my english: Imagine you have fully "sculpted" inside SD tiled texture of pavement, there's dents and cracks, everything looks cool, but you want it to be a little more interesting and randomized. I had in mind that we somehow through a node or even pixel processor have two inputs of pavement height map and mask map, similar to flood, we would then apply random grayscale and sample each shade of gray it's own tile of pavement "underneath" it, so that we can rotate, move and even scale those individual tiles in our pavement, so they'd overlap, rotate on each other and etc. That'd be such a great effect, but I have yet to find a solution for this, what you think?

[@slb902]

Different warp methods are ok to move them around, although far from perfect, and even rotate is possible, but I haven't seen one to scale it, and ones that allow then to overlap on each other

[@JohnnyHalcyon3D]

Im not sure I follow you - But you can just make a heightmap and feather out the edges into black and plug them all into a tile generator/sampler in order to spread them all around and get random rotation etc

[@slb902]

@@JohnnyHalcyon3D sorry yeah it kinda hard to explain, example: Imagine you have a fully done height tiled texture of bathroom tiles, some cracked, some have dents etc. Now, it is easy for us to make a random grayscale map out of it, since tiles have gaps and using threshold we can conver it to flood. Then what would be cool to do, is kinda assign, or UV every tile of the texture to it's unique shade of grey on the flood-to-random-gray. THEN we could rotate those individual tiles, scale, move them around, overlap, make gaps larger, thinner etc etc. Feel me?

[@JohnnyHalcyon3D]

@@slb902 You cant really work in that direction - Once youve placed the tiles, it's not really feasible to rotate them. You could mask them one at a time using a floodfill to index to isolate them and to find their center to rotate each tile with a pixel processor - This is all much more complicated than it needs to be though. You can give each tile a random grey with flood fill to random greyscale afterwards - as for overlaps - I would do that ahead of time

[@slb902]

@@JohnnyHalcyon3D yes I'm trying to kinda workaround complited height map nad give it a little bit more variation, thought some nodes may give me that, but it is way too difficult I guess, thanks anyways!

[@Soulsphere001]

I'm currently trying to figure out how to do that Mask Map Threshold randomness with a Voronoi node using the Random Color style. I know I can use a Histogram Scan to randomly pick Voronoi pieces, but I'm stumped for how I might randomly distribute them using something similar to the Mask Map Threshold. Any thoughts? I tried a few methods using 'Histograms' and I also looked into the Tile Sampler node. The Tile Sampler uses a FX-map, which I have not looked into so I wouldn't know how to use that. But I'm willing to learn about any of the SD nodes that could help. And anyone should feel free to answer this question if they can. Also, even if someone only points me in the right direction, that would also be helpful.

[@JohnnyHalcyon3D]

I think I know what you mean? You can watch my video on Custom Voronoi, I think that will help

[@Soulsphere001]

@@JohnnyHalcyon3D OH, yes, that's right. Unfortunately I cannot recall what I was working on at the time, so I'm not really sure what I was talking about. I might have meant a Voronoi node using the F1 style, but for whatever reason typed Random Color instead. I think I figured out a different way to do whatever it was I was working on. Sorry, I can get really absent minded at times.

[@hawk08ht]

Been a fan of your channel now as I have started learning Ds recently. One issue that I came across with this method is during scale mask, the smallest stones become spiky in heightmap after we plug in level adjusted texture in Scale Input. wondering if we can define height scale too for smallest stones so it feels more natural. Thank you

[@JohnnyHalcyon3D]

If by spiky you mean they are too tall, and you want the small stones to be lower in the heightmap (i.e; darker) than you can either use the same texture plugged into "Color Map input" and turn up the Color Parametrization Multiplier, OR you can swap the color parametrization mode to "scale"

[@hawk08ht]

thank you, yes I meant too tall. Interesting how "scale" mode with Colour Parametrization Multiplier value of .97 value fixed the issue. Texture used in "Scale Map Input" when plugged into "Colour Map Input" with Colour Parametrization Multiplier value of .97 also fixes it. In both case "Colour Random" needs to be at 0 though. Funny how your analogy of using a single switch to control temperature instead of multiple switches works here. Looking forward to your next video on how to separate intersecting rock shapes!

[@JohnnyHalcyon3D]

@@hawk08ht Color random needn't be at 0, but generally you'll want a low value so you dont override your values from the texture so much

[@hawk08ht]

@@JohnnyHalcyon3D hmm I did notice a very subtle value change with colour random set to very low value. Thank you

[@untitled_exr]

again tutorial she tells you not to worry about

[@JohnnyHalcyon3D]

LOL