Substance 3D Designer for Stylized Materials

1. Intro: Hey everyone, if you're looking for a course and how to make stylized materials inside Substance Designer, this is the right place for you. We will be covering most of the basic stuff and heading over to the creation of cheat sheet, which is going to be our guide moving forward in material creation as the course progresses, we will always be adding new stuff to the actual cheat sheet. Meaning when you get to the finish of the course, you will have all the tools needed at your disposal ready for your journey afterwards. I hope we have an amazing time together. 2. Navigation: Hey guys, and welcome to the beginning of this course here. So the first thing we're going to learn is obviously the real basics here. And it's gonna be about some navigation, how you use the overall program. And I'm going to talk a little bit about PBR because some people might not know what it actually is. And without further ado, let's dive in. When you start your your substance designer, it should look something like this. Or probably there is new graph pop up here. And what we're gonna do is we're going to create a new graph. And it's just gonna be some test graph that we can just have a little bit of playtime around. And that's why I'm going to call it test. And the parent size is two K resolution. Everything else you should leave to do to default. You can use some templates, but we're not going to be using any discourse. There is a reason for that as well, and I'll show you. There are two key resolution is completely fine for working. You can, depending on your PC specs, you can make the resolution bigger or you can make it smaller. I like to do to k. So let's click Okay, and let's create that graph. So as you can see, we have a few tabs here. We have the graph, which we add some nodes. And as you can see, we can have a lot of nodes here. And this is the main, the main area where we work in. We have the Explorer where we see some packages and we see our graph and a package. And you can have multiple, multiple graphs in one package. You see properties. And the properties are if I get on node inside, you can see some base parameters, attributes, instance parameters. We'll all, we'll cover that all up. And they're usually, so these are the attributes and base parameters, arm are on all nodes, but these instance parameters are based on which no would you choose? So if I choose a shape or if I choose, let's say this noise that is clouds to I have different incentives parameters here. You have a 3D view of what you're doing here. You have a library where you can pull out stuff, but we will not be using that because it isn't that useful. Because most of the time you'll just be pressing space and searching for the nodes you seen fit to use. Instead of just scrolling endlessly through the library. And of course we have 2D view, which tells us, which would, which tells us what we're selecting right now and how it looks basically. So for starters, you can see there's nothing appearing here. So let's bring out a shape node. So type in shape, press space bar, and then type in shape. And also the navigation. If you haven't figured it out already, it's middle mouse-click to move around. And you click to move, a left-click to move nodes around. And you can pull this pin with left-click as well. And now throughout the course you will see some sort of little shortcuts and tips like you can rewrite this using Alt if you hold, if you pull it out and press Alt left shoulder is you can make another one, but it's all gonna be showed respectively when it should be. So let's bring other shape and we can go down to some instance parameters and go to pattern. And let's choose a paraboloid. And let's scale this down to 0.8. Just so you can feel, you can play around with these just so you can feel a little bit of responsiveness than what's actually happening when you tweak these parameters a little. And now what we're gonna do is set up some output nodes. Basically why we're not seeing here. We're worried we're not seeing anything here is because we don't have any output nodes here. And what we do here is we create an output nodes like so. And we'll call this base color exactly. And this base color is basically going to be the color of this cube. So let's do uniform color. Just type in uniform color into the search and choose, let's say, an orange one. But you can see the cubes color is not changing. It is because we haven't applied the actual, the actual output node as we should. So press right-click View in 3D view and base color over here. And now or cube is orange. The next thing we're going to be using is a normal map. And you'll see how each and every one behaves through this simple demonstration here. So let's say normal here. And we're going to drag out of this shape. And it's going to pop out with a search bar and we're going to type in normal. And it's hard to see anything in this one. So bump out the intensity. Something like ten maybe. Or you can even go higher, 20. Let's go forward. You just for the sake of this. And you're gonna plug this in here. Nothing's changing. So we need to right-click View in 3D view and select the normal map. And now we can see even though the phases are completely flat, as you can see, it creates the illusion that has the actual cube is popping out in this shape, this shape here. Now let's do another output nodes. And it's not going to be this one. Let's see roughness. Now. Roughness behaves very interestingly, and I'll show you how actually let's connect this one up here and view in 3D view and find the roughness here. And as you can see, the black parts are reflective and reflective. It's really reflective because it's completely black and the white are the parties. The less reflective it is, the more rough it is, so to say. And you can see really well in this demonstration here. We will copy this one. And we will say height here. And we will apply this view in 3D view. And as height. Now a little changed, but the biggest change is if you go to materials, sorry, materials default and edit here. And scroll down to hide scale. If you bump this up, this is now not the best, the best height map, but if you bump this up, you can see that this is no longer a flat face. It actually worked the shape. So it pops out. Literally pops out. It's not just a fake effect, it's actually making the geometry in that shape. So the last map I'm going to show you is another output node and its ambient occlusion. So let's call it a or for short. And we're going to pull out from this shape here, Typing A0 and ambient occlusion HBO and plugged it in there. Now you can see this snowed. We can change the height depth and we're going to bump it up completely just so you can actually see the difference once we apply this. So again, right-click View in 3D view and ambient occlusion. And you can see, you can see the depth way better with the ambient occlusion. And that's what that's what the map is actually four. So you can change this, you can adjust the height. Now, this might not be the best presenter of this map, but you will see in future how the ambient occlusion actually functions and fields. So basically, you can bump up the values and make it pop out more and make the sort of these lower parts, as you can see, make them more black so they kinda pop out more. So that's it for this sanction. Let's move on to the next one. 3. Beginner Nodes: Okay guys, so continuing on with the course in this section, you will learn more about simple, really, really simple, so to say, nodes, how you use them a little bit. You will be experimenting a lot. We won't be creating really anything, but you will see how some nodes work and how they function. So let's begin with simple graph, and I'm going to say a graph name. Let's say, I don't know, nodes seems the simplest. And it's gonna be a really simple graph. But it gets you to actually learn a few tricks and methods and a few nodes and what they actually do. So you don't, if you're a total beginner. So you don't go into this whole course blindly because that would be a bit too much of a hassle for you. So first things first, I want to teach you a way of adding output nodes immediately and making them, making them useful immediately. Bring up base material. And click, right-click on it. Create output nodes and create nodes for hidden connectors. We don't want that. And this just created base color, normal roughness, metallic height, and ambient occlusion. In just one go. We have all these ready-to-go. We're going to remove the metallic. I just wanted to show this. We're not going to really use output nodes for this one. But I just wanted to do a quick show off. So you see the method. So continuing on, let's start with some noise. So let's see cells one. And this cells one. We want to, let's downgrade it to something like five, maybe. Yeah, that, that should do. Now, a good thing you can do is do edge detect node and edge detect node. What it does, it basically detects edges on these shapes and you can tweak the roundness. Let's put that to zero and you can tweak the width. I want that to be something like 1.5, so pretty thin. Now we will use fluid-filled node, and this node is a bit complicated to explain for the beginners, but we will use it a lot throughout the course and you will see it's full functionality. But basically this node, this node allows us to do, is it allows us to actually get access to all these fluid-filled nodes. So b box size, color, gradient, grayscale position, and bunch others, we're not going to be using all of them, but most of them are very, very useful and we will be using them. So let's do a fluid-filled to random, sorry, flood fill two random gray scale. And that gives us all these shapes. And it randomizes their grayscale value. So we went from this to this. And the randomization comes really in handy for a lot of stuff. So one thing I wanted to show you is another node is histogram scan. So this is a method we will be using quite often, but this is simplified version of it. So with a histogram scan, you can choose contrast and you can choose position. So if you choose max contrast, everything will be white. You can see, you can pop in as many or as little as you want. And if you bump down the contrast, some of the gray ones will start showing up. But for this purpose, we want to bump up the contrast. And let's, let's choose these shapes for now. Now, what we're gonna do is we're going to create a blend note here, sorry. This blend node is going to blend with this opacity. Opacity is gonna be this. And we're going to bring out a uniform color, you know that from the last session, and let's choose a green color. This is just for testing purposes. Now, you see a problem. We are trying to blend gray scale and color values together, which just doesn't work. It just doesn't work properly. Meaning we need to get this grayscale value to be color value. And we can do that by adding a gradient map. And this converts the grayscale value to a color value. Even though it is still, so to say gray scale, it's still black and white. It is a color value now and Canada, and it can be blended with another color value. That's what's important. And we can dock this node if we press D on the keyboard, and now it looks just more tidy. And you can probably see what happened here. So we blended this color and this noise using this mask here. And it's colored only the shapes that we're this, this exact ones that we can sort it out, filtered out here. And we can sort of make the blend a little bit lighter and choose the opacity of it. I'm just going to keep it to one. Now to move forward, we will go up a little bit and we will create a tile sampler weight. We need to de-select tile sampler. There we go. So let's play with this. Let's do something like eight by eight x and y amount. And this is a paraboloid. Or actually let's do five-by-five. I think that feels better. Now there's a lot of these parameters and you will get to learn them. Learn basically all of them. But this is just to get a little bit familiar with older nodes. You don't have to understand everything going through this little small pattern of things. So we can randomize the size a little, but I don't want that on the x and y. I want to scale