Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hey fox, I just dropped
a quick tutorial on making Gibby style bricks
and substance designer. The very ones on the
screen right now, if you like that magical, stylized vibe, this
tutorial might just be right for you what's
actually in it. Aside from the fully
commented project files, you will also have access to a video library where we
will cover in depth how I have created everything from heightened color maps to how I approach roughness and AO maps. As I have mentioned before, everything is very
well commented and organized for you to
understand more easily. If it sounds like
something you would like, check the link down below. See.
2. Height Map: Hello first, I would like
to thank you for actually getting these little mini series about this specific material. Secondly, I'm going
to try and explain this on a first site
monstrosity of a material. But once you get a
deep dive into it, it's really not
that complicated. First thing we'll be starting with the height information. I have it color
coded everything and commented so you can have an easier time when
going through these. The first thing we're doing is basically just getting a
shape, a simple shape. We are getting this
edge detect node, so we can get these rounded
corners right here. Let me actually make it a
bit bigger so we can see. We will just be inverting
gray scale and then masking it on subtract like so we
get this rounded shape. Next that rounded shape, we will be subtracting
these gradient axial. You can gradient ailene. You can pull this
one wherever you want and just change the shape however
you really want to. We will be just cutting
it off a little bit a certain sides and
then just beveling it basically simple bevel
0.2 here on the distance. Nothing out of the ordinary. Now to create a bit
more variation, what I'm doing is I'm
taking a gradient linear. I'm just using
transform to D to put these gradients in place
where I want them. And then multiplying the
results here with the bricks, basically just manipulating them as I want them and
you want to have at least a bit of variation in which height
goes where, basically. Then I'm just putting
it into a tile sampler. This is nothing too crazy. I just put the amount to 5.10 that feels like
a normal number. We choose to pattern input, we put all four of them inside. I choose symmetry random, because if it's not random, sometimes you can
see the repetitions. For example, two, Maybe it's just harder to see the repetitions when you have symmetry. Random turned on. I made another one here, which is basically
the same copy it. Random bumped all the way up for other purposes of the mask, but we'll get into that later. Basically, we have this
very simple height map. In some cases this can
actually just be good enough, but I like to do a little bit of damages
here, here and there. Next thing I do is auto levels just to clamp the values nicely. With that in mind,
I basically go into a slow blur and I
use a thing called node. A little bit of a heads up, This is not my node, but this node is pretty simple. The node is from Jimmy Malacha. He's a very talented
material artist. I got it from him. It
just saves a lot of time. It is a very simple node, it's just crystal two and shape and it's subtracted using easy splatter
and you just get that. Then you expose a few
parameters like here, then you can control it inside the graph pretty easily.
It's a handy thing to do. You can even expand it to use something other than crystal, but I just like to
use it as it is. You will see it be
used very often, I put it into a blur just
to remove the detail a bit. The slope blur this on in
and just a small intensity, we don't want to go overboard. This creates a lot
of these nice chunks and areas where it's destroyed. What we want to do is
just blend this on a copy so we can
control the amount, the amount of chunkiness
to say the amount of chip damage that it produces. You can see this is very subtle. But you can very easily
go overboard with this. Let me just put this back on. You can very easily go
overboard with this. I just put it very subtle because I'm not really
big into massive detail. I just like to add a
little bit at a time. You'll see the same done here. Basically it's a Perlin noise. I do a non uniform blur to
just extend these pixels, you can see I'm extruding them. Then I blur them quite
heavily actually, and put them into
another slow blur. Everything the same, crank up the samples intensities fairly low and then mode to you just
get these bigger chunks. These are very nice details. Then the same thing, again, just copy and choose
the amount you want. Here, you can even
see that it's a bit bigger, bigger of a change. Again, try not and go overboard
but experiment with this. It's probably for the best. The next thing I do
is quite a funky one, but I use a Oi and inverted Voronoi to get
this cell like texture. Slow blur the two with
crystal, that's blurred. Slow blur them and get a
very interesting detail. Then I blur this even further. Then I slow blur
with the height map, we get some of these
interesting chip damages here and there that
I really liked. Basically, same thing,
copy and that's it. The next thing is
these little cracks. You can see them.
