Weekly Substance Challenge - Asphalt

I thought it'd be a good idea to start participating more in the Weekly Substance Challenge over on Polycount, to practice Substance Designer. Here's my first pass on Asphalt material for this week, all of it is procedural

Substance Designer procedural wood planks

I thought I'd try to do some procedural rough wood planks as I need it for the porch of the house. This has probably been the hardest and most confusing for me so far, because wood is a lot more complicated compared to the other procedural materials that I have attempted to do before.

Here's what I ended up with:

The main challenge was to create the wood pattern and details that look believable, I don't think I managed to do it very well (and missed some detail out i.e. the round things wood has and I'm too foreign to know the names for) but it does look like wood to some extent, so I'm quite happy with it.

One cool technique I learned was to run a Vertical Noise node through HQ blur, directional blur, levels, then through Gradient Map node and some blends together with Wood Fiber nodes to achieve this kind of wood-ish pattern

More Substance Designer

Obligatory tiles this time, all procedural again. Wanted more dirty/broken abandoned look, can easily make variations as well for vertex blending, for example one without broken tiles, one less or more dirty.

Didn't use much reference for this but tried to make something up. I broke it into layers as usual:

Concrete?Dirt?Dirty concrete? for the base
Tiny stones on top, I did 3 variations to vary the size and color a little bit
Large tiles, a checker pattern was used as a mask to create the white/orange color pattern
Small black tiles which are just a tweaked duplicate of the large tiles
Some of the tiles were broken off by tweaking their mask using a combination of nodes and new mask was created to add some small broken tile pieces on top
Some subtle colour variation on the tiles i.e. yellow / orange stains
Dirt all around the tiles
Dust, a bit all around but mostly spreading out of the cavities

Learning things

Started learning 3ds Max to be able to add it into my toolset. As a dedicated Maya user since the dawn of my 3D adventures, I was a bit worried that it will be difficult to learn and Max has always seemed quite confusing to me. Surprisingly it took less than a day to figure out the UI and learn how the program works and while my muscle memory is still screwing me over from time to time I can definitely see why some people prefer Max over Maya for modelling, it is actually quite awesome.

Huge thanks to David Lesperance for the "Intro to 3ds Max" gumroad series! Would recommend it to anyone looking to pick up Max: https://gumroad.com/metalman123456123

I have also started diving more into Substance Designer, more specifically the procedural texture creation. I've been using SD for a while, but mostly only for baking and compositing/editing maps that were brought in from the outside. One of the goals I've set for the Abandoned Farmhouse scene was to learn and use Substance Designer more to create the textures procedurally (or Zbrush if I can't do it in SD) and then add some final touches in Painter, rather than using photo-sourced textures and relying a lot on Photoshop which is what I've been used to doing in the past.

I tried to create a country-side road type of material completely procedurally to replace the placeholder one I have in the scene right now, and while I can spot a lot of mistakes looking at it now, it was really fun and taught me a lot about different nodes.

The first thing was to collect clear high res reference images which I think is very important so you're not doing anything off the top of your head. I then scanned through them to figure out what makes that material recognisable, what kind of detail I will need to create etc. I also took note of any unique details that I liked which may only be present in one or few of the images I had, for example small grass patches growing out or small pieces of red brick buried in there.

Then I moved to figuring out how to create the kind of detail that I needed to do (stones, grass patches, small twigs etc), which nodes to use and how to use them. I started with working on the Normal map and then from there used the same masks to create the other maps such as Albedo.

Looking forward to exploring it more