this up to something like 1.5, maybe even 0.5. And I want to randomize the scaling by 0.6. And actually something like four works better. And now we can go to do position random. We can do whatever we want here. Offset, I like to do 0.5 on almost every thing I want to offset. I feel that it fills out the most space. We can do some rotation, but it doesn't really matter because the shapes are circular. Rotation random also doesn't matter because the shapes are circular. But let me just show you real quick. If you change the pattern to say this, sorry, a square. And let's just change the scale down so we see what's going on. If you change the rotation, it rotates all of them. I don't notation random basically just randomizes it. Randomizes what it rotates and what doesn't. So let's turn this back to four and this back to a paraboloid. So let's scroll down even more and we have color here. We have a mask random where we can randomly remove shapes from our mask here, I'm not going to be using that for this demonstration. What we are going to be using is called random, and it will randomize some of the colors on this very plain. So I'm just going to do something like five. You can also do color like this. You can reduce it or increase it. And we have blending modes. I suggest using the max, but when we need to use the Add, you will know, don't worry about that. We have also the global opacity. So now we can invert gray scale to get a really cool looking like a VOR and I sort of looking noise that it looks really cool and we'll use something similar once we get to material creating. Now what we will do is we will get a blend node and we will blend this with a certain thing here. So let's use Clouds three up here. Now, since the scale is already to one and I can only increase it, and I want this to be sort of zoomed in. Let's drag out and get a transformation to D. And I'm going to sue, sorry, I'm going to zoom in a little bit. And if I press shift it, it's ratio. There we go. That looks nice. And we're going to plug this in here. And what we're gonna do is we're going to run through some of these blending modes. There is copy, ad Linear, Dodge, subtract, multiply a bunch of them. Most of the time. We will be kinda messing around with them, changing things and doing things. Some of you might be even familiar with these. But as you can see, you can just go through them using your scroll wheel and see kinda mix, kinda just go through them and see what they do. And basically, some of them are pretty self-explanatory like subtract. But with some of them, it's more like you need to actually see an experiment to see what's actually going on. With the blending nodes. I encourage you to just play around a little. You don't have to understand everything now, but just play around a little and see what does what. You don t have to understand everything. But even a little can help quite a lot. So we're gonna do something like subtract with them because that looks cool like this. And then we will use another node that is called directional work. And directional warp warps the shape using the intensity inputs. And using this intensity parameter here and the warp angle. So we need an intensity input and let's set this to something like here, this one. And we can bump the intensity. I want to bump into 40 so you can see how it's actually changing. And you can see if you change where it is going, you can sort of see what it is doing. So there is, you can change the angle and you can see the shapes, the outlines of some of the shapes. Now this is because it's just a demonstration, but usually that's not a good thing. Anyways, this is looking pretty interesting and cool, like some sort of clouds, as the name suggests. But the last thing we're gonna be doing is let's blend these two together. Just for fun. Let's blend. And of course we can't blend this. You know that we need a gradient map to turn it into a color color output. And let's do, let's dock it. Let's get it here. And let's do something like multiply. Multiply feels nice. And that way we can add this shape to it. We can even do something like overlay, which is also fun to use because this way we can overlay the stuff on top. So let's use that for now, and let's end it here. And let's head on to the cheat sheet. 4. Before you move further: Adding Custom Nodes: Hey guys. So before we start with this section, I need to show you how to get some custom nodes going for you. Because the customer nodes, we will be using some of them and some of them will be really useful. So let's just run, run through these real quick. So the first thing you need to do, you'll get zip folder with all of them. And you can get them by going on custom nodes and just getting all of these here. So find the folder where you like to wear you would like them to be. I'm just gonna make a custom node. Nodes, open it up and just place them all in there. You should be able to download this really easily. It's really simple. And also none of these nodes, you will not get in trouble for these. These are all three nodes. And I'll probably include some links to the actual nodes themselves from the creators. So now I want you to copy this path here, copy it, and now go to Edit Preferences here, and go to projects. And library. Now already have some here, you won't be having anything. So just click Plus here and the folder, just paste the URL here, select folder, and it should be added. Something, something happened here that that's not the right one. Let's just copy. There it is. And select folder now is the right one. So click Apply and click OK. So now we have them in our system. We just need to make them able to be showing to us. So let's click plus on the library here to add a folder. And we'll call this folder custom notes. And we will add a filter here. And now we want this to be URL. And basically filter. What we want is to choose this as a graph. And just go down to the right too little and paste your URL here. And as you can see, all these nodes popped up. That is basically it. We now have all these custom nodes that we will be using. And we'll get to them and we'll get them working. You'll see in the future videos also you can rename this if you want. So custom nodes find or maybe Basically that's it. See you in the next video. 5. Cheat Sheet: Perlin Noise Shape: Hey guys. So let's start creating our cheat sheet. So for starters, let's open up a graph, new graph, and let's call it cheat sheet. Cheat sheet. And leave everything else to be default. So for starters, let's get some beer, let's get some output nodes, and we'll use the base material here. The technique that you already somewhat NO. And right-click on it. Press Create and output nodes. And create nodes for healing connectors, you want to say no. We're going to delete the base material and we're going to delete metallic here. And bump this up high here. And let's start getting some of this to work properly. So we'll use a uniform color and it's going to be a grayscale, just going to get something like this. It doesn't matter. You can change this to a preference. Let's get a normal and plug it in here. Let's set it to something like 34 starters. Another uniform color. And it's again going to be grayscale. And we're going to set it somewhere near white, something like this. Then let's get our blend nodes, not there, rather here. And just plug this into normal and plug this into height as well. And ambient occlusion bring out to A0 and it's going to be HBO. And since we want to see what's going on, Let's bring out 0.6 high depth. It's quite high, but it should do the trick. So let's, let's do some shapes now. I'm going to begin with a very simple one. And it's going to start with a Perlin noise. And let's not move that far away. And I'm going to do something like five. So Perlin noise is the bread and butter of Substance Designer, you can say so. It has a lot of good uses and you will come across it a lot. So it's only, it's only good if we start with that. So we're going to set the scale to five, which sort of Xunzi then, as you can see, what we're gonna do next is just bumping into auto levels, which just kinda clamps. If you were to do this with levels, it just kinda clamps this from here to here. And as you can see, they're pretty similar. So we're gonna do that. And what we're gonna do is bring out a thiol sampler right now. So that tile sampler is gonna have some parameters here. And we're gonna change this to be six by eight, this x and y amount. And what we're going to change as well is we want a paraboloid here. So let's scroll down a little and let's make this paraboloid a bit bigger. Something like 5.5 should work. And then we should have a scale map multiplier, but we don't have a scale map input here. And that's what we use, this Perlin noise force. So lets just grab it over here and bump it into scale map here. And then scale map multiplier do something like 0.85 that should do to do the trick now, positioned random, we want a little bit of it, not too much though. One. And let's do 0.5 for the offset, which is basically, it just offsets a little bit of these. And I find that 0.5 is almost always the best for this. Another thing we want to do is another color parametrization multiplier. And we want to plug the color map here. This is the same color mapping as is seen here and just bump it to one. What that does, it's going to change the colors of these shapes according to this map right here. As you can see. Next up is we want to multiply, duplicate this. So copy paste. And let's set this to something like ten by ten should do the trick here. And now. Now comes the fun part actually. So I'm going to place an order levels so you can see what we're actually doing here. So let's place it here. And notice that we're not seeing any value here. So let's just press right-click View outputs in 3D view. And everything should be set up here. So material, goods and materials default and edit. And we wanted to do a little bit of height scale. And let's set distillation factor to four and rounded cylinder. I prefer that, that one. So let's blend these two together. And we want to invert gray scale here. And now, you probably remember this kind of shape and pattern if you watch the beginners beginners videos. And this is, this is something similar to it. No, not quite the same, but really similar. And you'll see what we do with these. So we want to set this to men darken. And what this does is, as you can see, on zero is this one. And it's slowly carves out. It takes the black values from here and tries to put them on top of them here. And now, if we get this here, you can see how all of it sort of works. It can carves into the shape where these black spots are. And it looks quite nice as you can see, some of them are left out here. But we don't want this much of an effect, so let's lower it down. Say 0.4. I think that looks fine. You can see we agree, we have created some very, very simplified rocks. And wary they're very, they have a lot of sites and that's what we're looking for. So let's get another one here. And this one is going to be 15 by 15. But the thing is with these ones, we want to keep everything organized here. So when you come back to these materials, you know, what's actually going on. And it's not just a bunch of spaghetti nodes and whatnot. So let's select this one and bring up a comment. And the comment is going to say, primary shape. And nice thing if you select before adding the comment, It's going to be become attached to the actual node. So let's do the same here, selected type comments. And let's do secondary shape and place it on top, like so. And it becomes attached to it. Here. This one, we're going to comment again. And this is going to be details. And let's just bring that up here and it's attached. Perfect. So now what we want is another blend node from this one and just drag this out here. And what we want to do here is not men darken, because if we were to do that, it would create some very weird stuff. And we don't really want that. We want to subtract these. And as you can see, even with only two, only 0.27, it's quite a harsh, harsh subtract blood node. So we want something really subtle, something like 0.5. We want these kind of small side showing up small details. And we