Allegorithmic’s Substance Designer
are resolution independent. This
means if your texture requires more
resolution, an artist doesn’t need to
use a combination of bitmaps and
filters to re-author a new texture
in Photoshop. They can just go
back into a created substance and
increase or decrease the resolution,
and the changes will be propagated
down to all components of the
substance, i.e. diffuse map, specular
map, height map, normal map, and
so on. This feature alone makes
Substance Designer one of the most
powerful software applications for
generating texture data, whether
for prototyping or full production.
However, there did appear to be some
software slowdown when working
with very high-resolution textures.
There have been a few
applications that boast procedural
texture creation, such as Genetica
and Dark Tree, but none of them
have offered the end-to-end solution
that Allegorithmic has provided
with Substance Designer and
Player. Each of these applications
provides its part in the creation,
compression, and streaming of
textures in a real-time environment.
use as the starting point for your
substance library.
Once these base substances
are assembled, an artist utilizes
instances of them to composite
together their own new texture using
a set of robust Photoshop-like filters,
adjustments, and transformations.
This is my favorite aspect of
Substance Designer, as I can create
large texture libraries and not have
to rebuild my texture information
every time I start a new asset. I
can start by creating substances
that are just general rock, dirt,
and skins, and then use them to
composite together new substances
very quickly using things like HSL
adjustments, scaling/rotating/
moving, blurring, drop shadows,
and blending modes. The list of
available filters is almost endless,
and Substance Designer gives you
all the Math nodes you would need
to produce your own custom filters
if the pre-built ones don’t meet the
needs of your project.
Normally, I’m a big fan of visual
node networks to build up logic, but
there are times when the networks
can get quite large in the Substance
At the end of constructing all
this texture data, you simply drop
down Output Nodes to output
textures such as diffuse maps,
ambient occlusion maps, cavity
maps, specular maps, normal maps,
and height maps. It’s very similar
to what Crazy Bump and Xnormal
produce, but with flexibility and
re-usability.
With a substance completed
and saved, an artist or art director
can access the texture through the
Substance Player. The Substance
Player environment provides a
very intuitive interface for iterating
and customizing the substance
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to fit the needs of the project,
without having to learn how to
construct substances. Using
exposed parameters which are set
up in Substance Designer by the
technical artist, an art director can
change everything from the color of
a texture and normal intensity, to
the amount of specular and ambient
occlusion, through to how much
moss is growing over the details
in the texture. The list is endless,
as just about every slider, integer
value, and color swatch can be
propagated up to the Substance
Player as well as changed on the
fly in Maya and 3ds Max, or even in
your game engine directly.
Also, the latest releases
of Maya and 3ds Max provide
a new shader that can import
the Substance format directly.
This allows an artist to use their
substance while they are building
a level or character and change
the elements of the substance as
needed. This makes the process
of texturing very iterative, as your
textures evolve along with your
environments and characters.
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» So, what is the process of
creating a new substance in
Substance Designer? It can actually
start in a few different ways. An
artist can utilize a set of pre-built noises, patterns, and vector
graphics, or import bitmaps of
rocks, dirt, and rust to start creating
their substance. A technical artist
can spend some time pre-building
a library of procedural dirt, rust,
and rock using their own custom
filters and FX maps that can then
be composited by another artist.
Or you can just use Substance
Designer’s Bitmap to Material nodes
to generate automatic tiling textures
with accompanying diffuse,
specular, ambient occlusion, and
normal maps.
This flexible approach allows
you to pick the method that best fits
your project’s needs. Allegorithmic
has also produced a large set of
pre-built substances, available
through Turbo Squid, which you can
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