6 | Substance Designer: Heaven or Hell?

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While I was fumbling around with my little Lego pieces, we moved on in the lectures and workshops to think about tiling textures. The fun thing about tiling textures is that you can place your UV’s anywhere, not just in the 0-1 space, which is very freeing after trying to line up a billion tiny triangles to be as space efficient as possible. Then to further affect the tiling, one can increase or decrease the size of the UV shells to have the texture appear smaller or larger – changing the texel density.

Having a set texel density over an environment will help greatly in it all looking cohesive, as everything will be at the same resolution. Being able to set and apply texel density to multiple UVs with 2 clicks of a button is extremely helpful – I would like to give a crisp high-five to whoever implemented that button. This magic button was able to help me get all my UVs tiling correctly by setting them the same texel density.

Before I could do any of this, we had to make the tiling texture. Substance Designer was our weapon of choice. Having never used Substance Designer before, I was nervous, but while following along in class I gained enough confidence to start experimenting with deviating from the tutorial. The node workflow was new to me, I hadn’t come across it in any other program, but by the end of the session I was really enjoying it!

In the end I made 2 different colours of bricks – a classic red, and a more elegant dark grey. This was because of my indecisiveness when it comes to deciding where the colours go. In fairness I had decided on the colour scheme of my building – grey, red, and turquoise, just not where each colour goes yet.

For my roof tiles I had a much more difficult time, and it took much longer due to my lack of direction at the beginning. To try and find some, I started with timelapses of others creating roof tiles to try and find a few methods. Most consisted of creating the shape of an individual tile and then mapping it to a tiling node as a base – building on top of that with grunge and noise maps.

I thought it might be fun to have my roof tiles made from jade; while not practical or cost efficient it sure is cool and a neat solution to why the tiles are green :)

When the family that opened the restaurant immigrated, they brought jade with them to trade for they had no english currency, yet the english would not take jade either due to suspicion of the unfamiliar culture, so so its best use was in practicality in keeping themselves dry. Obviously they did not own enough jade to roof the whole building so slowly, over generations, more jade tiles have been imported using restaurant profits, and the roof added to until it was complete.

My lasting impression of Substance Designer is that there is a lot I haven’t explored and that it has possibility to create a lot of impressive things.

It was time to jump back into maya. Maya is Love Maya is Life. Live Laugh Maya.

For too long I had been putting off intricate but important details. Railings, brackets, and finials had been on my mind for a while, but I had been internally warring with myself over how to make them. I wasn’t sure how I could make them feel organic but also easy to UV unwrap and reasonable polygon-wise. I already had a design for the railings, so I began there.

The curve tool used in an orthographic view will snap to that axis, and between a mixture of cubic and linear curves I was able to map out my design. The idea behind it is that of a stylised plum blossom intertwined with some characteristic flowing art nouveau lines to represent branches and leaves. The floral motif in this design carries well even though ‘plum blossom’ is not so obvious as which flora the motif belongs to.

My solution to unwrapping this is that I’m not going to. Instead, my plan is to take all the railings and the finial and bake them onto cuboids in a trim sheet. Trim sheets are another way to save in texture space and draw calls, as each material counts as a draw call. By laying out multiple textures on one material, you can assign one texture to an object yet texture each surface in a different material. This is particularly effective when working on objects that have a lot of slight variation in something like stonework to create visual interest for the viewer. I was particularly impressed by the trim sheets for God Of War 2018 (Santa Monica Studio) created by Cliff Schonewill and was inspired by the possibility of variation.

The same process was used in the arched rails above the handrails, and they will also be baked onto the sheet. My finial used the same set of curves that created the blossom from the handrail combined with a simple pedestal to create the piece.

The brackets are not so detail heavy, more of a small piece I could dot around where needed, especially on the underside of the second-floor roof, with a lattice structure running across the ceiling to help support the weight of the roof and the upper floor.

I had unwrapped all my pieces and created a few more along with 2 tiling textures. Creating my trim sheets is next on the agenda, along with more work in Unreal Engine to create a lighting pass.

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REFERENCES

GBD WORLD. (2023) Procedural Old Mossy Roof Tile Tutorial, Substance3DDesigner. [Youtube user-generated content] Available at: https://youtu.be/BsTXrHetx-Q?si=ncAgbVfqMfDAX4XM. GBD World, Youtube.

KALYSON. (2019) Substance Designer - Stylized Roof Material. [Youtube user-generated content] Available at: https://youtu.be/SOXS6RRewq4?si=gNIKPl0K7bQAOQkI. Kalyson, Youtube.

NVECTOR. (2023) Stalyzed Roof | Substance Designer 2022. [Youtube user-generated content] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxOXgr1BU4I. NVector, Youtube.

SCHONEWILL, Cliff. (2018) Trims. [online] Available at: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/XZ2L0. Artstation.