don't want to carve it up too much. So let's set maybe 2.1. This could work as well, but I find that some of these are a bit too noisy, so I'm going to turn it back to 05. Now, let's move this a little bit to decide just a tiny bit. And let's do a directional work. And what directional verb does, as you have seen, it basically just warps in an angle with the intensity input. So we're just gonna do this one here. So 90 degrees -90 degrees, we want it to come from down, up. We're going to use the details here as our intensity. And you can see how it's sort of made more, made more of these sides and move these rocks to create some more natural ledges. See, here, we still have some of these unnatural looking edges. But here we have Kinder remove them. You can see the warp here. You can see how straight it is here, and how we work to adhere to remove such thing. And another thing is gonna be another directional water and we're going to warp it with itself. And what I found this to be good, if you put a high value, it extrudes the shapes outwards and you almost completely remove signs of unnatural looking rocks. As you can see. There, it's hard to find an edge that doesn't look that natural, maybe this one here, but it's really hard to find. And after further detailing when we step into material creation, it's going to be impossible pretty much. So this is the first shape we created. And let's just put a frame on it so we keep stuff organized. So let's just do something like purlin Perlin noise shape. I think that fits it the best. And let's head on to the next one. 6. Cheat Sheet: Tile Sampler/Distance Shape: The next one will be a little longer. And it will start with a tile sampler. And what the style sampler will do is basically we will do something like six by six or six by six. Let's do six by three. That should work fine. Sorry. Let's do a bit of size difference. So we want 0.1 here. We want these thin needle looking shapes and we want to lengthen them. So 0.75 on the y scale. Let's leave it at that. And let's put 0.8 and scaled random. We want some to be bigger, some to be smaller, and so forth. Position random, we do need a slight position randomness and offset. As usual, 0.5 usually works the best. But you're free to test this out. And now we're going to do a bit of rotation. And I like to put them in this kind of rotation here. And we want just a slight, slight rotation random because even if it's 0.1, we have all these messy looking shapes which we don't really want. We want them to go sort of in the same direction, but not too much. So 0.3 or even point to look, looks okay. And we will go down here, scroll down and call random to the max. So what we will do is a simple distance node. You've seen this before. Just put this as a source input and the mask is going to be Histogram scan here. And just put positioned to one to make everything white. Here, put 5,000. And you should be greeted with these kind of shapes. So before we do anything, let's do a quick directional warp with a crystal node. And the crystal node is going to be something on five, pretty zoomed in. And let's just keep everything as it is and just do something like 40 that should do. Afterwards. Let's just imagine detect and the edge detected. I'm going to place on edge width one and adds roundness zero. We don't want any roundness. We want the edges to be really sharp. So we're not getting any shapes yet. But bear with me. They, they will come up soon. So let's do a flood fill node now. If you haven't watch the tutorial videos, we're basically, we're gonna be using this kind of method a lot. And this method is pretty popular among material makers. And it's really, it's a really good node that can get us a lot of stuff and can get us a lot of various different rock, rock sort of shapes. And we'll use it a lot and just bear that in mind. So it's an important thing to learn here. So from here, it's going to allow us to use the fluid-filled notes and we want the fluid-filled to gradient. And let's copy this two times. So we want three of these, like so. And now what we wanna do is we want to randomize them. So let's get an angle here, 145, Something like that should work. And angle variation, 0.15. So what angular variation does if we bump it to one? It basically creates all these random angles, as you can see from where the gradient is coming from. As you can see if it's zero here, all of them are going to be going from this position to this position. But if it's one, everything is random. So this gradient is going from black to white to like this. This one is going from black to white like this. So we want a little bit of angle variation here. And let's set up the rest of them are We want a little bit of it here as well. So do y -25 somewhere in that range. And just a slight tinge of angle variation. Let's do another one here. Angle variation 25 should do the trick. And 145 again. That seems like it can work. And now what we're gonna do is blend these together with min dark and, and something like 0.6. And you might not see it, but let's just copy. Oh, sorry, this is wrong. Let's just copy it again and do this here again. So let's grab an auto levels. And let's plug this finally into here. So it's hard to see on, on this 2D version of it. But as you can see, we're creating these lines and these edges. So we create better rock shapes. But before we do that. What we wanna do actually is put a gradient map here and put it to gray scale. What is gradient map is going to allow us is if I pop in here, you can see how we can sort of sculpt these out. Can see how we can change where these lines are exactly. So let's put this completely to black. And I want this one to be something like here. As you can see, I want that to create that sort of edge on top. Like so. That's what I'm sort of aiming for. Now let's just maybe go a little bit more down. That should work. Maybe, maybe a little bit of a different angle. You can change how the whole material behaves with this one, this more of an upright angle, something like this, works really nice. And this is kind of more of Over way to do things by hand and to sculpt them in sort of. But it's really useful to learn that as well. So I really suggest you doing, doing this. So let's do a gradient map here again. And I'm going to do gray scale. And the same thing. And what I'm gonna do here. So let's just set this, and let's set this one to black. And let's do another one here. And you'll see why. So if I sort of pair them together, they will create this interesting line, as you can see. But we want these black. So yeah, as you can see, this one to recede inwards and this one as well. Yeah, that's, that's working pretty nice. So let's move this a little bit more, something like that, and maybe spread these out just a tiny bit. Let's create something nice. And we can always come back here and sort of change the angle of that. I think I like this one. Now, you see there's a lot of noise going on. We'll fix that in a minute. But yeah. This is something I think I like. But another thing that we could do here is we could grab a Perlin noise again in, put a, put something like five on it. And before doing this, so let's make some space. Let's set another blending mode and a Perlin noise to it. And do a multiply. I'll multiply. So as you can see, it doesn't make it a bit darker that I admit. Chile, we don't want that to multiply x2 overlay. Overlay is better. So if you didn't see this kind of methods, sort of makes the edges a little rounder. And you can see a little in here to change. And it makes them a little bit more interesting and a little bit more natural with this Perlin noise. So I suggest using that. The last gradient map here is this one. And let's do grayscale again. And what I'm gonna do with this one is I'm going to get this to somewhere like so. I'm going to clamp these two together, like really close together. And I'm going to bring them out like this. That looks quite fine. Yeah, that's that's pretty okay with me. I'm just going to copy this out and I'm going to place this in here. We don't want the same Perlin noise. I mean, it's nobody's really going to notice, but it's usually not the best to use the same Perlin noise. And you could copy this and just change the random seed. But what is usually better is bringing a transformation to D. Because this is a cheaper way of creating variation. And this is not really that important. So it doesn't need to be like a real different version of Perlin noise. So just pumping out and change it to some random. So these two are different, as you can see. We can dock this by using D on our keyboards. And this, if you're making some big materials, which one's, which one day you will probably be making. It makes you save some memory and some just some processing power with this by not creating another noise from scratch. So let's plug this into here. And as you can see, it immediately made this look a little bit more natural, just a tiny bit. So you're getting some cool shapes here. Definitely some really nice carved out shapes. What we wanna do is let's get another fluid-filled node, flood fill, and we're looking for this to be box size. And what that creates is, the smaller the shape is in this particular matter, the darker the shape is, if that makes any sense. So see this one is one of the smallest and it's really dark. And you can really see it if we do some audio levels here. And what we're gonna do with this is we're going to get a blend nodes. Now you don't to do this. It's really isn't that necessary, but just put this to multiply. And what this will do, I'll let you plug it in. It will get some of those shapes back. And some of them will pop out based on how big they are. What you can also use is fluid-filled to random gray scale. If you want this to be completely random and not just not just some, what is the smallest. And I don't think this ₩1 too much. So you can do this as well. So random grayscale. But that doesn't give us much of a good result because sometimes the randomness is a bit weird. So the best bet if you want to do something like this is actually just getting getting a B box size and just auto levels and plug it right in there. And this creates a cool effect. Sometimes the material itself is better without it, but I'm just going to keep it for now because that's that's what sort of intended to be like. And let's move this to the back here. The next thing we're going to do is we're gonna do a histogram range. And this sort of helps us correct the edges a little bit. And if we do a range of 75, there we go. We create, the edges are still really sharp, but we create a little bit better of a thing here. And we're not just going to do that, we're going to do invert gray scale. And let's do a histogram scan here. And put, let's put a contrast up a little. And the position, we are sort of really looking for the edges here. So let's just put something like 0.6. Something like that, I think will work fine. Yeah, something like that should work fine. And let's do a non-uniform blur gray scale. And by using Shift-click, drag this down and plug this one on top. And this sort of, as you can see, it kinda blurs these areas around the edges. And that's what we're looking for. But we want it to be more subtle. So 0.7, maybe one. And if we place this here, this is, this is way better than it was, although it's still creating those weird shapes. But sometimes they're really unavoidable, but we will, we will fix them as much as we can because that's what you really should do. Everything else should be left to normal. Let's see, Let's see the results. If we put something like this, if we put way too much of a position. I mean, this is the sort of just kinda blurs the whole, the whole shape we have going on here. And we sort of lose that. We do get these clean looking edges, definitely, but we lose a lot. So I think disposition should be maybe if I really do something like this, this position should be something like So. Unfortunately because we're gonna lose weight too much detail if we do it otherwise. But we're not done yet with. This, so let's do a distance node here. And instead of masking put, let's put it into source input. What we're going to plug into the mask input is actually our edge detect here. So by dragging