Ubisoft Candyshop Days 2019 - Exploring Color In Substance Designer

Each year Ubisoft holds a company event dedicated to Material Art and our internal library tool, Candyshop. Last year I was invited to give a talk there and Ubisoft has been kind enough to let me share it publicly with the community! The talk details the research I had done into different workflows for creating color and the subsequent nodes that came from this research.

[@boudini8043]

I'm 3 years late, but this is still really valuable stuff. Thanks Ben 👍

[@kaikizzle]

It's unbelieveable how deep you can take on colors and how "easy" it actually is after understanding the procedure. Thanks man!

[@MaxPuliero]

YES! finally someone expose this topic in a proper way. thanks.

[@rekcneb]

what i didn't expect to find, but hoped for entering "substance designer color" into the searchbar. awesome work & presentation - thank you!

[@javieralaiz9572]

Superb. Packed of interesting and usefull stuff. Can't wait to try the nodes!

[@lucasannunziata]

Thanks so much for sharing these techniques ben! I learned so much from this video

[@tjalle199]

Very informative, nice stuff Ben!

[@pavelolivaart]

Really awesome talk Ben! I really took a lot from it. It's really hard to find resources like this one.

[@osman3d]

Just amazing, thank you very much for sharing!

[@edgeextrude]

You’re a madman, I love it

[@Soulsphere001]

I have yet to build your nodes, but I'm definitely going to try it out (perhaps by the time you read this message). One thing I've found particularity hard to deal with is colour, even more-so than roughness. At least with roughness, one has a lot of reasons as to why various roughness values exist, but colour is one of those things that doesn't necessarily have a reason for existing (other than it looking good). I'm not especially creative, which is why Substance Designer (SD) is a good tool for me, so colour is much more difficult to inject into a SD graph. Anyway, thank you for the video. I only found it because your video was mentioned in an article. It's actually kinda surprising how little information there is on colouring, though I suppose that's not overly surprising since SD videos tend to be quite sparse in general. If you have any other tips about colour, I'd love to learn more. Anyway, I'm off to work on building those graphs (and maybe adding my own tweaks if I can think of anything interesting). Again, I really do appreciate people taking the time to explain these things. It's really very kind of you, and others, to explain a lot of this without the expectation of financial compensation. Thank you. EDIT 4: Deleted other edits, since I have resolved those problems. EDIT 5: The only part I'm confused about now: Is the Value Variation slider just the Opacity slider from the Blend node? It's difficult to tell, since I don't have a similar example to yours.

[@BaezlEugene]

This is brilliant! Technicolour right here.

[@arrw]

Great talk. Thanks Ben

[@cowholy3031]

Thanks , this really helps

[@iendrin9152]

i know it’s an old video, but can i ask what would be an good way to get similar result as 39:29, but more painterly? Can i change some parameter with the existing nodes or should I add/replace something?

[@benqwilson]

Quite a difficult question to answer as of course there is no one correct way of doing it. My initial thoughts are to work with the gradient input maps to have a more painterly feel. Perhaps it would make sense to keep the variation sliders quite low, and layer more nodes together rather than try to push huge variation changes with a single node. Hope that makes sense!

[@iendrin9152]

@Ben Wilson wow, i really appreciate the detailed answer :o d it makes perfect sense, now i know where to start. Thanks a lot for replying and pointing me in the right direction, it means a lot.

[@mikegentile13]

Great where can I get the nodes?

[@benqwilson]

Sorry for the delayed response. Colour variation is up on my artstation www.artstation.com/benwilson/store

[@christopher8116]

At this point in the video; kzbin.info/www/bejne/j563f2uBapJqhcU you use a blend node to blend two BW Color variation nodes, what blend mode did you use ?

[@benqwilson]

I used the default copy blend mode. The idea behind that being you minimise any change to the colors that comes with the other blend modes. This way you only defining the color from one place in the graph (the color variation nodes themselves).

[@christopher8116]

@@benqwilson Oh I recently did a blend mode but use Max instead of copy, the results are good but I may go in and change to simply copy, hoping I get the colors I have in place now.

[@christopher8116]

What node is the guy speaking mentioning here; kzbin.info/www/bejne/j563f2uBapJqhcU ?

[@benqwilson]

Hey Christopher! The node mentioned is WkFunctionDrawer kzbin.info/www/bejne/Z4TakGambtOolaM. It appears all the links are no longer valid though, so you may need to reach out to Werwack if your interested in it!