These small holes, cracks, whatever you call them. I just really wanted
to add a few of them. Basically what I did is you
choose a paraboloid here, you can see that
they're very small. I just crank up the X and Y amount and just play around with
the scale a little bit. Position, of course,
random offset, all that stuff, Rotation doesn't really matter
because it's circular. Anyways, then I cranked up the mass random a lot
because if you don't, yeah, it's going to look like cheddar cheese. Pretty much. Crank this up quite
high so you have a few of them you
can play around like maybe nine suits you
better. I don't know. I found 95 to be
quite interesting because it had just
the right amount, Not too much, too little. Basically. These would look weird if they were
just little holes. What I did is I slope, blur them with a perlin noise that set to quite a high scale. You can see the deformed, some of them almost
didn't deform at all, but that's also okay. You can see those then we're just subtracting these
on a very low value. You don't want to
crank the you don't want to crank this
up too high because, yeah, it literally punches holes in your materials. It
was something like this. Yeah, again, experiment.
It's up to you. It's pretty personal preference. Now, I made a bit of
overcomplicated cracks here. I'll go into depth with those. What I did is basically
splattered a bunch of random squares with
a bunch of random, like you can see, size and size random and
scale and scale, random position and offset. It's pretty random, but
I get this out of it. A very interesting map. By the way, this
distance node works only if you use
the color random. If you don't use this, this will not output anything really. After that, I go into
the edge detect, I make two edge detects. One is set to two on edge
width, and one is set to three. This is So we can blend them together using this Gaga noise. You can use Perlin or
anything for that matter. Now we have a weird
transition over here, but this is good
because we can blur this after we level it out. You can see we have varying
thickness of these edges, these cracks as
you can see them, they're varying in thickness. That is one, it's
very subtle detail. But I really like
doing it because it's so simple to do it
instead of only one. You use two detects,
and that's it. The only real pain
with this is just manipulating the levels
to get a nice result, But you can see
it's pretty simple. After that, I leveled
it inward just a little bit of course, inward gray scale, because we're going to be
subtracting this here. I do just a tiny bit of
directional warp with this histogram,
histogram scan here. It's nothing special, but
just a tiny bit to break it, you can see then I use the creased texture to
just warp it even further. You can see this is changing
it quite a bit now. And then what I'm
doing is I'm blending. I'm removing, I don't
know if you can see, but I separated the bricks
that were invisible, so to say that were
lower in color, were a bit blacker,
bit pushed in. And then I inverted gray scale
to get a white map of it. And then just a bit
of histogram scan. Now when we remove this, the cracks will not appear on the bricks that are further in, the cracks will appear more on the bricks that
are popping out. It just adds a bit of detail. It's a personal preference,
really you don't have to. The next thing is just a
bit of gauge noise with a bit of levels to just
destroy this even further. And just a simple
subtract will do, this is a very low number
because if you go any further, it will again cut into the brick and you don't
really want that. Basically, the
height map is done, like everything for the height. This is done and we'll move right to the
color section now.
3. Color Map: In the color section.
This is probably the most comprehensive
section of them all because
it is pretty long. But we're not really
doing anything too out of the ordinary Once
you get the gist of it, it's really nothing
that special. What we're doing is we're
creating two brushes here that we're going to splatter around
using easy splatter. Just going to splatter
all of them around and create a interesting
mask to begin with. How I create these
brushes, I don't know. I just mixed and mashed a lot of techniques
to get something. You don't really
have to do this. You don't have to
do this at all. If you have some
brushes that you use in Photoshop or any other
software for that matter, you can feel free to
just import them. I just wanted to keep
everything inside substance. I don't import any resources. It seemed like a fun
challenge and it did a pretty good job here. I just did a directional
noise with a blur. When multidirectional,
warp gray scale, you get this interesting
effect where it's layering, I blur that. And then into the
histogram scan, because I want it
more general mask. I do a little bit of swirl just to create that avy effect. It doesn't really matter
much, but I like it. I bevel it a bit.
Then another blur. Now I add a bit of noise
because noise is good when repeated a lot.
A bit of leaks. The leaks are basically
carrying the brush. I just get it a bit more, I gave it a bit more height
and the blended it in here. What they did in
here is basically I created this
interesting gradient. So to say I just did this transformation
and then gradient map and then just converted
this to gray scale. I could have done this as well.