the pinout and pressing Alt, you're going to create a railroad node. So we're doing this just to keep things organized and we're going to create another one and plug it down here. So for this one, we don't want anything too crazy. So let's do something like two. So we can get these edges closer together. And we're going to blend here these two together with a little bit of multiply. And we're gonna do something low. Because if you do something high, it's again the same thing, the same problem or creating. All we're trying to do is smooth out these edges as much as possible. So it was really smooth here, but we are trying to get these sort of leveled approach. And it's hard to do so without losing sight, without losing a lot of detail on the shape itself. But so far it's looking pretty decent. So let's do a directional Warp. Now let's bring out our beloved crystal node. Let's put something like six here and place it into intensity input. And what we wanna do here is something like 20. So let's see what we're actually doing. Something like 20. And let's choose an angle. Because that's really important. So let's plug this in. I think this does the best job at it. So as you can see, it's created this sort of fractal ink kind of shape. And that's exactly what we're looking for. So the next thing is let's move this to the left quite a bit. Because we need still a little bit more of working here. So let's do save transform gray scale. And we're going to offset this by something like 0.7. We're basically just trying to yeah, to make different sort of noise here. It's, it's really in reality is the same one, but we're trying to create a variation for the purpose of adding some detailing. And we're going to do something like 3.5 and the blur inequality of course one, we're going to go slope blur, gray scale here. It's actually going to be our slope and the grayscale is going to be this directional warp. And let's put the samples up completely. And let's put this to something like 1.5. And it's creating those really some kind of weird, nice-looking edges. And that's exactly what we're looking for. So let's put a blend node and let's put this up here. Shift drag again if you didn't remember. And we're gonna do main darken. And now this effect is a bit way too much as you can see. So let's do 0.6. 0.6 seems to work. Point for something like 0.4 does the job quite nicely. And the truly last finishing touch we're going to do is going to be the custom node and it's going to be low passing here. And let's just try and do as much as we can. As you can see, some of these are already fixed. So now, as you can see, we can't really fix it completely. But this does quite a good job at this. Yeah, this is quite a good job at fixing those weird looking edges. So I'm going to keep this up. And that should be it for this, this one shape. And let's just do a frame to frame everything up. And let's do maybe tile sampler shape or maybe something like title sampler. Let's do like slash, distance, node or distance, just like that. We can do something like that. And yeah, that's pretty much it. Let's move on to the next variation. 7. Cheat Sheet: Polygon Cliff Shape: Moving on, we have one of my favorite nodes here. So just before we actually move on, I figured that this one was kinda out of the frame, so just put it in just, just for good measure. A little bit of OCD there, but still it's good to keep stuff organized. So we will start this one with a polygon, and we'll do a polygon with five sides. And we're going to blend this with a gradient linear. Let's just keep it as it is. And I'm going to show you one way. So multiply works nice. We get that interesting fade and whatnot. But what works best is min darken because min dark and creates this or this whole little edge here that fades downwards. And that's exactly what we're looking for here. So let's do a title sampler. And this time this is going to be the actual pattern inputs. So what we're gonna do something like four by three. And let's do a banner inputs here. And let's do size, maybe two for this. Overall size, 2.5 should do the trick. Position random. So now you can see something is actually happening. And opposite 0.5, Let's do a little bit of rotation because I want this to be something like let's get that uneven number there, 110, maybe, something like that. Um, aside from that, some color random shouldn't be nice. 0.5. Yeah, that's, that works, that works fine. So let's get an auto levels right away. So we see what we're actually working on. And let's just drag this shift, shift and drag, and drag that down here. So we see what we're working on here. Just like that. So first things first, directional warp outwards and we're going to use Crystal nodes. And the crystal node is gonna be on six. And let's just plug that into directional work. And let's do something like 20. Let's check it out. Yeah, exactly. Just some fast detailing right away on these rock shapes. Next, we're going to grab another directional warp. And this one is going to be a bit of a difficult one. So let me show you. We'll do a tile random and we'll do something like 1.6. And we want to do split here. None, we want all these here. And interest amount zero. We don't want anything like that. And random, why? Something like 0.7? And now what we want is color random. But this sort of creates a bit of a weird, weird fields. So what we wanna do is go down here and select Size y. And let's do this. Something like 0.5. There it is. And what it actually does is it creates this thing that the smaller the shape. Again, it's similar to the fluid-filled node up there. The smaller the shape, the darker the actual shape it is. So we want something like this. And let's do a directional warp here and plug this in as the intensity inputs. And we want this to be something like 35. And we want this to go down completely. So let's do minus nine till it's got an even number there. So we want these shipping or edge shipping to be something like that. And you'll see what I'm talking about in a minute. So this is something like, as you can see, this is creating these exact. And if I plug it in, you'll see this creating this sort of layered feel to it. That there's a bunch of blocks layering on top of each other, which occurs naturally in some nature rocks. If you have seen it. We can bump up the intensity. I found 40 to be quite a funny one. But we'll keep it 15 for now. Because we're gonna, we're gonna make a bunch out of this shape. We're going to do a lot. So move this out of the way and let's head into other stuff. So we're going to get a blend node here. And it blend node is going to have something interesting coming into it. So let's do an edge detector. Let's do something like six here. And we're going to bevel it. So let's do a bevel. And bevel is going to be 05. That works. Let's do a levels quick and just a little tiny inch to the left. So we get a little bit more of a smoother edge here. Although I think we want this complete black, I'm complete black pixels here. So let's just have them like that. Let's do a slope blur grayscale here. What he's going to be the slope. The slope is going to be a safe transform from this here. We're just going to tile it twice. And we're gonna do a tiny bit of blur. So let's do 11. And as you can see, this looks pretty good. And let's put that into slope and bump up the samples as per usual and do something like four here. Now while this is good, we want actually the mode to be men. Because this, as you can see, this cuts. But if we set it to Min, it sort of has that continuation thing here. So what we're gonna do is we're going to get it here, plug it in. And we can do min darken. And if you remember, that is what does these edge chipping? And it blends only the dark pixels. So if we plug that in, you can see quite a lot of chipping here. But we don't want it to be that much. So let's do something like 0.4. That does quite a good job. So it creates this really nice shipping look, maybe a little bit lower. I would set it. Let's check some of these out real quick. Yeah, I think I think we're going to be fine with this one. Yeah. Everything should be okay. Let's actually just move this a little bit to the right, maybe or maybe to the left. Let's see. To the left it kinda closes them up. I think this is the look, I'm sort of leaning more towards two. Because if this is a way to open, it creates this weird edges. And let's just, if we move it a little bit, and if you show it just sometimes around here, I think that's way better for the overall material. So let's just move it a little to the right. Maybe a little more. Which can do with these actually is go here and it will show specific parameters. So, well, let's do something like 0.74, 0.47. That should work for now. Yeah, that seems pretty good. So next thing we're gonna do a blend node and we want to do a multiply here with this. Why we want to do that is you'll see when we do the multiply and we plug it in here. As you can see, it moves some shapes outwards and some of them inwards. Now again, sometimes it's better to not have this at all. But let's just for the sake of having it, Let's have something like 0.4. It creates some interesting variation anyways, so I think this could look cool. Anyways, let's do a little bit. If you hold the left, you can click on a line and create a reroute pin, something like so. And we're going to bring shadows from this one. And the shadows are going to be something like four. And we're going to do a thing called shadow curving. And we want the shadow to be casting from the top. As you can see, this will just make the whole shape a little more natural. And let's bump the samples up. And let's bring out that blend node. And let's go down here. And let's plug it here. And let's do a little multiply, just a small one, and do something like 0.5. Let's actually plug this in so you can see what's, what it actually doing. And it creates this sort of shadow below these linings. And that's exactly what we're looking forward to make the hall. Rock or cliffs rock a little bit more natural because that's what usually happens with these kinds of rocks. They can intrude, they go inwards. And that's what we're trying to replicate here. So let's do 0.5, something a little more subtle. Yeah, that's that's quite fine. So let's move this to the left again. And let's continue on with this. So what we're gonna do now is we're gonna do a splatter circular. And that's a node you probably haven't used before. And it's something similar to a tile sampler. It just makes shapes in a circular pattern. So let's do pen and amounts. 12th. And let's go scroll down a little. And radius 0.7. Good work. Radius random 0.285. That should do something interesting. Angle random point to maybe just a little spreads. That's, that's okay, That's all okay. Now we need to do size differently. So let's do 0.4. And the overall scale, 0.5, we want them to be a little smaller. And domain thing. I forgot there they actually shouldn't be paraboloid, they should be disks. So let's go down. And what else is there to do? Maybe a little bit of rotational randomness. And lasting should be a bit of color random. So the collar random is basically illuminance random. So let's just max it out. Next thing, the distance node. The same thing we did before, put this into source input, get a histogram scan. And just pluck this to one. And put this here and just make something like 5,000 really high number. And we have created these nice shapes. So what we wanna do with them, Let's bring out a directional work again and put this down here. What that does is it moves the shapes and kinda fractals out the whole shape here. As you can see, it just creates this chilling effect that happens here. But as you can see, it doesn't look really natural when you look at it. So let's do a little bit of a directional warp. You probably guessed it, it's a crystal node here. Plug it in here to something like six. And let's, let's change this a little. So maybe something like 40. We want it to be fractal doubt and something like this looks fine. Switch to some fat 51. Yeah, that should do the job. And plug this down here. Now, it looks a little better. But it's still, it's still not complete. And we wanna do shadow curving for it as well. So let's do a blend real quick. Again, shadows. And let's do something like 1.5 or 1.61. 