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.
