Substance Designer - Learning The Next Generation of Texture Methodology

I have started to pick up Substance Designer recently, discovering its awesome power of procedural texture generation. The idea is that it can create textures from scratch without any need for external texture files, and it can make pretty complex patterns if you know how. I'm still learning, and have a way to go yet, but I'm building a clear picture of how it works it seems.

This is a tiled floor texture, complete with Albedo, Normal, Roughness, and Metalness maps. The texture is entirely procedural generated, with no external image files being used of any kind.

Here is it's creation graph:

The brilliant advantage of this is the ability to create textures that have infinite iteration possibilities, all at the push of a slider or two; or indeed however many you set up. For example, you could make a pristine metal wall, and use a set of sliders that dynamically age it with weathering and rust as required. From here, you could make an entire texture set that shows an environment ageing over time, without any real extra effort taken to paint the texture up.

I will soon incorporate this method into the Gas Station scene, probably only to the extent of texturing something like the floor, but I'll see how it goes.

Gas Station - Texture Update

During further development of the Gas Station scene I have corrected most of the issues with the normal maps by using cages when baking. Apparently if you use hard edges on the low-poly model, only baking normal maps with cages will produce nice results in xNormal.

The texturing is 99% done in Substance Painter, with some Photoshop involved in areas where it made more sense to use it.

I plan to use Substance Designer in this scene as well, which I will start to properly learn soon.

Gas Station Update

This is just a quick update on the Gas Station project. I may add a roof and some more items, but otherwise, the main part of it is done. I have fully modelled the high-res meshes and the low-res meshed now, and xNormal has created normal maps from each of them. The results can be seen below.

On closer inspection however, you can see that the normal maps are far from finished, and this is the main part of conducting this project; to learn how to correctly bake normal maps on hard-surface models.

You can clearly see in this surface that there is a black line striking through the normal map where it should look smooth like the high-res version.

This error is all over the model in different areas, though not everywhere in what appears to be the same situation, so I am looking into this.

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Update:

http://polycount.com/discussion/81154/understanding-averaged-normals-and-ray-projection-who-put-waviness-in-my-normal-map/p1

This covers everything I needed to know. :)

Gas Station Random Project

Recently I have been working on a Gas Station. Didn't really plan to do this, but it's already pretty far on in development. Here are some screen shots:

The model is built in high-res with the aim of its surface data being baked down to a low-res game mesh for the final scene. With the gas pump and some items around it being finished, I have already started to construct the low res geometry, which the last image shows.

Also, just a random update on the helicopter model from my previous post; this model is still being made, and has progressed a bit from where it is shown there, but not by enough for me to bother posting any news on it yet I don't think. I also have an urge to make a kitchen scene for some nice interior design renders, but I probably shouldn't start a 3rd project on the side....