0.6 looks nice and we want the angle to be upright. So 90 degrees and edge softness, 0.75, maybe. You see it kind of creates more of those there. And bump up the samples of course, and just plug it into the blend nodes. Right away. We're gonna do a multiply. But this is way too harsh, I would think. So. Let's do something like 0.15. That should do should do just fine. Yeah, that does that does the job pretty nicely. Next thing we're going to do is actually bringing out a edge detect from here. And that edge detector is going to be something like 0.1, 0.5 edge around this to zero. And let's bevel it real quick. So bevel pointer one, just something really, really small. And let's do a slope real quick. And we're going to grab a blur HQ from here. And let's just do, We don't want a big blur here. So let's just do something like 1.4. And the quality to one as always. Here. As per usual, bump, bump up the samples and do something low, 1.35. And if we do it on men, yeah, this, this creates a nice, nice little value here. So let's do a blend and plug it into there and multiply. And we want something really small like 0.01 there. And that's sort of just makes the shapes a little more apparent, so to say. And yeah, so let's frame this and name it R. Let's see, polygon shape, polygon shape. And let's wrap things up and move on to the next segment. 8. Cheat Sheet: Disc Cliff Shape: So moving on to the last chapter of this cheat sheet, we have quite a simple little shape here. So let's start off with a shape node. And we will do a disc here. And let's scale it down just a little bit. And we're going to grab ourselves a crystal known. And let's do something like four. That seems nice. And what we're gonna do is actually bring out these disgust, some directional warp right here. So what this does, it basically, so if we plug these in and let bumped into something like 50. And as you can see here, this behaves almost completely the same like our normal directional warp here. So if I would bring it out and bumpy to 60, we have almost the exact same shape here. But what this does, it allows you to get another direction from where it's actually warping the shape. So that's what we're looking for here. And we're looking for some interesting sort of little spiky shapes here. We want to have a few of them. So let's select this and copy two times. And I want to have another one like this. Let's maybe change the angle. That looks decent. Let's change the angle. Again. It's maybe been another vector and then lower the intensity a little. This, this looks really good. So up next, we're going to bevel this shapes and we're going to bevel them. -0.3. So we create this flat face and top and this sliding face here. And that's what we're looking for. I think everything else we should leave as it is. So let's copy this over three times again. So just grab all of them and we have three different shapes that we're going to combine. Next thing, because we're creating sort of a slate looking cliff. I'm sorry. We're creating sort of a stacking cliff. So to say, we need a gradient linear and you're pretty much well-versed in this. We're going to create this. But since it's not like, it sounds like in this one here that we're creating it, we are going to be actually flipping this 1180 because we want the bottom parts to be the brightest and the top ones. We want them to be a little dark. You'll see, you'll see how that stacks and how that works because we can change that easily and I can show you so I don't have to explain it to you that much. It's better to show something. So we'll do mean darken again to create this side of the shape. And we will copy that over here. Plug this in, and we'll just use the same gradient linear because we want the same results here. Now, let's bring out a thiol sampler. And we want to do pattern inputs. And let's set this to three because we have three shapes here. Let's just pluck them all n. And what I'm gonna do is, let's do something like eight by three. Then scroll down size 3.5. We want it to be a bit wider. And this something like 0.4 scale, 4.5, we wanted bigger, we want it to cover the whole thing. Scaled random. So we want to y scaled random. Why we wondered is, as you can see, when we get that, it gets these little small layering on top of it. And that's what we are exactly looking for. Let's do 0.85 into position random. And now you can see what's actually happening here. We're getting a lot of these interesting little layers that we're looking for. Let's do 0.5 as usual on this one. And you can do something about the rotation. Usually a slight angle is better for tiling. But that is really up to you. I'm going to leave this at zero. Maybe if we do a little of this, think we'll come back to this maybe, but I'm liking the normal look of this. Let's just scroll down and go to Color random. We want some randomness in there. And that should be it for now. So let's just comment this. Primary shape. Primary shape. There we go. Let's just put it on top and we're going to copy and paste this one. Like so. And what we're gonna do differently with this one is quite a few things. So first things first, let's change this value. We want six here, so we want more of these. And second thing, Let's scroll down and remove this color randomness. Now, our directional work should do. We've worked these two together like so. And let's just do something like 30. And let's do 90 degrees. Something like this. Something like this works perfectly. So let's do a blend and Shift-click. This is going to be foreground. I'm just going to be a background. And what we do here is we do a Min darken, but before that, let's do an all levels or quick one. Let's grab this here, and let's grab our outputs and just Shift-click and slide them into here. So we see what's going on. Now this is a little bit too much. So let's go. Material is default at it. And let's lower the scale down a bit. Yeah, this looks better for peering. So now what this does is, as you can see, we have created, we need to do admin dark in here, sorry. So we create these little more of these layerings, as you can see, but we want them to be subtle. So let's do one point, 0.1. And you can see the difference here. We just add a few more strips here of detail. That's what we're actually doing here. So let's do a hide blend here. And let's do a Save transform. And what we're gonna do as usual, I'll just offset this. 0.6. 0.1 should do. Let's put this down here, and let's put this up here. That's exactly what we're looking for. Now, Height Offset, something like 0.6. And as you contrast to Max and opacity, yeah, that's all good. So let's plug this in here. Yeah. So we're just trying to get more of these layers. So to say, for the material right now and now, the material, I mean the shape is sorted done, but we're just going to add a little bit, little bit of detailing here. So let's do Perlin noise. Something like five or maybe four. Let's do 4.4 and plug it in there. And we're gonna do a simple multiply, so something like 0.5. We don't want to overdo it. Yeah. We can make the shape a bit more natural and pop out in some areas. That's, that's what we're looking for here. And what we're gonna do now is a simple directional warp. And with the directional war, but we're gonna do a crystal. But for this, let's do, let's blur it just a tiny bit. So something like 21 should do it. And plug that into intensity input. And let's do something like 20. And let's choose our angle here. So as you can see, we can make these go down or up. I want them to go. Something like this. I think that's that's looking quite nice. And another thing I would like to add, and it kinda adds a little bit more detail. We might not need this step, but just for the sake of showing you why we're actually creating this cheat sheet, is because we can just go over here. And let's just grab this one here. So let's grab all this and paste it down here. And we have this little note here, use, ready to use. And let's do a directional word and chuck it in there. And let's do like 90 degrees here. And yeah, that's basically adding a little bit more of a warping and a little bit more detail. If you bump it up even more or even more, you can see how it slowly making the shape look weird. But something like ten or 15, which with 90 degree angle. Or maybe we can do a little bit of an angle to decide, does add just a tiny bit of detail. We can go back here and maybe add more detail here. No, no, That's, that's way too much. Now, something like this should work and we are basically all done. So let's just frame this and just name it a disc shaped. This shape, this shape. Let's do that. So, yeah, we're all finished with this. And next up is actual material creating. But aside from that, we will, we will throughout this course, we'll expand this cheat sheet and make it even bigger. So when you finish the course, you not only get all the knowledge, but also the cheat sheet with all the good methods you used. And you can always have them at your disposal to just quickly copy paste and make something, make a, make a start out of something. So let's get onto material creating. 9. 1 Main Shape: So let's get into material creation. Finally, we're probably not going to use most of these methods in the material and bowed to create. This is just so I can get you started on everything. First of all, and then we will repeat processes and you will get to learn everything in a better way. You will repeat more, more of these as you go. So let's create a new graph. And we will call this stylized cliff stacked. You can again call it whatever. But this one I'm gonna be calling it. So we created a new graph, completely new graph. So let's start by using base material here and right-click Create and output nodes as we did previously. And let's set these up. So Blend normal, not normal. Let's plug that in there. We'll get rid of the metallic again. A0 ambient occlusion. We'll plug this in here and this in here. Base color, uniform color, that's going to be gray scale. For now it's gonna be something like this. And roughness color that is going to be completely white for now, all are a little bit darker a little. And let's just get a random shape just so we set this to be grayscale. Let's bump this to maybe 40 even. And just to check that everything works as it should, Let's change to paraboloid. And let's click here, right click and view outputs in 3D view, everything is working fine so far. So let's get started. As always, I like to put all the levels here and work my way from there. For starters, we are going to be having a title sampler. Not there. De-select that and tell simpler. And it's gonna be a two-by-two. And it's gonna be a simple parabolic shape. Let's see. Let's lower down the X a little and get this. Not, not that way. Sorry, let's do it like this. So let's actually get this lower, something like that. Bump up the overall scale. And apart from that, I think we're all set. Now. Let's do a simple levels nodes, just a simple one to pump the values up like this. So we want this flat face created here. And let's head into a blend. So the blend here, it's gonna be very similar to what we have done on our cheat sheet. In fact, we can go back to our cheat sheet. And let's copy this one. And let's go back. Paste it here. And since we don't have any maps, what you wanna do is scale map multiplier, and color a parameterization multiplier as well. Slower than down. I'm gonna do eight by eight. And let's see what we can do here. Enlarge this quite a bit. But we want to have scaled random. Something like that should work. 6.6, sorry. We ought to have some position randomness. So 3.5 and offset, I think it's fine to stay that way. The main thing here that changes, this is the color random. Yeah. Now we know we have something that we want. We're going to do all the levels. And from the other levels we're actually going to head into levels. And the levels. We just move this a little bit to the right. Something like this should work. And we go here and what we're gonna do is subtract. Now, you'll see we have created a few sides, few shapes and whatnot, and that's exactly what we're looking for. And we're just gonna get a lower