It doesn't really matter. I just wanted to get
the tip of it pretty wide and then gradient just
fade into black slowly. I use another
transformation to D, then blended a
little bit of the, basically to just add a bit of more noise
into that brush. And then auto levels
and the brush is ready. The next one is
way more simpler, It's just a shape, paraboloid, multidirectional warp again and then levels to just get it nice, then I just apply
some grunge leaks. That is basically it,
onto the important part. Now what I actually did here
is just a simple cloud, non uniform blur and then slope blur to create
this starting base mask. You can see it just, it's just so it's
not a flat color. Just so it has a bit of
something to work around with. Then I use this series
of easy splatter with a lot of colors that I deemed
interesting beforehand. This is more about
experimenting, but just get a general direction of color, where you want to go. And then just experiment
here and there all the time until you get something
that looks decent. Of course, you can finish the whole material and
then you can come back to color and tweak
it a bit even more. That's why designer
is pretty powerful. You can always tweak these and see how they
change anything. I can choose anything here. And you can see
that it changed how the material looked
on certain parts. But it's up to you to experiment and choose
the colors that you like. This is just spluttering
all over the place. We get. It's just like painting a
canvas with some random colors. Just getting some
base to work from. You can see I ended it here. Now what I did here,
I did two slow blurs. One is to just
really make it wild. And I use the
darroode again with quite some big shapes just
to make it quite wild. You can see this is
a big difference. The second one is just to add a little bit of
painterly feel to it. More shapes but smaller ones, you can see this here. You're just adding
that painterly feel. Now what I did, I did a directional work
with this mask here. These are just a collection of masks that I deemed
to be useful. I use multiple times. I use only once. It's just
for organization purposes. I just did a directional
work with height. But height without it's
just a normal height. It doesn't have any damages
or anything like that. You can see it put color in various ways.
On top of those. I thought this is it seems too stretched in certain areas
and pretty good in others. To combat that, I just did a small slobler,
just a small one. The next part, I did
a first shadow pass. This shadow pass is
not really important. I'd like to do it anyways, because it sets my mind
in the right direction. It's just a small
shadow pass that is derived from the height map. Here you can see it. Just invert and histogram scan. Don't put this
like really black, put it something grayish. It's not saturated at all, just don't put it too dark. The next is color
variation pass, and that is pretty simple. It is derived from this
other tile sampler. And a little bit of histogram scan a little bit of levels, you can see we have
different colored bricks. The next part is
I add the leaks. You can see those
quite evidently here, here on quite some
places, you can see them. The leaks are very simple. If you ask me, they
start with grunge leaks, I just transform them a little bit to get
that repetition. Then I put a similar
set up as in the ode and just easy
splattered all over the place. Next thing we do is we just
slow blur it a little bit because this one seemed a
bit too sharp for my taste. Then directional warp
again, height there. We just add it as a mask and we put a nice bluish color there. You can see it adds quite a
lot of life to those bricks. The next important color
overlay is a dirt mask. A dirt mask is also
very, very simple. It's just clouds to I do a little bit of
slow blur just a bit, then histogram,
select this node, basically just
selects the position and you can select the range
and contrast and all that. It makes very nice
masks as you can see. And basically the same
treatment I just worked it, it created this very
nice mask which I then applied this
third mask on. As you can see here, I prepared two masks for adding. You can see this
little black line and these little highlights. These are the two
masks that I used for them and you'll
see that very soon. Now it's the important
shadow pass. As you can see, we again, we're using a height map, but now we're using
the full finished one. We're using it, putting
it into a normal, it's just a simple normal, Soble, nothing really special. Then I'm using light inputs. It basically casts
light and gets you the white part of it. You can actually add
it into the albedo. What I do here is I
color the shadows. Now here you really need
to be careful with colors. Which colors go where. I usually experiment
on this phase a lot. If you don't nail
these three colors, it won't look that
great as it can. I just experiment a lot. See, you can see here that
I choose like a bluish, a greenish and like
some purplish. Those work pretty nicely and
you can start to make out the bricks from this base color. Now just another thing, these are dark, but
they're pretty saturated. Not a lot, but make sure
they are saturated, not like very desaturated. Just so you can have these nice details,
I finish it there. What I do here is I did the
same thing for the cracks. I basically got the cracks
out of here and put them into a normal map and then just the same treatment
light all over the place. You can see a little bit of bluish and a little
bit of purplish here. This part I add some black, I added from the curvature, just his gram scan, a little bit of blur and
a little bit of levels. I add that in here. Once those are in the cracks
here are pretty good. The next thing is I'm
doing this black outline. The black outline as you can
