Ultimate Texture Creation Course for Games & Cinematics

1. Introduction Trailer: Name is Emil Sigas. I have been an environment and material artist for about eight years now, and I will be your instructor for this course. In this course, I will show you everything that you need to know to create tlilable materials that are perfect to be used in environments for both games and film. When I decided to create this course, I wanted to teach you multiple different techniques on how to create materials just like we do in the game industry. And that's what we will be doing. We will be going over on how to create procedural materials in substance designer, how to create materials using both sea brush and substance, and on how to create photogram try materials. Best of all, is that I've included both beginner level material workflows all the way up to intermediate and advanced workflows, meaning that this course will have something useful for everyone. We will first go over on how to create a basic tiles material using substance designer. We will cover some of the substance interface, and I will show you in real time on how to quickly create some tiles, art custom cracks, and create a proper base color and roughness map. Then once we have covered that, we will go over on how to create a more advanced, broken tarmac material, also using 100% substance designer. This material will be a bit more advanced, but everything will still be done in real time without any time lapses. Some of the key points in this material are on how to create a stone generator, how to create a realistic base color and roughness, and on how to render a scene using Mm set TolbacF. In the end, we will have an amazing looking material that is fully procedural and it has the flexibility to control how broken a tarmac is, how many stone tears scattered around, and many more settings. We will then move on to creating a material using Z brush and substance designer. For this, we will be sculpting all the big shapes using ZBrush. This includes the ground and the stones. I will also show you how to place some foliage on your material using Maya, and then we will bake our material using MusetTolbag four and finalize it in substance designer until we have a material that we can be proud of. Finally, for last two materials, we will be using photogram try techniques. For this, I will actually take you outside, and I will show you the techniques I use to scan both a brigair material and the ground material using a simple DSLR camera. We will then convert these materials into a tree mesh using reality capture and then bake it down into a two detexture using marmoset. I will show you how to make these materials perfectly til using two different techniques, one of which will be in substance painter, and the other one will be in substance designer. All of our materials will be rendered using MamsetTolbk four. But as a little bonus, I have also included an extra chapter where I will show you how I create an environment in unreRngedFo using these materials. This bonus chapter will be done using a time labs as it is not the main focus of this tutorial course. In the end, you will know the techniques and workflows needed to create almost any type of environmental material. So that was a quick overview of tutorial course. If you are interested in more environment tutorial courses like on how to create props or even entire environments, then I would recommend that you look on our store page. I hope that you are excited for this tutorial course and I hope to see you 2. 01 Setting Up Substance Designer: Okay, so we are going to get started with our first material. Now, this material will be a very basic substance designer material. And the reason why it's basic is because this one will also include an introduction to substance designer, basically. Of course, substance designer, it's a very large program, so we will only go over the tools we need to create something like this. But it's to get you started. And after that, we will do more advanced material in substance. Oh, what I have here is a program called PureRef. It's basically an image viewing program. So a lot of artists use it. It's quite handy. You literally just dragging your images, and then you can just like you can select them, scale them. But the cool thing is that they will always stay the same resolution. So I can just keep zooming in. And these images that I have supplied for you, I've taken them myself. So you can just use them. They are part of my website, which is called reference.org. And basically, that website just provides free reference image. Yeah, I have some really nice, really high quality images so that we can see how everything looks. And it's mostly like these three. That's what we're going to do. So we are basically going to just create these styles. Nice and basic, it's just going to be some shape forming, adding some large details like cracks, adding some very small sandiness in between and just breaking up the edges a bit. And for the rest, I will also show you already how to add some very basic stones, and I will just go over this. So before we dive into substance design, I just want to go over the material. As I said before, we are going to go for large shapes. Now, there are very small stones in here, but the tricky thing with this is that we probably do not have the resolution to actually make it look this detailed up close because resolution is, of course, an important thing in games. These kind of materials would almost never really be above 2048 by 2048 in terms of resolution. Now it does depend on the game. Like some games, you can even boost up the settings and go to 40 96, which is just a four K resolution. 2048 is just like a two K resolution. 1024 is basically one K resolution 512 is 0.5, and it goes on like that. So within games, you are often 512-2048. So we need to focus on that. We need to make sure that we get the optimal resolution for this. And that's basically the general idea. So I think we'll just jump right in and we can have a look. So what I did is I resetted my entire layout over here. So this is probably what you have. It will look like this. However, I like to change my layout. So over here, we have the library view. The library view basically contains all of the stuff that we might need. Everything from noises to filters to just there. Everything that you would use inside the subsisizer is pretty much in here. We have a treaty view. If you want to preview your materials in treaty, you can use your treaty view. However, because this is a material tutorial, I will actually be using Mom set Tolbag for the previewing. The reason I do that is because I have much more control and get a much higher quality render out of Mom set Tolbag compared to this twinVew. This twnVew over here is great. It's very handy to preview your models. But it's a little bit limiting in terms of final renders. So what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to just press X because I don't need it. We have a two D view. Our two D view will basically later on show our actual texture when we have created a file. So all of these windows, you can make them big and large. What I tend to do is I tend to here, I tend to have my two D view as like a square, and then my library is just sitting here with everything on this. So that's a two de view. Now we have over here the explorer and basically the explorer is it has to do with saving all of our files later on. When we create a file, we are able to save it here. You will see that soon. But for now you can see me just dragging and dropping this window, and I want to basically have it here at the top, like this. And then we have our graph over here. The graph is one of the most important ones because it will actually showcase us building the material. That will be what the graph will show. All those notes that you have probably seen, that's why they will be here. So I'm just trying to like there we go, see. So now I basically get this view. So my graph at the top, library at the bottom left to the view explorer and our parameters. Our parameters are basically our settings. It's just settings. Yeah. So before I can really showcase you how to use substance Ziner, the easiest thing for me to do is to first actually create a new file because then everything becomes activated, basically. So if we go to file and just go to new substance, we get this window. So in this window, you will have a lot of different templates. Now, it all depends on what you need. Most of the time, if you are working in unreal engine like us, even in unity, I would say you would go for PBR metallic roughness, even in 20 modeling programs, almost everything supports metallic and roughness. So you just want to create that, and that will basically make sure that we have a base color, a normal map, a roughness map, and a metallic map, and then additionally a height map and an ambienoclusion map. So these settings are very basic. All you will need to do is grab the metallic grauphness which is your template. You will know if you need to use a different one. And then the graph name I'm going to call these tile Oops, tiles underscore basic. That will just be our save name. Size mode, you just want to keep it to absolute. Absolute just means that it will stay at 20:48 by 2048 resolution, which is the one that I was talking about, see, 512, ten, 24, 2048, 40 96. So we are going to go for 2048 by 2048. We