opacity, something like 0.6. So what we're looking to do is create these shapes. Modify them a little bit. And after, after awhile, we are going to be separating the four shapes and plugging them into tile sampler to create the general shape. Why we don't have this in the cheat sheet is because without making the whole material, it wouldn't make much sense to just have that as as a thing in the cheat sheet. So for now, we'll continue on. We are going to head into a directional word. And we're going to do exact same setup here. Exactly the same. What we're going to change is just a number here. Let's do 12 by 12. And that should yield a similar results. And plug this into here. So let's have some changes here. Something like that. Should work. Yeah, I like it so far. What we're gonna do next is we're going to do just a normal warp with a bit of blurriness Q here. And let's just plug it right in. If you didn't know, you can see this value. And if you just click once on this blur HQ, you can change the blur HQ, intensity and quality and all the parameters with seeing the other node. So you can modify this quite a bit. So this is without the blur. And I think I like this. This, this seems nice to me. Let's just do maybe a little overwhelmed, lower value. Let's see, let's see how that does the job. Let's leave it like this for now. This looks pretty good. So let's move this out of the way. And let's plug it in here so we can see what we're doing actually. Before we move forward, let's comment this. These will be our main shapes. And these are the secondary and primary noises. So that's secondary noise. And comment. Primary. Primary. So let's let's do it like that. Yep. So because we will need an actual audio levels here, let's just plug in another one. We'll probably use multiple auto levels in this process. So we'll do something like histograms can. Now. We'll just get this to the max and we're going to carry out and blend node out of it. And what we're gonna do here is get a levels nodes. And we are going to be getting this a little bit to here. And let's remove some of that black color here. And let's see. So I'm liking this just a little bit more. I think this is quite fine. And what we're gonna do here is just a simple multiply. And we have some interesting shapes here. So we basically flattened out the top parts of the whole material. So maybe, maybe go back here and change this a little. The overall luminance of the let's mess with this. I think, I think I'm liking this one so far. So because this material is pretty long, I'm gonna do, it's probably in one sitting. But the video is going to be cut out so you can go tutorial, but tutorial and quit anytime and know what's actually going on. So let's do this is going to be called basic shapes. And that's the end of the first part. And let's head on to the next one. 10. 2 Shape Sculpting: So in this one, we are going to be getting out a histogram scan again and just getting the position and contrast out there. And we're gonna be doing fluid-filled. Now, I'm not a particular fan of this method that I'm going to use. But it does give some good results. But it could, it could be avoided if you already liked the looks of these rock shapes. But let's do some fluid-filled to gradient. And let's do levels. And now you'll see what I'm about to do. So just bring this here. So what we're looking for is these edges right here and we're going to bump into auto levels. So this is exactly what we're looking for. And we're looking for some randomness with these edges, as you can see. So all of these, we're going to be creating more, of course. So some people go overboard with these. I like to go Max for, and that is what we are going to be using in this situation. So just get some different angle variation, different angle, just randomize it as much as you can. There we go, and we have these. So far. Let's move this a little to the side. And what we're gonna be doing is basically just subtracting these blend here. And go here. And we're going to choose Subtract. As you can see, we're slowly removing these shapes. And for now I'm going to leave it to 0.6, but I'm probably going to change it later. So you're going to see very moving bit by bit here. So let's just copy paste. Same thing. Just plug it into this one. And now we'd removed another bit. Same thing. Copy paste. Plug this in here, and we removed another one. And another same thing. Just copy paste. That's pretty straightforward. And we have this shape so far. So what I wanna do is I want to see if I can, what, what changes if I put these all to one. So Emacs them all out. So I must admit I quite like kids, but I think 0.9 In these will do us some good. Because I want to keep some of that original shape, but also want to cut out the shape. I think I'm quite a fan of this. This is looking pretty good. So this, we're going to call frame it and let's call it shaped sculpting. And let's move on to the next segment. 11. 3 Shape Separating: So in this one we're just going to move this a little bit to the right. And now there is a real important thing here. We're going to do a 2D transform. And what we're gonna do is get four of these out. And now it's the time where we are finally separating the shapes. So what we're gonna be doing is just setting these offsets to 0.25, 0.25. And let's see if I can do something here. We can probably lowered this output size. But we want tiling mode here and set your absolute and no tiling. So we don't want it to tile. And let's double click this to x here and you should get a shape. So now it's just a matter of 2.5 and -0.25. Just double it. There we go. We've got that shape. Let's do two. What is this? So now let's do both minus, minus 25, minus 25 and double it. We've got that shape. And now we do -5.5 and double it. So we should have four different shapes. Perfect. What we're gonna do now is get gradient linear. And we're going to blend them all together. So just grab these actual is due for one. So gradient linear. And what we're doing here is just getting all these different gradients. So get this one and flip it 90 degrees, get this one and flip it 180 and get this one, and just do the 270. So we have everything pretty much here. We're going to go multiply, but we're going to maybe go something else as well. We might change this to mean darken, so we get this shape. We can always go back to that and play around with it. So let's do actually just copy paste this. Just a simple copy paste for each and every one. It's a lot of copy and pasting because we have the same shape and it needs to repeat quite a few times. So let's just get everything in order. There we go. That should be it. So now we're going to get all the levels for every single one because we want to bring those values to something more normal. There we go. And now we need to do a blend. And that blend is gonna be a subtract. But we don't have the certain thing that we're going to be subtracting it from. So for now, we're gonna go into the next segment and do the details. 12. 4 Details: So here in the details, we're going to be creating the cracks first. And this is a matter of creating a simple dial sampler. And let's say seven by seven. And it's going to be a disk. And here, let's see. Let's set this to something like 0.1 and scaled random 2.85, let's say. Now randomize the position, get the offset. There we go. And let's see, rotation random doesn't really matter. Color random does matter though. So let's do something like 65. There we go. And we're gonna do a distance snowed and histogram scan. So just make sure you get everything right here. And let's bump it up to five K. There we go. Now as detect. And the edge detector, we actually want some edge, edge smoothness. We're going to do something like 1.3. Makes sense. And now we're going to do a directional work. And this might not make sense now, but it will in just a minute. So follow along. Let's get a Perlin noise out. And the Perlin noise is going to be set to 13.2 directional warp. And in this directional waterproof and set this to 30. And just some random angle, we need as much randomness is possible in this one. Now, directional warp again and copy the Perlin noise again, is just gonna be up-scaled version of it. And we plugged it in. And of course, this one needs to have a different angle, but this one should be something a little bit more light because we have a lot of noise here. Now, we're going to head into another directional warp. And we're going to bring our Almighty crystal one. And let's set this to something a bit more zoomed in. And let's blur it. Just a tad. So quality and 85, just a little bit of a blur. And what we're gonna do something like 7.5. Again, this angle seems fine. Now you're going to invert grayscale here. And we are going to bevel this. So the bevel is going to be -0.2. And this is exactly the details we're looking for. We can see these small guts. Everything is pretty good looking. We'll bring this into auto levels. And now there's a certain thing I don't like and that's this. So we're gonna go back here and maybe lower the smoothness. Yeah, that's, that's pretty good. That is pretty good. And now what we're gonna do is we're gonna take this. And because we have four shapes, we need for 2D transforms, we're gonna do something similar to what we did just back then. Let's bring them down a bit. Let's actually bring this whole thing, something like So. What we're gonna do is just zoom in a little and randomize them. So this one doesn't need to be exact. We just need to create, zoomed in versions and randomize them as much as we can. Just make them all different. And a little bit zoomed in. There we go. That's perfect. And we're going to name this frame x. And just before we move on to the shapes, I want to create another details. So these are going to be kinda cuts. And what we're gonna do is do waveform a and waveform. Let's set this to 11024. Wave number should be one. And size max 0.12, something like that pattern we want to pattern and nine. So nine, this one. Noise zero. So it's starting to look, it looks something like a bruise Now, we're going to bevel it. And that's a bit too much for a bevel to -0.25. And that looks pretty good. We're going to bump down into the towel sampler. And now get this into pattern input. And the amount of bruises depends on you. Five-by-five, I found out to be pretty good. You can go lower, you can go higher. And you can always go back and can experiment with these values. As always, that's the, that's the power of Substance Designer. So what we are going to do here is let's just get this size, something like 1.5. Yeah, let's give this to all five. So 0.5 scale random 0.5 as well, should do the job. Position random 4.5. Let's maybe even do some offset. 0.5 wouldn't hurt rotation random. So that one is pretty important here. 65. There we go. Now you can see they look something like kind of cuts and bruises. And we want some color randomness. Of course we don't want every single cut to be the same. So 0.75. And after death we're just gonna do a simple auto levels. And we are done with the slashes, I will call them. That is all the detailing. And we can move on to the next segment. 13. 