see, if you follow this, but bear with me is just the edge detect
with invert gray scale. Be careful not to put
too much edge width on this invert gray scale. And I just pull that into
here and you can see the black outline going
all the way across. Next thing we do a little bit, you can see this here we are
adding these little holes. What we're doing here actually is adding the little
shadow values. Now we're adding the light value around dirt mask patches. It's the same thing like here, we just did to normal curvature,
smooth hesogram scan. When I went here, it's
just simple levels, a little bit of blur and then a little bit
more simple levels. Then we added those, like small, nice looking highlights there. The next thing is we
added highlights on those bricks that
are popping out. You can see it when the
height map is applied. This one is popping out, this one is popping out. On this one, you can see those are the ones that are
mainly highlighted. Then I do a general highlight, so you can see all those
small little lines and around holes and edges too. Both of these are achieved
by normal Hubble. And this one is
curvature smooth, a bit of levels, bit of blur, and then a bit of levels again, you will see this a lot. What this achieves the level blur levels is you can blur it out to just lose a little bit
of detail or even gain it. You can see it goes from this to the nice lines that
actually go across. Very interestingly,
it's just a tiny thing that can help with the looks. The next thing we
add this top color, you can see it changes quite a lot how our
material looks. This top color is just another simple
normal into the light. And we just set the light specifically to hit these types. We choose this blend on a
copy, it's pretty simple. It's top down. Finally, you can actually recognize these shapes properly. They look really nice. Now here I'm just adding a little bit of
a light into the holes. You can see it's just a tiny bit of an
improvement, but I still like it, it still feels like a bit
more realistic the way it looks then the HSL is just to make this a
little bit more reddish. I don't know, I
just felt it looked nicer when it's just a red. Now we add the
final shadow pass. The final shadow pass is again a pretty simple derived
from the height map. It's just ambient occlusion
that is inverted. And then put in here you can see just a bit of green
around the edges. You can see how much that
actually adds in there. And the other one is just
normal curvature, smooth. And then we go into levels
to just get these holes. This is interesting because
you can see in these holes, that's where we are
adding little details. You can see the difference
is actually quite big, how it looks, just adding in
those small pockets of air. It's really
characteristic to like gibley and stylized
styles to have those little holes here where it would be darker than
the rest of the shadows. You can see how it just
makes the bricks pop. Basically, every single step just makes them more
and more pop out. Now, before doing this
global bruscifying, we're actually making the moss. Moss is pretty simple as well. What I did is first
create a mask. This mask is derived
from this one. It's just. Before
adding any damages, we have this simple ambient
occlusion with some. Parameters to get the
most out of the shadows. I invert the gray scale. I do some levels to just pick up all of these weird white values, then I just blend it with Perlin Noise Just so we have
some variation in color. Then a simple slow blur
with crystal two to bring out a lot of those details
like here and there, we can blur it just to
a little bit of levels. You can see how that looks
now and we do non uniform, we get these very interesting. It's almost like it's melting, feel directional work
with itself just a bit. And then just a bit of levels
to control everything. Then I put that as
rotation map input. And mask map input, rotation map isn't
really that important. What's important is the mask. But before we get into
this tile sampler, let's just get to
creating the shape. The shape is pretty
self explanatory. It's just a shape
into the transform. And then we have the
mirror gray scale to make this heart shape. I just put it a bit up, it's a bit better
for the splatter circular. Then we splatter it. We create these two variations. Just mess around
with these settings to get something similar. After that, we just
get it into transform. I just like to squish it a bit. Nothing special. Then we
get into the tile sampler. This is pretty simple. Just put a lot of x and y
mount until it looks right. A lot of scale and scale, random position and offset. We have the rotation and
rotation map multiplier. The most important
one is mask map, because without it, it's just
going to spawn everywhere. While this might look cool, it's not really what we wanted. We want them to show up at pockets in between bricks
and here and there. Going onto the
bricks themselves, you see this one
filled in this pocket. Pretty interesting. Basically just
messing around with the tile sampler
until it looks right. There's nothing more to
it, if I'm to be honest. Then we do a ter node with
quite a lot of these shapes. Just a small one, you can see how slight
and small this is. Then I put this
into gradient map. I just do a little
gradient there, you can see just a
few simple colors. Nothing special or
out of the ordinary. Because I don't like messing
up the gradient map a lot. I dipped it into HSL just to get the colors the way I
wanted them a bit more. Then I went into the
slow blur color again, just creating, that's
nice, painterly feel. Then we blended these
two on copy just a bit, you can see no mask at all. It's just a mix of both
worlds, so to say. Then we are blending this brick brick
albedo with the moss. You can see this looks
pretty nice just using this one and putting the histogram scan as a mask.