probably don't need a higher resolution for this. It wouldn't really make sense. Now, what we can do, the power of substance is that you can dynamically also upscale and downscale your actual texture size without getting blurry or looking bad. So what we can do is at the very end, when we create our portfolio renders, we can just very quickly set our resolution to four K, so 40 96, just to get a little bit more of like a crisp portfolio render. But you wouldn't use that resolution in a game engine most of the time. So you just want to go ahead and press Okay. And here we go. So it will always automatically open up our TD view over here. We can just close it. If you want, we can just quickly run through it. It is basically just using your click Rotate. You can rotate, middle mouse button you can bend around and just your scroll wheel you can zoom in. Now, since we're not going to cover this, I will recommend that you simply go to YouTube and on the official algorithmic page, they will go over all of these settings. Personally, because I almost never used this, I wouldn't really want to show, I know how it works, but I wouldn't be able to, like, perfectly tell you exactly what the setting does and stuff like that. So I'm just going to close it, and I'm just going to focus on all of these things. So you can see that some stuff has changed. We now have a graph, which has a lot of notes here at the top. These notes you can also find over here, pretty much. So it's just like shortcuts. Now, you just use your middle mouse button to move around and your scroll wheel to zoom in and out. It's not a 20 program, so that's all the buttons you need to move around. You can, of course, make the smaller or bigger if you want. That doesn't matter. I like to just have a nice view of my two D view. So it will have automatically created these notes, the base color normal roughness, et cetera, et cetera. Now, it has a base, literally has like a plain color put in, but later on, these will be the notes that we'll use to export that texture. So basically, in a nutshell, whatever we plug in here, that's what will be exported as a texture file. In our case, that will be a dot TGA file. So yeah, having that. Now, what we will be using most of the time is because you have all these graphs and all these things over here. But after you've used substance for a while, you start to know the names. You start to remember what everything is called. And when you do that, it's very powerful to use the space bar. If you use the space bar, you can basically search. So first of all, when you press space, it will show you all of these inputs. They are the same as here at the top. See? You can recognize the icons. But for example, you can just go, Okay, what do I need? I need a slope blur. So you just type in SLOP and then it already knows, Okay, you want a slope blur and you can just use your arrow keys to find it and then press Enter. And there you go. So it's a very quick way to navigate. So that's what I will be using most time. I will press space. So whenever you see this menu, you will know that I pressed space bar basically. And then of course, I will tell you what note I need, why I need it, stuff like that. I will go over all that stuff. Let's see. So in order to actually properly save a file, we want to go here to the top in our explorer, right click and press Save. So I made this little folder. In our source files, we have a saves folder, and in here, we have a substance underscore basic. This is just because we're also going to make an advanced one. So I'm just going to go ahead and press Save. Done, it is now saved. It is all ready to go. So now at this point, what you would often do is you would start by building your material. Now, the way that you want to build a material is you want to go from big details to small details. And within that, you want to often first create a height map. Then you want to create your norm map, and then it's up to you to create your base color and your roughness map and any other maps, basically. So we are also going to do the same thing. We are going to focus on a height map because there are tiles. It would be very cool if I just give it like that little bit of extra height in our final render, just to make it look extra nice compared to just relying on a normal map. So what do we see here? Okay, so the tiles there are very straightforward. They are basically just all the same size, and they have a little bit of, like, damaged etches. And if you look closely, you can see that they have a little bit of tilting. It's easier to see here. See? Some tiles are slightly higher than the other ones. This just simply happens. Over time with all the walking, it just very slightly shifts. And that's basically what we also want to do. And once we've done that, we would, of course, focus on our cracks. So we have now set up substance designer, and we are ready to create our material. And that's what we will be doing in the next chapter. We will start by creating our height map for material. 3. 02 Creating Our Base Tile Shape: Okay, so let's get started with our material with our height map. What do I want to do? I always just like to move over here into a bit of a clean view, and I like to get started here B the way that I worked, the graphs always go from left to right and they become quite long in my case. The first thing I want to do is I want to create the actual shapes. Now our hight map works in whatever is black in the height map is low. So black means zero. It means there's no height. White means that there is 100% height, and then we have all the gradients in between. Those are 255 different gradients that we can use in order to fake as if we actually have height in our material. So we're going to make that now. We are going to go to our patterns over here, and here we already have some very nice base patterns that you can often use. And the cool thing is there are actual patterns that are literally called tile generator or the tile sampler. The tile sampler is a little bit more complicated, but I don't think I actually need it. I think I can just get away with like a simple tile generator. So you click and write this in, and by the way, if you want, you can just press space and type in tile generator, and just like that. You also have it. So if we go ahead and just like preview r2d view, this is what we get. Now, you can see that you have a lot of settings in these parameters. They might be a little bit overwhelming at first, but don't worry. It will get easy quite quickly. Oh, we have these tiles. Now we need to decide how many do we want to have in our texture. Having bigger tiles means on the one hand that we can put in more detail in those tiles, but on the other hand, it means that they can be repetitive because this is a tilable texture. What I mean with a tilable texture is if you go into your two D view, if you press space, this is what I mean, it is repeating. This texture. The ability to repeat this texture is very useful because it means that you can reuse this texture over and over and over again on very large areas of three D space. The problem with that is, is that if we make our tiles very, very large and only have a few details in them, we will be able to see those details repeating over and over and over again, and that is quite bad. So you don't really want to do that within environment art because it just looks bad. So I'm going to go probably four Let's Let's see. No eight. Three. Let's do four by four. So we type in the X and Y amount four by four. Yeah, you know what? I like that. I like four by four. That's fine. So having that done, now what you can do is we need to fix this. Right now it's really soft and that's not really how these tiles look like. They do have a tiny bit of, like, a round corner, but not as much. So what you can do with this is you can go ahead and the pattern, you can just leave it to brick. If you want, you can go for square. The squares are perfectly sharp. But what I like to do is I like to go from my patron to brick because it shows us some softness, and then I like to just set my patron specific down. And what will happen is that here, we can make it very sharp, but we still have that little round corner that you can often see in here, see? So we just want to try and get that same effect. So you can just use your slider, and let's start with 0.02 over here in our value. And I'm just going by feel over here. You want to make sure that they are not touching, that the tiles are not touching each other. Now, what else can you do? All of these settings, this means if you just want to rotate your tiles, but they're square. It doesn't matter if I rotate them 90 degrees, it will still look the same. Scale is quite cool. So the scale, although we don't really need it, Oh, I should do it like this. We can just control the scale in here. What we can also do is we can set a random scaling. This will randomize the scaling of your tiles. These tiles, you might feel the urge to randomize the scaling, but these are manufactured in a factory. This means that they will only have a few millimeters of error in between them in terms of, like, the scaling. That is not enough to actually see any difference in scaling. So you just want to leave it off. We're just going to go for realistic, even though it's very tempting to do this because this feels a little bit more gamy game ft. But yeah, we're just going to leave that. Offset. Offset random is nice, for example, if you want to create bricks or if you want to change the offset of your tiles. You can just basically set an offset. And here, see? So you can just play around with your offset however you want. Once again, we don't need that. Their tiles, they're very simple. Random rotation, it just adds some rotation. Now, we can play around with this, but I think our tiles are two. Here, we literally go to like 0.00, not even that, 0.001. It's a Btrick you can try and get the tiniest bit of rotation that you see over here, but I want to go even lower. 