5 Generating The Final Shape: So for the next segment, we are going to be completing this part here. And we're going to be actually creating something that we can visualize as rock shapes. For now, we're just going to move this a little to the side. And now it's the time for these over here. So we need a blend node here. And they're gonna be subtract blend nodes. And let's just get them all functioning. Because this is way too much. Because let me show you if I plug this into auto levels. This is way too cracked here. There. We don't need this. This is why we do some really low value like 0.05. Now you might not even see it on this one, but here as you can see, it's pretty, pretty **** visible. So let's do O5 for now. And let's just get this. So plug these all n. And if you would like, you can also dock of these because we don't really need them for changing the values. But you don't need, you don't need to. And again, if you want to dock is just press D on the keyboard. Now. Again, another blend. And we're going to do a gradient linear one. And what we're gonna do here is a multiply. But again, this is subject to change. We can go, we can go Min dark in here as well. And we're gonna do this to every single one, is the same, it's the same gradient linear here. Because we want these shapes to sort of be black at the bottom. So they stack on top of each other nicely. And you'll see what I mean by that in just a second. So this is base rock shapes. And let's move to the actual creation of these maps. So we'll grab a towel sampler as always. And let's see. I'm thinking of five-by-five and pattern input. We need four. And let's plug all of these in here. And what I want to plug in as well is a colormap inputs. From this. I just want to make it a little bit more tidy here. So let's do it something like this. So let's get this started. Five. As you can see, it already looks like something. If we plug this in here, we're getting something that resembles some rock shapes. As you can see. Let's actually get this to be a bit more for a high depth. And let's again change this to run cylinder. Now since we're working with actual shapes, Let's do materials default and edit. And let's bump the scale-ups so we sort of see what's going on. So yeah, we're starting to get something that resembles these shapes. And they're looking pretty good, pretty decent. And so far we are, we've created just this one. So there's a lot to go into this. So we can do something like 0.5. That's too much. 0.1 maybe, or point to even. And this maybe goes to six. Yeah, I like it. Position random. Now with this one, we need to be careful, but we want the position random, of course, 0.5 for the offset. And we're starting to get this sort of shape that we want. And this is what I was talking about. You can see that these cuts are a little bit too much. So let's do something like 0.2. Can even randomize the values here. Some 0.1, some point to just one, let's say 0.2 as well. This, in my opinion, it looks better. So now what I'm definitely going to use is this. Now, there's a little bit of a problem with this one is that it's keeping these white popping out. So we don't want to overuse this. Um, so let's see, Let's see. Symmetry random. We can maybe do that. I would advise against that. That's really not that needed. What we can do is optimize this a little. So size random. Let's do a little something like 0.3 or 0.35 even. So we have some are more narrow and some are more wide. I'm liking the look, so dat definitely liking, look for that. Position random. Let's see if I do something higher. I like, I like to 0.1, 0.2. That's to me, this looks better. I'm definitely going to stick to this. Now. Scaled random, I'm sticking to it as well. I'm rotation. I think there should be a little bit of rotation randomness, but I'm not sure how I'm going to make it work. So all five. Let's use zero again. Let's do something like 03 dots. That's looking better. And this one here, Let's pop it down to three. I think. I think this is a pretty good start. So let's maybe get this to be min darken. Let's see how it behaves. If we get all of these to be min darken. If we sort of change them. Yeah, we're not keeping this, this flats out the shape way too much. So multiply, are all going to multiply this and we're going to keep it multiplied. This, this is looking quite amazing. So far. Now. We can move on from just this one. We can make another tile sampler. But this one doesn't really have any dark spots. But, but I want to create another one. And you'll see why. Because this is a good shape for big rocks. But you can see these parts of the materials. These these big boulders are kinda missing some smaller shapes in them. And that's exactly these dark colors here that we are missing and that we should be aiming. It's more visible on this order levels here. So these are the ones that we should be aiming to fill up. So I'm going to copy and paste this. And the only thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to increase this to like 8.8. And let's give it a bit more interesting shapes. So no rotation random, I don't want that. It's quite interesting seeing all these color random. We don't want. Actually. I'm going to keep it for now and see how it works. Also, yeah, we could, we could use some color random here as well. So something like 0.5, 0.2. Definitely looking better. But what I think I'm going to keep going to just for now. And what we're gonna do with this is we're going to blend these two with men darken. So as you can see, we're getting these shapes. Actually, I think we might need to reverse this. Oh no, no, no. We need it to be like this way. The sick. Oh, no, it's not mean darken it smacks light and I believe yeah, exactly. Max light. And so we're getting these shapes popping out. Yeah. Exactly. But as you can see, this is a bit too much. So whenever it's too much, just get to call random and get a mask random working. And I think this should be fine. So we're just kinda filling some of the space is not all of them. That's our main goal here. The only thing I'm thinking about is just doing the same values here. Maybe mask random to something like 8.5. I'm actually thinking of not doing it this way. Yeah, I think we should be doing it realistically this way. So let's do a histogram scan, a contrast. And we want the position to be quite up there. And if we invert this, we get all these black spots. So all these darker spots become white now. And that's where we actually wants to, to get the shapes to be. So if we plug this into mask map and remove the mask random, of course, and get the mask MAP threshold. That's when we're actually starting to get some interesting shapes. Although ten by ten would be more fitting here. So we're going to use both mask, mask map and the random mask to get the result we are truly looking for. Okay, this is, this is exactly what I was looking for. So to fill in some of these gaps, as you can see, to just fill them in nicely. So that's exactly what I was looking for in here. And we created basically just a simple mask map input here. So we can control where the shapes are going to be going to. And now we actually made what do we want? It might not be completely perfect. But I think it adds a lot of value to our little rocky cliff over here. Other than that, let's get our directional work. And now this is where you could copy this. But I think using safe transform, it's way better to just offset it a little too. Let's say something like this and use a directional warp that way. Let's do something like nine maybe. Exactly. That's, that's what we're looking for. A just a little bit of a move to the side. Let's maybe bumped us to 20. Let's see how it looks. What if tile this twice tiling it's twice does make a good. Let's, let's enlarge this little tiling it twice does make a good difference here. It creates these interesting shapes that give the rock a little bit more structure. So to say, let's say 25. And let's see, let's see if I want to push them this way or this way. Let's push them to the side and say 15. We want this to be more of a subtle effect in anything. Yeah, I'm liking the look of this quite a lot. And now what we can do is just better to shape a little. We can do another directional work. And now it's up to you. You can use this cheat sheet. If you want to. You can experiment with this. And that's what I'm gonna do here. I'm going to do a little bit of experimenting. I'm going to do something like 20 here. And this creates this amazing, amazing fractals and just natural, natural edges and movement of the whole rock. It really starts feeling like it belongs. Now, the end part that we want to do, of course, is do a blend and another subtract, it's going to be a really low value. And this is this part. So actually let's move it up here. I think it's more handy there. And we're going to just do it here. And they're barely visible, but up here, they're quite visible. So that's why we use an abnormally low number here. And that adds these slashes, this feel to it. That's really nice-looking. I would call it done. For now. I'm going to frame it and say rock. So let's see what we can create. Its main rod-shaped, main clip shape, whatever you wanna call it. And I think this was quite a bit of a success. Now we can try some more stuff. We can go back to our cheat sheet. Of course. We can look into some of these techniques that we use here. And we can use some of them like this one. To create interesting, interesting shapes. We can, we can probably do some shadow curving. So let's get Maybe this copy this for starters. And let's start a little bit of experimenting because this is one of the main processes of creating materials. And we're going to open this up again and get the height scale back. Exactly. And everything we add is going to be. So let's just move all of this to decide here. There we go. And this is our experimentation platform. So a directional warp. That's gonna be like 15. And let's check it out. So bear in mind. Sometimes it might be too much, sometimes way too much detail is going to break your rocks, is going to break your shapes quite significantly. So bear that in mind and be cautious of it. So we're gonna just do this. I think this can stay. Um, yeah, I'm pretty sure this can stay. Definitely. So we can do some shadow curving. I believe that I believe that will make things look way better. So let's, let's try it. We're going to get some shadows node here. And let's get it to something like five Delight angle. Let's just get samples up. The light angle should be here because we are creating something that's going upwards. So let's see if I do something like this. Five to 75. Something like this could work. Now, blend it together. And let's see what we can blend it together with. Multiply works Good. Men, Dark, and this is way too much. Let's see what we've done on the cheat sheets. What we have done there. What kind of blend? Now? Multiply. Multiply. It does make a good job doing this. So we can even add this kind of flashing effect, but I'm not a fan of that for this particular material. So let's just get everything back. I don't like it when it's not high-skilled. So we're gonna do multiply and 0.5. Let's plug this in here. I think that looks really amazing. So let's get into the last part, which is albedo and roughness. 15. 7 Cheat Sheet Additions: Okay, So we opened up our cheat sheet here. And the things I want you to add are mainly this part here and these cracks and slashes here. So let's add this. Now you can start stacking them because you'll, you'll start using this. You don't even need these output nodes, but you're going to start using these as basically copy paste machine. So let's base this somewhere here. I think that works fine. I'm going to make it a bit larger. There we go. These are, let's call them for shapes. And you can even make segments to this, which I think we will do so we can keep everything organized. Um, let's, let's copy these two together. So I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna take this briefly. And I'm going to get this like so. And let's move and copy these over here. And all these small details. And what's not. We will we will make a different color for them. Let's say yellow or green. I like green better. Yeah, this green works, works way better. Let's actually just do completely green. I think. So zero blue and just completely green. Alpha, little bit, something like that. So you can always go back to this and see like, Oh, I need some details. Here they are. So it's always better to keep stuff organized. And I think the last thing we're going to be copying is the albedo section here. And DLB TO section. We'll color it orange. And let's put a, let's say above here, somewhere, somewhere over here. And we'll color it some orange color. Yeah, this works. Okay. So now this is not going to look like anything, but you can, you can probably get away if you want some kind of look in this, inside this cheat sheet. But this is just the cheat sheet because you don't really need this. But if you really want it, you can just plug in some of these shapes here. And they can pop out colored. And this is also the power of the substance designer, just sheer power of it. We have created a decent looking Albedo map with no modifications whatsoever. So that is basically what we're gonna be using throughout