Pretty simple stuff here. Here we add, you can
barely even see it, but it is a nice addition to just add a bit
of this variation. We basically just took
the yo normal and then curvature
smooth and then just histogram select to select
some of these areas, see just a bit of detail to
be added on top of them. Then we are just adding shadows. Shadows are derived from the
sloblretty simple stuff. It basically just casts a shadow and we invert the gray
scale to get these values. There we go, we add the
black around those, and you can see the difference. Obviously, it makes it feel like it pops out
more as you can see. That's a really cool look. Then we put this down, we're putting it into the slow blur here
and into this one. What we're doing here
is just globally blurring the whole base color. We have one that blurs
it in a similar way. We blurred here in the
beginning, we just blur them. Create a little mask here, and then we put them together. Now you might not see
much of a change. Let me now bring this
up a bit like this. You might not see
much of a change, but you can see it when
you shift through them. It's painterly, it's paint got all over it and it's
not that clean anymore. Now, this is of it's completely up to you to personal preference
if you like it. I just like how it
dissolves the colors a bit and makes it
feel really nice and painterly. The
same is done here. It's just another slow
blur, another mask. You can see we're
just blurring a bit here and there Just
adds these nice details, washes away the color, that is the base color is done. The hardest part is basically, do we have roughness,
normal, and Mb? Let's head into those.
4. Roughness Map: Here we are in the
roughness part of things. How I start is very
similar to how I started. The color part. It's just clouds to all levels. Slow, a bit of levels
here and there. And then slow,
blurring it to create some general mask and
then directional warp. We've seen this already, so I'm just going to
fast forward through it. The next thing is
I'm adding white. Where this dirt splatter is. Basically, I'm
deriving the mask. You can see this
is the same thing. I just like how it goes, how it went, like
that dirt splatter. Because I like the way it looks. If let's say subtract it, it's going to shine. I tried this before,
it could work nicely. That dirt splatter is shining and looks all nice and cool. But I really didn't like it. I liked it more when it's almost pure white because then
it doesn't shine at all. Almost. We have a nice look on all those nice details
we work hard to achieve. Like this black line and this
highlight as you can see. Then we're adding just a bit
of randomness with here. It's just a simple
cloud, slow blur. And then histogram select
directionally work. You get a bit of a mask that
make a bit more powerful. If you want to be careful
with this though, it can really make
or break material. Just a simple variation.
Nothing special here. What we're doing now, we're doing the same thing we
did to the base color. We are brushifying it. Just a random mask, slow blur with node, another slow blur. And then there we go, just a bit of bring
it looks washed out. Next thing I add the black
around these bricks, these are basically these edge highlights this
one and this one. I just pull them together into a blend node and
pull them down here. What this achieves,
it's basically a, just a simple way for
your edges to glow, so they give a little bit of
shine when looking at them. It's just a personal preference, you don't really have to do it. It's not that noticeable, but it is nice and interesting. The next part is
we're just adding simple white into the cavities just so we make sure there is nothing in between these
bricks, no dark spots. We're just using a simple
height map for that. We're using it on divide. You can see if you pull this up, it will do more and more of it. You don't really want to
pull this up too much. The next thing is
just adding the moss, and that is pretty simple. We are just grabbing this one, we're just doing the levels. You can do this with
histogram scan as well. I did it with levels
because I wanted to get a little bit of
this information. Then we just pull this
histogram scan as a mask. There we go. We
have white spots. None of these would shine or
anything stupid like that. And basically we're done. Now let's head into
the normal app.
5. Normal and AO: The normal map and
ambient inclusion are pretty self explanatory. I'll just go through them both. It's just a simple normal
map derived from the height. It's set on six,
it's pretty low. I don't like very
intense normal maps. You can try out more intense or less
intense. I don't know. It feels nicer when
it's on a lower value. What we're doing is just
manually adding moss because we didn't really
include the moss into the height map that
was on purpose. But that's why we need to
add moss manually here. What we're doing now
is just russifying it, basically just slow blur and slow blur to get
these nice details, create a mask, russify the
whole thing and call it done. This is the same thing we
did for ambient inclusion, ambient oeclusion, very light. I put this here on eight. If you go too much it
just loses its charm. I don't know. I like it
when it's very light. We're just again,
adding manually The moss moss is just
derived from this thing, it's put into the
ambient occlusion. The next thing is
we're just russifying it all the same,
Getting another mask. You can always like do a random seed here if you
want a different one. And calling it done, basically that is it for
the material you have actually learned all
the specifics about it. You can go into the material, into the SBS file and
just dig away at it, see anything that I might
have missed in explaining it. I tried my best to cover
everything important. But if I was to cover
everything in this material, it would have taken
you way too long. It's better just to
glance over what I think is important while I
was making the material. And then you can head into the SBS file and
you can dig away at basically everything you deem also important or you
want to learn more about. Again, thank you for getting this little mini
series on how to make this and I
hope I see around.
Populus Course