0.00, 05. Yeah, I'm just going to give it the tiniest bit of rotation, but I need to make sure that my tiles are not touching because then the system later on breaks the system that we are going to create. So as you can see right now a height map, Black means that it's plain level, white means that it stands out. But what if you want to create that variation? Remember how I said, some of the tiles are slightly higher than other tiles? Now to do that, we can very simply go down here and we can set our luminans random. And this will randomize the gray scale of your tiles. Now if you set this quite low, what will happen is you can see that the darker tiles will be slightly dented in in our final texture. So we can set this to like 0.2, maybe. That might even be too much, but we'll see. Let's start with 0.2 because we can always go back. And here, that's what just give us this nice extra variation. And over here, you can do a lot more settings like checker masks, other masks. So you can do a lot of masking in and out, but we don't need that. So we got our tiles. Now that we have our tiles, now, the next thing that we would probably want to do is we would just want to break them up a little bit. We just want to go ahead and, like, break up these edges a little bit, and then we'll do the cracks. The way that we do that is we very simply go in and we want to press space. Now, there is a node, and what you can see me doing is I first select my node, my tile generator, and then I press space. There is a reason for this. The reason that I do this is so that when I enter something. So we want to, in this case, go for like a slope blur, so slow blur gel. As soon as I press Enter, it will automatically connect to each other. If I wouldn't select this node and type in slow blur, will happen is it we would then need to go in, click and drag and connect. So it's just one extra thing less. A sloperGray scale. Basically, the way that we are going to use it is this node allows us to manipulate our grayscale mask, basically, based upon another mask. I'll show you what I mean, and then it makes it a lot easier to understand. First things first, samples. We need to set this all the way up. So we want to get the highest quality, and that's basically what the samples is. Intensity, let's start by setting this all the way down. And now we basically need to input a slope. In this case, a slope will be a gray scale map. Now, I already know which map I want because I've used it hundreds and hundreds of times. So if you go to noises and scroll down, there is a map called the moisture noise. This will become one of your favorite maps, basically. With this map, these are all noises. They are grungesO we often call them grunges also. They are very heavy. They're just gray scale maps that are random patrons. Now, what you can do here is you can set a scale. If you want, this will just tile your map. You can set a random seat, which will just randomize your map over here. But you do need to remember not every map has this. Okay, this one does. But let's say over here, if I pick a grunge map, sometimes they have different settings. So these ones you can control the cracks and the balance and stuff like that. So with this map, I want to go ahead and not really do anything about it. I just want to drag it into my slope. And if we go to our slope, this is what will happen. If we zoom in and we set our intensity up, you can see that it will try to break up our actual gradients based upon this map over here. But this does not look very nice. The reason it doesn't look nice right now is because it pushes out. It isn't cutting away. If you look here, you can see that it's cutting away from the shape. Right now, what it is doing is it is just moving around the shape. That's where the modes come in. If you set your mode from blur to minimum, minimum means that it will ignore black. Maximum means that it will ignore white. So minimum, you can see that now it's starting to really cut out these nice little shapes. So we are all of a sudden starting to get these really nice little cuts. Now a cool thing if you double click on your slope blur so that you can see this view over here, and then only click once on your moisture noise, what happens is that you will be able to change the settings of your moisture noise while still previewing your previous map, which in this case, is a slope blur. This is handy because what I can do is I can go in my moisture noise now, and let's say I set the scale up, you can see that things change. The higher I set the scale, of course, I don't have enough resolution, but yeah, you can see that like the little cuts, they change. So stuff like that, it's really nice to work with. Now, what I'm going to do is we have these cuts over here. I want to double click on my slope blur and probably set the intensity a little bit low to 0.02. There we go. So we just have these smart cards. Another problem. These cuts are everywhere right now, so you can see in here, they are everywhere. They just keep going and going and going. But in real life, sometimes you have some quiet areas and then sometimes you have some cuts. Then you have some quiet areas again, and then you have some cuts. So it's very random where the cuts are. Now the way that we can fix that here is very simple. We can blend between the one without cuts and the one with cuts. The way that we do that is we breath space and we literally type in blend. Now, this blend, what you can do is you can, for example, plug in the one with the cuts in the background and plug in the tile generator that doesn't have the cuts in the foreground. Now, what this blend is allowing us to do is, well, it is also used as a blend mode, and the blend mode is very cool because it's just like Photoshop. You just have multiplies, subtract, you have all of these different modes. But the way that we are going to use it is we are going to actually use the opacity in this. The Opacity, you can see as a mask. We are going to basically have a mask and everything that is white in the mask will blend oneing. Everything that is black in the mask will blend something else. And this is how it's going to work. Let's say that we grab, for example, like a grunge map 001. This is like a cool looking mask. If you want, you can play around with your random seat. Basically just get something cool. Now I want to go in my balance, and I just want to drop this down. The reason I'm doing this is because everything that will be white will show us I believe it depends on which order we have it in. But yeah, everything that will be white will show us our damages. So if we set our balance down and our contrast higher, see, we can now have a little bit more exact details. Now, if we plug this into our past, this is what you will see. Sometimes you will see some quacks. Over here like this will damage, and then sometimes it should over here, I should just fade out a little bit here. There's almost no cracks here and here, it just nicely fades out. Then you can click on your grunge map once and you can just play around with your balance if you want to make something look interesting. It's all up to you however you want to use it. I would say don't go too overboard with the damages, even though it might be tempting, just don't. Oh, we got these damages over here. Now, what we'll do in the next chapter is we will go ahead and we will start by creating our racks, which will just nicely break up some of these surfaces the way that you can see over here. And once you've done that, we'll just add some tiny, tiny little stones in there, and then we can already call this pretty much done. So let's well the shape, at least. So let's continue with that. 4. 