this course and sort of doing. We're not all, of course, we're not going to do everything like this and just copy paste. There's always tweaks that need to be made to make the material extra goods. But the cheat sheet will help you tremendously. So let's just keep these shapes, blue details and green and these orange. And that's it for that material. We can move on to the next one. 16. Cliff Slate: Okay, So let's create the next material. Bring out your cheat sheet, and let's begin. So we'll, we'll create a little bit of a simpler one. And it's gonna be a lot of copy pasting because the last one was a little too long and we had a lot of, lot of stuff new to learn. From this point on. It will get easier and easier and you will have more and more stuff in your cheat sheet and more and more methods to utilize yourself and even customize a lot of the materials yourself. So as always, let's just create a new graph. And the graph we're going to name something like, let's see. I'm going to call it like slate glyph, glyphs late. It doesn't really matter so far. So let's do base material. And we're going to, as per usual, just gonna do create output nodes and no for that one and delete the metallic one. And let's just start setting everything up. A0. Let's do some uniform color here. Something like this, normal, not there. Rather. To do 20 roughness, again, a uniform color. That's grayscale. Plug it into there. We need to blend node somewhere here. And let's just plug everything like so. And let's begin. So we're actually going to begin this by going to our cheat sheet and we're going to copy this part of it. So we're going to copy a lot of stuff for this material because it will make our life so much more easier. So let's just copy it here. And let's plug in d or two levels in here. So we have everything set up. Maybe it just bump, bump, bump this up. Just a little more. Yeah. Okay. So we have this setup here. The setup. The next thing we are going to be doing is actually adding in our details here. So this is gonna be quite a simple one. So we're going to copy this and get back to her, Cliff. We're just going to get these, maybe this one up here. Because this is already, are really good setup for for a material. We just need to color it and add a little bit of detailing. So that's exactly what we're gonna be doing. And we're going to be creating blend nodes and just doing the subtract. And of course, let's put this to something like three. And copy it again. And let's put auto levels here. And let's plug this auto levels into here. And let's just get these shapes here as well. And we're gonna subtract them as well. 0.03, maybe even lower. And this one, I think two is better. Yes. So let's just frame this, adding the details. And now this is, this is looking quite nicely. Another thing we might add in here is, so let's just copy the albedo because of the beer. Sure that we are going to be using something similar to this. Main tweaks are gonna go to the Albedo actually. And you'll see why in a moment. So let's see what we can utilize here as well. We can use this sort of setup as well here. But this is easy enough to do alone. So let's go back and let's get our albedo. And we're not going to use it yet. And there's going to have to be some huge changes to this one. But first we're going to do is the thing from the cheat sheet that I wanted to copy. Let's give it a go. Because each and every one of these methods that we used for our cheat sheet rocks, you can mix them up and make some more interesting, more interesting materials and some more interesting shapes. So feel free to just copy paste, mix, change everything. All of these materials, because that's the best way you will learn these this program. So if we put something like this, which really, Let's see how much it changes and what changes exactly. Oh, we didn't get this. So more or less creates these cuts here. Which is sort of like okay, Let's just move them to something smaller. And yeah, that does that and for this material, but they also wanted to get from the cheat sheet is what we used for this one here. And it's exactly this whole setup here. So let's just come back to it so we can copy it. And let's just bring this thing here. So all of this is what we are going to be needing and move this out of the way a little. There we go. That should be it. We don't need this bevel. And if we place this here, we have everything set up. So you'll see we just use this kind of fractal link method. And I quite liked it for this material. So that's why I used it back when I was making the actual material myself. But we're making some changes and we're tweaking. These are completely unique materials. I haven't made these before. So let's just do here. Let's do shadow sculpting or woodcarving are rewarded to more details. Let's see. There we go. So we don't need this edge detectors will actually we need to add weight? I messed up here. It's actually better if we use them. Yeah, it's, I forgot about that part of the functionality. Sorry about that. So we'll actually bring them in here. And let's get everything here. So bevel, edge detect. And let's do, let's see how this looks. Leverage q, I think that comes from this, this one here. So let's see the difference. This and this. Well, we'd create some weird things here. Let me just check out if I didn't mess if I mess something up here because that's probably the case. I'll know the blurry skew comes from this one and the urgency to okay, okay, kicker, we got everything sorted now. So blur and let's change this to 1.5. And now it should be somewhat better. Yeah. It is. Now definitely makes the edges work. So, yeah, of course, if we bump this up too much, it's not going to look anywhere near good, but this is okay. I think 0.03 works here. So let's Dan had to be DOE. Shall we? Let's actually, this is kind of misleading. Let's do this fractal link to shave. Yeah. So basically, we almost made a complete material just of more or less copper-based. But still we made all those copy-paste, so don't worry about doing that. And of course, with every material, you'll need to tweak something. So be aware of that as well. So let's get these plugged in. I think most of these will retain their original value. But as you can see. This is not that much of a reliable way of doing stuff, although it works decently here. So let's, let's plug this as the albedo. And let's do materials and height scale. Yeah, this works mysteriously well, but there are some stuff we need to tweak definitely here. So first of all, there's way too many shapes. So let's do something like 15 maybe. 3131212 is sort of bad. But it does create a good one. A good good point for all of these. Yeah, it's created quite a quite a nice thing here. This one. And this one. Let's, let's tweak these a little. Let's see something like this. And I think it's too much. So let's do something like 0.3. That looks more subtle and a little bit better. Here. 0.1, 0.2, 0.2 looks way too bright, so it's 0.1. For this thing. Here, I think we want less of these bits, more, something like this. And let's see. Something like this should work. And I want to lower the contrast a little. And I think this might just cut its dew 0.1 maybe. Because then you can see all of these wanes over the rock better. I'm quite liking the feel of this. And especially the sort of Wayne's that we have here. I liked them, that they're a bit harder and bit more visible on the rock itself. Now, if you don't, of course move them slightly. What I don't like is a thing this subtract is too hard. This one here. So let's see 0.1. That seems better. That seems better. Yeah. I didn't like when it was way too hard because the shape look way to cut out and we're not looking for that. Maybe 15. This is okay. I guess there's also one big factor playing here. And that is A0, which we don't want to be 0.8, like it was maybe 0.5. That looks pretty decent. Yeah, that is looking does looking amazing. Now the problem with this, as you can see, this color variation is kind of ******* me off just because it's not according to this one. And that's this is where you can get some conflicting results. And that is why you should test these out a little. And I think this works a little better because you have in this sort of material. Let's see, before we actually remove it, we don't have any real defined shape here. So to say, we just have some blobs and some, some hills and whatnot. We don't have any defined shapes of rocks actually. We have just a rocky sort of area. And with the addition of this fractal here, we kinda get that variety and shapes of rocks that way. And I think coloring them this way is way better. Because we now have some shapes that we can assign random values according to the gradient map. And this way, this way we definitely get some better results. I would argue just directional warp distance, no directional or let's see. Since it's here. Maybe, maybe, let's get, let's actually get this controlled like this. So let's delete this. And let's say, let's, let's control the colors with the random gray scale rather than the distance S1. I think that makes for some better colors and more, more variations. So we can kinda mix these out and see what works for us. And I think that already looks way, way better. And the last thing we need to do here, this is all going to be just one small tutorial. Here is the roughness map, which we will get from here. I'm going to do levels the same as last time. Get this one up a little. And let's get this one a little bit shiny. Yeah, you can see, see that shine there. And that's what I like with these. But you need to be careful not to overdo it. Here. I will do a little bit less of it. And also, it depends where you're putting these materials to work. So just be mindful of that and always tweak according to your situation. I just like the overall look and this shining factor over here that it's happening, as you can see. To me that that's the amazing part. Just a little bit of shine. And I think it already makes the whole overall look better. I'm thinking of bringing this up just a tiny bit. Yeah. I think this looks better. And of course this is not even in some kind of rendering software like Mombasa tool bag or Unreal Engine. This is just some substance designer and rendering software. So this can look way, way better. Believe me, it can look way, way better. And also, if you want, these gradient maps are always something you can experiment with. So let's create something like this. Maybe some interesting variation. Like these are always up for experimenting and you can always adjust them to your liking. So try get some cool variations. Try get them and send the pictures down so everybody can see what you exactly did and also just experiment as much as you can and you will learn way more and way better. See this, this is some kind of desert, is Schrock that has a little bit more red in it. You can change this. You can change this to even be some kind of a crystal rock if you want to. But to me this looks pretty, pretty cool. So maybe I'll even so I'll delete this and copied this one. If I can. Oh, yeah. And I'm gonna make this one just slightly lighter. And this is a really orange looking rock. Let's, let's make this one. I know we need to make it darker. Sorry. Not later. Oh no. Let's just press Windows and new 3D view. Now. Everything I can about it. So let's do view outputs and let's just do a quick edit. Height scale. Yeah, this, this could definitely go as some kind of desert cliffs rock and this can definitely blending them into some kind of desert theme. So I'm just showing you a little bit of what's possible. A lot is possible with Substance Designer and just experiment, I'm encouraging you to do so. You can even send me your stuff by mail or down in the comments. Like, I really, really encourage you to actually actively try and mix all of this stuff up and get some funky and cool results. Even if you get something that isn't really practical for usage, but looks kind of cool. It's still progress because it's still something you made and you probably learn something from that experimentation. So just my little message to experiment as much as you can in this program and you will get amazing, amazing results. So see you in the next one.