Substance Designer 2017 Essential Training

Learn how to create 3D textures with Substance Designer. Find out how to use the atomic nodes and graphs to generate texture maps for game engines like Unreal 4.

Substance Designer is a powerful, procedurally based tool for creating textures for 3D art and games. This training course provides a complete overview of Substance Designer, the 2017 version of the application. New texture artists can use this course to get a jumpstart in the field, while experienced artists will find plenty of advanced tips and tricks to take their skills to the next level.

Instructor Joel Bradley begins with an overview of a prebuilt substance graph, demonstrating the strengths and nondestructive workflow of Substance Designer, and walking through basics such as navigating the Substance Designer interface, adjusting important preferences, importing meshes and maps, and using the 2D, 3D, and Graph views. He then moves onto the large array of essential "atomic" nodes in Substance Designer, including the Blend, Curve, Slope Blur, Normal, Gradient, and Water Level nodes. These nodes comprise the heart of the Substance Designer workflow. Then learn how to create a custom panorama from scratch, and explore more advanced topics such as MDL materials, functions, and FX maps. Finally, Joel closes out the course by putting a substance to use. Learn about the advantages of using a published substance file (SBSAR) over hard-coded bitmaps for in-game materials, and see how to import a substance package into a game engine such as Unreal.

Introduction

• Welcome
• What you should know
• Using the exercise files

1. 2017.1 to 2.1 Updates

• Welcome
• Updated exercise files
• UI: Baker interface
• UI: Baker reset resource
• 2D View: Enable and disable tiling
• Patterns: Arc Pavement
• Patterns: Cube 3D
• Patterns: Gradient Linear 3
• Patterns: Shape Mapper
• Patterns: New Splatter Circular
• Graph: Copy and paste to graphs
• Patterns: Star
• Patterns: Scratches generator
• Adjustments: Histogram Select
• Effects: Flood Fill
• Effects: Flood Fill to Gradient
• Effects: Flood Fill to Random Color
• Tile Sampler: Multi-image input

2. Quick Start Substance Overview

• Using shapes
• Using custom inputs
• Advantages of the multiswitch node
• Transformation 2D nodes
• Inner-panel masking
• Creating edge detailing
• Edge masking
• Rivet generation
• Normal map creation
• Diffuse creation
• Ambient occlusion

3. Substance Designer Setup

• The Welcome dialogue
• Preferences and important setup
• What is a Substance Package?
• What is a substance graph?
• Choosing the correct graph template
• Setting our graph properties
• Mesh setup prior to export
• Importing meshes and maps into Designer
• Baking out mesh specific maps

4. UI and Tool Locations

• Adjust the UI layout
• Menu items and options
• The Explorer section
• What is the Library?
• The parameters section

5. Using Designers Graph View

• Navigating and using the Graph view
• Using the graphs quick access options
• Setting up graph information feedback
• Using the Graph View toolbars
• Utilizing the preview size

6. 3D and 2D Views

• Using the 3D View
• Geometry and Materials menu
• Lights and camera controls
• Enviroment and scene settings
• Display and render options
• Navigating the 2D View
• 2D View essential Controls

7. Using Atomic Nodes

• Adding bitmap nodes
• Discussing the power of the Blur node
• Using blend nodes
• Utilizing the Curve node
• The Warp node
• Adding detail with the Slope Blur node
• Using shape nodes
• Creating patterns with the Splatter node
• Creating normals
• Combining normals
• Creating height maps
• Creating color with the gradient nodes
• Adding procedural dirt
• Using the text tool
• Adding realism with the Water Level node

8. Creating Custom Environment Panoramas

• Adding the panorama shape node
• Blending shapes together

9. MDL Materials

• What is MDL?
• Creating the MDL graph
• The basics of an MDL shader
• Finalizing the Anisotropic BSDF

10. Functions and FX Maps

• What are functions?
• Adding the FX map
• Building an FX map, part 1
• Building an FX map, part 2
• Finalizing the functions

11. Exporting and Using a Substance Package

• Exposing substance parameters
• Exporting bitmaps
• Publishing a substance
• Importing a substance into UE4
• Adding finishing touches

Conclusion

• Next steps