03 Creating Our Cracks: Okay, so we are now going to work on a cracks. So you can make cracks within substance in many different ways. So I'm just going to show you one of them that I personally use often. A few things you focus on cracks. These are tiles. These means that the cracks will not just transition from one tile to another tile, and definitely not in a way that it would just, like, very slowly flow over. This seems to be something that students often forget. And when they create cracks, the cracks just keep going from tile to tile, but this wouldn't be realistic. The most realistic thing that you can get is, for example, like over here, we have, for example, something dropped on the tile and it dropped exactly like the split, which means that there is a crack in the same area. But even in real life, you can see that these cracks, they are not linked together. So, yeah, that's something to just keep an eye out. For the rest, the cracks, the general shape of them is quite planar. Here, it's a little bit of some bumps in it. So that's something that I want to get, especially like over here. You can see quite a bit of warping. But within the cracks, you can see that there's also a lot of activity and damage and everything going on. So those are a few of the key points that I want to capture. So the way that we want to do this, first of all, the thing that we need to do is we basically need to create like I just call them pixels, basically. They are just like very small white squares. Now, normally, I have a very advanced generator for this that I use, but I'm not going to do that this time because it would just be way too difficult for, like, a basic thing. Even I barely know how it works. I only made it once and I would be able to easily replicate it. What I am going to get is I'm going to get a tile sampler, yes. And then if you go ahead and go to the patterns, just set this to be a square so that we have squares. Now, we are going to set the amount, the X and Y amount all the way up to 64 for now. And then we basically scroll down to size and just set the scale all the way down, see? So we get pixels, basically. So yeah, you just want to give it some very small white dots. Okay, seeing this, what I know now is that I need to set the X and Y amount lower. Let's try 25 by 25. And we basically just want to scatter these around. The way that it works, wherever there are more pixels, there will be more cracks going on, and wherever there are less pixels, the cracks will be bigger. So you can imagine that and you will see it soon also. If we go, for example, to our randomized positions over here and you set the random X and Y position all the way up. And if we don't go ahead and actually randomized rotation doesn't matter. Now, this is still quite evenly scattered, as you can see. So you can see that now all the cracks will be quite even. What I want to do now is I just want to, like, take away a bunch of these. There's a few ways that you can do this. You can go ahead and you can grab a random mask over here, and this will just randomly take out certain pieces as you can see over here. There's another way you can do it, multiple ways, actually. You can use a tile sampler, which allows us to input a mask. Unfortunately, it doesn't do that over here, but there is another way to do this, so don't worry. So another way that we can do this is we can go ahead and because they are just pixels, we can simply blend them out using a mask. Like that isn't too big of a deal. It would be a bigger deal if they were very precise shapes. But let's say that for now, I would add a blend to this. In this blend, I basically want to go ahead and I want to go to my noises and just grab something to blend out a little bit. Actually, you know what? Let's go for Grunge Map 001 again. Maybe we can even reuse this. Probably not. Cool thing. You can just press Contra C and Contra V, and that way you can duplicate your notes. Let's say that I delete this one because this way I don't need to change all these settings. I can now go in here and I can say, Okay, I want to make this a little bit less of the white spots and change the random seat. Changing the random seat is a very easy way to make sure you don't see the same patterns in the same location. Because right now if we get the same cracks also in the same locations, it might sometimes feel a little bit off. So we basically plug this this time in the top and if we go to our blend, we now need to use a blending mode. If we set this to subtract, it will just subtract all of the white spots. So you can see before, after. S, it is subtracting a bunch of the white spots. It will be easier if we go into our tile sampler and I set my random mask lower over here. And now I can just go in my blend. And if I don't click on my grunge map, I can just play around C with the amount. So now what happens here is that the cracks will be mostly localized around these areas, which means that we get this effect. Oh, that we get this effect. We get the effect that some of the tiles are completely fine, and then some of the tiles all of a sudden have cracks in them. And that's basically what I wanted to capture. So let's actually turn these into cracks because they're just pixels right now. If we go into our blend, we simply want to go ahead and we want to add a distance note. A distance note basically allows us to push out certain shapes using a mask. Now, in this case, the way that we are going to do it is we have over our mask, which is our pixels, and we want to also plug this into our source input. So we get this. Now, if we set our maximum distance very high, so like 5,000, what will happen is this happens. You can see that they will now be pushed out so far. I can even show you. So these pixels, you can see these pixels are being pushed out, out out to a point that we get this effect where they are just pushed out so far that they are just bordering other pixels. And that's basically the goal. So when they border other pixels, they will stop, basically. Now, one thing I'm not a big fan of is that we got some of these weird little lines that I'm not used to. Let's see if it happens because you have a plug in this. Oh, it doesn't even oh, yeah, because there are too many. Never mind that. Let's just go ahead and let's see. We'll see how it goes. Basically, I think what I want to do is I want to go to my Grinch web and I want these playgrounds with my balance to here, see? Make the cracks even bigger. So now, all these stripes are basically going to be like a crack. We got this stuff. Now let's go ahead and let's go add a edge detect node. Now, there is a tricky thing. The Edgec node doesn't always look as good. If it doesn't, I will show you a different node that I use myself, but it's not included in the base or substance designer. So the edge Dec node is trying to detect these edges that we have over here, and it will basically masters out. If we set our edge roundness all the way down, you can see like it's happening a little bit better. And if we then set our edge width over here, uh, yeah, you know what? This might work. So with setting our edge width over here, we just get all of these thin little edges down here. So one thing I'm still not happy about is these squares. These squares look a little bit strange. What I could try to do is I could try and go into my tile generator and give my pixels random rotations just to see if that works. Okay, see, so that does break up the squares a little bit better, doing random rotations like this. For the rest, honestly, it's like you kind of need to hit the sweet spot with this. So we can also play around with our random mask to see if we can get some smaller or bigger edges that are broken up. I don't want to go too small. Yeah, this kind of stuff over here, it's a little bit tricky because there aren't enough edges. There isn't really a way to break it up. There are ways to break it up, but they're too advanced. I don't want to go into that kind of stuff right now. What I can also do is I can also go into my tile generator and play around with my random seat. And then, until we come across something like this. So this one looks a lot better. So sometimes it's as simple as just playing around with your random seat until you get something you like. So let's say we got this stuff over here. That's like a nice little base. Now, we still need to make it look like actual cracks because these cracks, they are like, bend. They have broken pieces and everything, all that fancy stuff. But first, what I want to do is I want to mask them out based upon our tiles. So I basically want to grab these tiles, and I want to create a mask, and based upon that mask, I can then nicely just divide the cracks up. It would work something like this. We would go ahead and add a levels note. And we will plug in our blend. Now with this levels note, the only thing that you want to do is because you want to make sure that this is a perfectly white mask. I'm going to grab my white slider and move it all the way up up until around here so that we still get some of these details and then move your black slider all the way down. So we get almost like a black and white mask, something like this. The goal is that they do not touch that none of these tiles are touching. Here, maybe I will make it a little bit sharper. Here, try to fight like a sweet spot where nothing is touching. It still looks like some of these broken details in here, but we now just basically have a mask. Now that we've done that, we are going to use a node, and the node is called a flood fill node. What a flood fill node does, as you can see, is it will basically convert our mask to something called a position map. A position map is basically general data of the positions of our shape. We can use these positions and this data in order to manipulate things. So type in if you press space and type in flood fill, and then what you can see is all these nodes flood fill to position to random grayscale, to gradients, all this kind of stuff. Um, this is an amazing note. It's really nice, but what we need it for now is we just need it for flood fill to random gray scale, which will give us a much stronger gray scale compared to like this one, because this one is way too soft. So we got this stuff. They are all randomized gray scales, and they are never the same type of grayness next to each other. Oh, except for this one, that's unfortunate. But we'll see how it goes. Now what we can do is there is a node, and that node can basically select random grayscales. It is called a Oops. You do need to be in this view and press space. It is called a histogram select node. This, if you set your contrast all the way up and you set your position or actually set your range, you can play around with your range and your position in order to randomize exactly where you want your nodes to be. So the range is basically how many of the gray scales you want to include, let's say three. And then the position, of course, three doesn't always, it depends on how the gray scale looks. But let's say this. This looks quite cool. They are not touching each other, but they still are randomized. So we now have these tiles basically masked out, and we have a slide that we can simply in the future, change this however we want. Here, maybe I'll do this. Four, why not? Looks cool. So all we need to do now, as you might have mentioned, is we need to go ahead and only show the cracks on our white tiles. The way that we do that is we simply add a blend. And then if we just go ahead and plug in our histogram select at the top, we can go and set our blend mode to be art. Oh, sorry, subtract. No Art subtract. I technically was close. No. You know what you can do when you are like me and sometimes we get the blending mode, you can click on it and you can use your scroll wheel in order to figure out, there we multiply. Of course, it's multiply. Sorry, that is really silly of me that I forgot something like that. So basically multiply. And then what you can see here is that the quacks are working. You can start to see the shape coming back out of it. The only place where I do not like it is this one over here. These cracks, they do not feel very realistic. They feel a little bit strange. This stuff, you might be able to get away with, but I don't like it. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to go ahead and playing around between my tile generator and my grunge map until I get something I like, basically. I just go make this a bit. If it allows me to. Come on. There we go. Et's makes this a bit bigger. So let's start with our grunge map. What if we just play around with the random seed of our grunge map until we get something looks a little bit more interesting. Let's play around with our balance. See, of course, I'm just using the most basic version of this crack generator because else it might get a little bit too complicated. So let's play around with tie generator. But yeah, it does mean that I just need to play around with it to get it exactly the way I want it to. You can also play around actually with the X and Y amount if you want to reduce your amount of cracks like this. Just try and get something that is in the direction that I like. And see. What if I make them a lot smaller? What if I go in my tile generator and for example, make my pixels a bit smaller? This will make it harder for them to show up. If you make them bigger, you get this stuff. So that's why I'm trying to get them smaller so that they only just show some of the cracks. Like this. Another thing that can sometimes happen is when you make your pixels this small, they might not always be perfectly white. The way that you can test this is you can add a oral levels or something called an Auto levels. And this will just make sure that they are pushed back into the white completely. And it looks like Okay, so it looks like I am already into the white. Cool thing. If you press backspace, you can remove a node without actually breaking the connection. So that's just a nice way to just quickly remove a node. So we got this stuff. Let's see. So we got our distance, and we got our edge detect. Our distance over here, I feel like the grey scale is not doing exactly what I want. Another thing that you can do is you can also use your outer levels here. If you use your outo levels here, you can see that it will try to break everything up a little bit, which will make it easier for the edge detect. But as I said before, I'm not here, I'm not liking this kind of stuff. So I need to let's look at our blend. I need to keep playing around with this until I get the same settings. Now, normally I would just do this off camera, but in this case, I will go ahead and yeah, I'm close. I will just play around with this on camera. Let's go into our Edge tag. Let's play around with our random mask. These three I like. Can I maybe just get rid of this bottom one? Okay. Oh, that's mean. Actually, you know what I can show you a way to get rid of it. Okay, I will show you a way. Let's say that you want to get rid of this bottom one because you don't really like it. A very handy way that we can do that is the same technique we've used before. We add a blend after our histogram select. And then we add something if you press space that is called just a simple shape, and the shape is literally like it says it's a pattern. So it can be a disc, it can be a square whatever you want. We then set the scale quite low like this. And then all we need to do is we need to add something that is called a space transform and basically transform inside of substance designer means that you can move around shapes. So you can imagine if we plug this into our blend, set our blending mode to be subtract, I can simply click on my transform and then move the shape on top over here. Now, the thing with the shape is that when you move it, it will tile. See, I will just continue tiling on like this. If you want to get rid of that, you can simply go into tile mode over here. Click on this little button and set this to be an absolute and then set this to be no tiling. And once you do that, it will no longer tile. So I can just place this here and I can now have these cracks over here. I'm just going to call that ready for now. So we just got these cracks. I might need to do some balancing later on because even though this is a basic tutorial or yeah, this is a basic one, I still want to make it look very nice. So we got this stuff over here. I'm now just going to go ahead and just click and drag and move our actual cracks a little bit further back. The first thing that we want to do now is we want to this wavy effect that you can sometimes see. We want to do this in two stages. The first stage is going to be large waves like you can see over here, and the second one is going to be smaller waves like you can see over here. We do this using a node if you double click on your edge detect, and the node is called a directional warp. Now, like I said, we are going to go for a big one and then if you just add another directional warp right away for the smaller waves. Now, it's basically like a slope blur. You basically input a noise, and it will try and in this case, warp around that noise. If we go down and grab a purlin noise down here, this is basically just a very soft little bumps. We can set the scale low. So these are for the big ones and just plug this intra direction warp intensity. Here, you can already see it happening, before, after. At this point, you can set your angle if you want, because these are cracks, the angle doesn't matter too much, actually. And then if you play around with your purlin noise, you can set the waves amount, see? So we want to set this quite big. So let's go for eight. And then you can also play around your intensity to set this stronger or less strong. Now for the smaller ones, I'm just going to press Contra C and Contra Ville by purlin noise. I'm going to make the size a little bit smaller. Throw this in here, and here you can already see the waves being a lot stronger. I always like to set my warp angle a little bit different compared to the previous one and then simply play around with your intensity. He see to get some extra waves like this. If you're looking your tiles, this is what it basically will look like, like this. Now that we've done that, we just want to add some breakup and remember we have this one. What we can do is we can literally copy the slope grayscale and just paste it here. And then in the grayscale, plug in our See plug in our cracks. And because these are cracks, we can probably get away with just having the damage everywhere. So as you can see, now we just have these little cracks sitting over here. So we got these cracks. I would say that there are too many of them. I probably want to go in my tile generator and see if I can just play around with my random mask over here. There we go, see? To get some of something like this. That's actually a lot better. Oh, that's a little bit unfortunate that we have this one over here. The reason that is unfortunate it feels very similar to that one. But actually, you know what? With some warping, we can, if we just go to our directional warp and just play around with the intensity, before you know it, we can make it look different. Oh, this actually feels a lot like what I was going for where we have, sometimes a corner cut off, sometimes a straight piece, and sometimes we have, like pieces meeting each other. So it's actually just a coincidence that it happens to look exactly like a reference. But that's a nice thing about substance. It surprises you like this sometimes. So we got these pieces over here. Now I will show you one extra twig, and that is how to create some extra bigger damages. Basically, the only thing that you need to do for that is add another slope blur gray scale. Remember, always set samples all the way up, intensity all the way down, and the mode to be minimum. And you basically want to go for purlin noise. Now, we can tie this pearl noise over here, but it's most likely too big. We probably want to go for parlis that is a lot smaller like 64 or something in the scale. And what that will do is if I play around with my intensity, it will give us these type of cracks. See? They are much larger. But if we set them at quite a low level, I think I want to set my pearl noise even higher. If you go into scale, just select it and sets to like one to eight. Just type it in, and then it can also type it in. So with this one, intensity, 0.01. Yeah, let's do 0.0, maybe a little bit higher. 0.02 maybe. Yeah, let's do 0.02. Now the next thing that we want to do if we just move this up. We now need to blend between these two. Very simple. It's just going to be a simple blend with our damages, and then the one before our damages, just like we've done before. And then, for example, just grab grunge map 001. Drag it in here. The reason why we can do that is because you can actually just reuse the same grunge map into multiple areas. If you can do that, it's even better because all of these modes, they cost us time to actually calculate because we need to calculate all of these settings. So every thing costs at time, and grunge maps cost often quite a bit of time compared to the rest. So it's good if you can reuse, basically. But that's something that will come into the advanced tutoril. So let's not worry about that. Let's first make something cool. So if we go into our blend, we now got this stuff. We got these cracks over here, which are looking great. The only thing I would say now is that now that we have these cracks, we need to go in and we need to actually add them to a proper blend because right now they are added to just like a plane. So if we go ahead and add a blend, we can drag in our real blend, which is this one in here. And in the foreground, we can go ahead and we can drag in our quacks, and then our mask like this, see? And once you've done that, yes, I don't think we don't need sets to multiply, I believe. Oh, yes, sorry, we do need the sets to multiply. Don't forget such a blend to multiply, and you can just delete this one. This one was just for preview. And there we go. So the graph x for basic tutor has become a little bit bigger than expected, but I find that even though it's a basic tutorial, it shouldn't suffer too much in quality, even though we do that. So I hope that this was still understandable. But what we have now is we have cracks in our tiles. We have our actual tiles, and we have damages. So at this point, I would call my height map done, and I would move over to my normal map. My norm map would have like these little stones in here, and it would also show the actual tiles. Now, I will go over it later on. But basically, the reason I'm doing stones in my normal map is because they are too small for my height map to really bother because they're pretty much flat. So they're just going to be like some random shapes that I scatter around. So let's go ahead and continue with that in our next chapter. 5. 04 Creating Our Normal Map: Okay, so we are now going to go ahead and create a normal. So the way that we create a normal is we are basically going to convert our height map to a normal map. Now, before we do that, I want to show you a little trick on how you can work very nice and cleanly. So these notes, what you can do is you can go ahead and you can select all of them like this. And then if you press right click and add a frame, you can add this nice little box. With this box, you can easily just move around all of the notes at the same time. And when you click on the box, you can just go to the title and call this height map, for example. Now at this point, let's move on to non map. So to convert a hypemp to normp insight of substance designer is very easy. All you need to do is press space and type in normal. So when you do that, you will get this normal note. Now, oh, I'm crashing. There we go. All you need to do with this is just plug in your hypemp in here. And then you have basically two norm map formats. So you have OpenGL and DirectX. Now, Unreal Engine uses DirectX while MamsetTolbek uses OpenGL. I personally prefer to use OpenGL. The reason I do that is because right now, if I sets to OpenGL, this feels easier to read to me on how it would look like compared to this because everything is inverted. Pretty much the only difference between Direct X and open GL is that the green channel of your RGB is inverted. So over here, if I said it's to OpenGL, you can now really nicely see all of our damages and our cracks and everything. Often in these type of cases, you can also see whenever they are too much. Like, we have a few, too many damages here and there, which is something that we can work on to improve. But we can do that later on. So we got these pieces over here. Now, we were going to go ahead and we were going to make some very quick and flat stones, like you can see over here. And basically, I'm going to do this in like a super easy way, just like a very basic way. So because they don't need that much detail, they are not full on stones. So if you go to Patron, I want to go ahead and I want to grab a shape over here. There we go. And these stones, they often are slightly around. So what I would do is I would set my pattern to be a disc like this, set the scale a little bit lower that we have some space around to work with because we basically need to manipulate the shape to make it feel a little bit more like an actual stone. We can do this in a few ways. The first way would be to add a slope blur gray scale, and then plug in quite a large purl noise like this one, for example. Set the samples all the way up, set the mode to minimum. And this time, you want to actually set your intensity quite high. So now, this might not look very nice, but if we go ahead and we add a levels on top and just push the black slider over levels to the right, you can see that it will start like cut out, and it will start to give us an interesting shape. Now, what I'm going to do is, I'm just going to copy my pearl noise and paste it again because I want to have a bit more control. So with this pearl noise, I can play around with my scaling. You see? And like this, I can very quickly just get a few of these random shapes. So what I would basically do is I would probably do this. I have my shape over here. I would duplicate these three notes, three times, for example, that's already enough. The stones are going to be so small, you will not really be able to see much of a difference. So we got this one let's go into purlinis and maybe play around with the scale a bit more. And what you can, for example, do is you can also play around with the disorder. The disorder kind of changes the way your purlin noise looks. So we can do like one of this. This feels like a little bit like a reference if you look at it. And then the last one that we have over here, what might be cool to do is to actually create a cut in the same way as that we've done here with our shape. So we would basically do this. We would add a blend, so I select the line and I add a blend node using my space. So I'm adding a blend node between my shape and the slope grayscale. I then go ahead and I, let's say, duplicate this transform over here because we can reuse this. I duplicate this transform and plug it into the top. Then I set this simply to be subtract. And now I can just quickly move this around. With the transform, you can also scale. So I can scale this out. And I basically just want to create a little cut like this. Now, when you create a cut like this, by the time that we add a slope blur to this and the levels, it will hopefully become quite an interesting looking shape. I just need to here something like this, maybe play around to the scale. Let's see. I just wanted to get something that's a little bit long. I think something like this will work. So we got this one, this one, and this one. And don't forget we have everything rotation within these pieces and all that fancy stuff. So these three levels, if we just go ahead and select this, what you can do is you can nicely organize this if you want. You can right click At the Frame and call this Stones yeah, well, see, I'm just going to call it stones. Call this stones. Now what we need to do is we need to scatter these stones around so that we can then place them on our actual ties. And the way that we want to do that is if we go to patterns, there is a note which is called the shaped splatterer it is quite a large and maybe sometimes overwhelming node to look at, but we only need some very basic stuff from this. The first thing that we need to do is set our pattern input number to three because remember, we have one, two, and three. We then simply drag in our patterns Pattern one, Pattern two, and patron tree. Now, what you can see is that they are not fully white. This is because the shapes splatter always tries to automatically change the gradients, but we don't want that. So we want to scroll all the way down to our height and just turn off the height scale out to adjust. See? Now they're nice and white. Now it's just a matter of setting the X and Y amount way up. We need to have these wally small. Go to our scale, set the scale random way up. Like that, for example, position random, all the way, rotation random all the way. We just want to completely randomize this kind of stuff. So that's the general idea. Now, you can see here there are way more stones in here and they are quite generic, but there are a lot more. So I'm going to go in my X and Y amount and go for one to eight by one to eight. Now, this becomes really, really small. So what you then probably want to do is just go into your scale and just set your scale a little bit higher. Like this. We can still play around with like a scale random. So we get something in this direction. Okay. Let's see. Rotation random. What you can also do is you can also play around your height scale random, which is the same as that luminosity slider that I showed you in the tile generator. So we basically get this. We get a bunch of random different stones, and this is why I mean why I'm not too worried about the look of them because when they become dismall, they are just pixels. They are just like small random shapes. But the shapes will have different densities and everything, and it will hopefully look quite nice. So let's see, is there anything else? I think that is about it for now. Yeah, I think we can use this. So what you would do is you would go ahead and you would add a normal to this. Sets the OpenGL, see? And we get all of these. Now, we said it's very, very low, so 0.05 in the intensity. But we get all of these tiny little stones. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to go ahead and first of all, we need to make sure that those stones do not show up in between these cracks over here. The way that we do that is we simply grab, I believe we created a mask for this. There we go. We have this mask. We simply grab this and throw this into our mask random slot of our shaped splatter. Then if you scroll all the way down, you over here have a mask random map multiplier. And if you boost it up, it will just make sure that we do not have them in those cracks. We might want to make our mask a little bit bigger, I believe. Let's just duplicate these levels. Placed over here and just set because these are stones we just set our there we go, see. Let's make our etches a little bit bigger. Let's try that. Yeah, okay. Yeah, that should work. So here we start to see the lines so you can start to see that the stones stay away from those edges. I need to have a check and see how far I need to push it, but I can only do that when they are applied to this one. So we got these stones. Now, these stones are only part of it. These stones are all the big grey stones. But you can see that below these stones, we also have noise, and we also want to capture this noise, basically. Way that we would do this. So we have our normal map over here. Now, let's go ahead and let's grab another note. I'll make it over here. And it's just going to be some generic noise. What I would do is I would go in here and I would, for example, grab a B&W spots two often looks quite noisy. Let's add a normal map to this. Open the here, see this looks quite noisy. Now, if we just add levels in between, we can click on our normal just with our levels. Playgrounds would like your middle slider, get it, push the middle slider a little bit to the right so that you get some strong noise, some small noise. Now, if I see this, I feel like I want to flip around my black and white slider down here to have the noise actually going inwards because it feels like all of this noise goes inside. It doesn't really go on top. So we got this generic random noise over here. I think we can use that. Let's go ahead and go into our normal. And in here, once again, we want to just go ahead and add a mask for this. So if we go and art a blend, now, this is a normal map. So we need to art this mask, where are you? This time, we can probably use this one. Actually, let's duplicate this. Let's duplicate these levels over here. The reason I want to duplicate my levels is because I want to make a little bit bigger, but I probably need to invert this, but we'll see first. Plug this into your paste then if you press space and add a normal color, this is just a plain normal color in the top. Here you see? That's what I mean. I need to go into my levels and invert this. But the general idea is that the noise will not be in between our cracks. They will just be on the tiles. And let's start combining. So we have our normal. If we press normal combine, so space, normal combine, we get this node. Now, this note, I always like to set it wide away to high quality, and it basically just blends properly the normals together. So now you can see that now we have these normals. Now, the first thing I can see is that I want to probably set my intensity quite a bit lower because it's really strong. But here we go. See this is already starting to look quite cool. Now on top of this, we can add another normal combine. And plug in our little stones. These stones are mostly for our base color, but they are still handy to have in our normal map. It's just that I need to go into my intensity. I need to make these very subtle, 0.03 maybe. See, there are just going to be these very subtle little stones sitting on top like that. You can also have them embedded, like you can see over here, but that's a little bit more tricky to do. So I'm not going to go over that in this basic because it takes quite a few more new and complicated notes. But we will definitely cover that kind of stuff in the next one. So we got this stuff. We got a nice looking normal sitting here. Oh, yeah, in between. We want to have probably some dirt or something in between, just like some generic noise. The way that I can do that is I can just add another normal combine. And this time, if we just grab Clouds. No, not Cloud three. Oh, what shall I pick? So many choices. B&W spots one, maybe, because it has, like, the little bumps in it. And if I then add the normal, and set my B&W spots one like the scaling, set it lower. There we go. That should do the trick. It will be so difficult to see that you don't need something very specific. Same deal. Art the blend, arch your non map color over here. And this time, what I can do is I can just swap around these two outputs. So the plain color will be at the background and there's noise at the foreground. This means that I can use the exact same mask. See? So now the mask will just only show up here and we throw that into our normal combine. And don't forget to set your normal combined to high quality. There we go, see. So now we get some of that noise in there. And that's basically it. We can go ahead and select this, right click Ara Frame and call this normal map. So we have a very nice looking height map. We have a very nice looking norm map. At this point, what we can do is, I like to just get rid of all of these outputs. I never really use them. Now we have a metallic output, but this is this concrete. It's not metallic, so I can delete that one also. And I can already start by dragging some stuff in. So our normal map slot over here goes into our normal, our height map slot over here goes into height, and we have an ambient occlusion slot. This one is very easy. All you need to do is add an ambient occlusion node. And another cool trick if you hold control, you can click and you can actually duplicate your output. So we are clicking and dragging our height to our air ambien occlusion. At which point in our Ambien occlusion, all we need to do really is set our height depth quite a bit lower so that it's actually showing not as black, but more like a nice softness, 0.00, 0.005. Yeah, like that. So that's already looking quite nice. And if you want to make this go a little bit faster, this is handy if you have very large graphs. You can just go ahead and set the GPU optimization on here, see, and that we'll just make use of your GPU in order to make this go a lot faster. So you plug this into your ambient clusion and there we go. Three of the five maps done. So in the next chapter, we will start by working on our base color and then we'll work on our roughness. And then we can start by just previewing this inside of MamosetTolbg. So let's go ahead and continue with that. 6. 05 Creating Our Base Color And Roughness: Okay, so what we're going to do now is we are going to work on our base color. So if we have a look, the base color is actually very simple. It looks like it's going to be just like a plain color. Then we'll have some extra color for the stones, which will be slightly randomized. And maybe also see if we go to the close ups. Yeah, yeah, maybe some extra Micol in between, like our dirt bums that we have over here. Then we will top it off with just some generic dirt that is sitting mostly around the corner. You can see over here and we'll call the day after. And of course, yeah, we have in between sand. So the way that we are going to do this is we are going to go ahead and we are going to start by adding a like a uniform color. So if you press space and type a uniform color, this is just a plain color. Now, the cool thing is you can just grab this little checkbox, and you can actually grab outside of your window. So what I am doing now is I'm simply grabbing one of these colors. I just click somewhere here until I get something that is in the ballpark of what I want. Go in here, maybe say, like, Okay, I want to have a little bit darker or something like that. Doesn't really matter. Just to get a generic orange looking color. You can copy over this value if you want to get the exact same one as I have, but I'm not even sure if this is the one that I'm going to end up with. I'm not going to blend this. I'm going to show you another technique. If we go ahead and add a gradient map, and gradient map, it works very similar to other maps where it is able to read gradients. But what it can do in our case is it can read those gradients and then turn those gradients into actual colors. If I go and where are my stones, there we are. Here we have the stones that have different gradients. I can simply go and plug this into my gradient map. Now I need to direct this from something that is a little bit more interesting in color. Hmm. I'm afraid that that is too light. Maybe around here. Maybe I drag around here. So what I will be doing because I cannot do this on the same screen is I'm just going to click and drag around this area. You can see that if you pick grant editor and press pick gradient, you can see here you can click and drag and it will just pick whatever colors that are inside there. So if I click and drag this across my stones, you can see that we get this effect. We just get that all the stones are slightly different color, which will often give us a nice effect. All we really need to do then is we simply need to plug this in here, add a very quick levels and plug in our actual stones down here, boost your levels up. This is just make sure that the stones because gradients don't really work for colors, because it wouldn't make sense to have a stone slightly orange, for example, the stones are they are discolor or they are not discolor. So we plug this in here, and then we get this effect. Base orange with these pieces on top. Now, on top of this, as I said before, we were going to add a blend because we are going to add some dirt in between. We can do this very simple. We can just add a uniform color again. This time, let's make the color. Yeah, let's actually make it almost black, like a very dark color. It doesn't matter too much. You can even go for almost black if you want. But the goal is that I go to this mask over here. And I want to go ahead and plug this into here. Now, right now it is not in the correct way, we need to invert mask. I have showed you how to do this with levels. However, what you can also do is you can select the line, press space, and you can type in invert, and then you get a invert grade scale. Now an invert grade scale, once you've used it, you don't really need it anymore. Like, I'm not going to go around and play around with these settings. So if I don't want to have this note here, but I still want to use it, I can press the button D. So if I press D, so W ASD, so next to the S, you can go ahead and you can dock it. And dock it basically means that it will be a small version. You can still go into the settings just by double clicking on it, but it will not be such a large version. So that's often quite nice if you never use it for something, for example. So we got this stuff over here. We got now all the darkness. We can now go into our blend. And if we just play around with our basic slider, we can turn this, like, lower or stronger, whatever we want. Now, the last thing that we need to sorry, last two things that we need to do is actually, we want to probably do that over here. Just add a very quick uniform color, and let's add a blend before our uniform color. This is going to be like in between dirt. So we are just going to make this like a brownish looking more darker brownish looking color. And we are going to blend this using R Wars this mask. It was this mask. However, I can remember that we inverted it. There we go. Scrub these levels, let's plug this in here. See? So we got this. We lay your stones on top, we lay your dirt on top. I feel like this might be a little bit too dark. Let's make our makes it a little bit lighter. And then finally, now we're going to just add this type of dirt that you can see over here. You can see that there's, like, a little bit of dirt often around the corners. Now, the way that we are going to do that is we are going to go ahead and if we just grab our tile generator over here, I should be able to use this. Let's see. Yeah, yeah, I should be able to use it. I'm going to duplicate this, and I'm then going to set my pattern from brick to pyramid so that we get this effect. The reason I basically need to do this is because we need to go ahead and we need to have something to use as a gradient for our mask to recognize where the corners are. So this is the way that I'm going to. There are more advanced techniques, but of course, this is just the basics. So one thing to keep in mind that these need to stay the same. There is something called exposing inside of subsisigner. You can Google it or you can stick around for the more advanced tutorial for this because it is quite a bit of extra work that would allow me to automatically update both of these notes at the same time if I happen to actually change a setting. But for now, we have this tile generator. And then we want to add something called a ground dirt node. And this is what you can see happening. If you play around with your dirt height over here, you can see that the ground dirt note, you can also play around to your levels. We basically add dirt around your occlusion. But in this case, it asks for a position map, but it can also read gradients as positions. So wherever there is black, it will add it. And because this is a gradient that goes from black to white, we have control over adding this like more or less. All we need to do now is just drag this all the way over here. Add a quick bled note. Let's just duplicate this uniform color over here and plug it into the top and just plug the ground dirt into the base. Now it's all a matter of just going to your uniform color and maybe making this a little bit lighter. You can, for example, play around to your paste and stuff like that just to get something a bit more interesting. Yeah, let's not make it too strong, something like this. Now, this might look very flat, but this is on purpose. We want to have this stuff looking very flat. And the reason we want to do that is because we want to go ahead and the way the PBR works, most of the detail comes from a norm map and our ambient inclusion and height. It doesn't so much come from our base color map. That used to be the case way back years ago, but that's no longer a correct technique of using it. So you want to try and keep your base color quite flat looking. Now when I look at this, I just want to go in my blend, and I want to just tone this down a little bit because I feel like they are a little bit too strong. So I'm going to see if I can get away, but just changing my opacity down. And if not, then I will show you a different trick. So basically, we got all the stuff over here. I think the darkness over here is also a bit too strong, so let's just reduce that so that we have quite clean tiles. We then plug this into the base color, and all we need now is our roughness. Our roughness will basically take care of our shine or just like the response of light to our material. With roughness, if something is white, it looks very dull. If something is black, it looks very shiny. So, of course, this is concrete, so we want to stick to quite white. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to arts like at, you know what we can probably can we use this plant? Yes, we can just duplicate this plant over here. And if I add a uniform color, I'm basically going to do this. I make this new uniform color fairly white. I then duplicate this uniform color and make this a little bit darker. So this is, sorry, a little bit whiter. So this is now just simply like the tiles and the ground. What you want to do with these is you want to turn them to gray scale up here. The reason for this because a roughness map does not need colors. A roughness map only reads in gray scales, and gray scales are a little bit cheaper to use. So we now have control over base tiles and the in betweens. We then add another blend and we say, Okay, I also want to go ahead and I want to add I want to make my stones like a little bit light or a little bit more shiny. So I just add or duplicate another uniform color, make it a bit darker and use the same stone mask as that we've used before. Okay, that might be a bit too dark here, see? They will be slightly shinier than the stones below. I'm then going to end it off with just one single blend, and I'm just going to use my ground dirt, and I think that should already be enough. I don't need to also add this one over here. And I want to go ahead and set this to be art. So this will be arded on top, which means that it will just make it very light. We simply play around with our pastes, so this dirt will be even duller. So around these edges, our tiles will look even duller, and we then throw this into our roughness. Now, this is a very bare bones roughness, but it is a great starting point to then later on play around with it and see if we can make it look better. So I would right click ter frame. Roughness, same over here. Let's move this up here. Add the frame. Base color. And now that we've done that, we are ready to start exporting our textures and previewing them. If you want, you can also add the frame over here and just call these outputs. There we go. So I'm going to save machine. The way that you can export your texture is you can go down here one level. You can right click and you can press export outputs as bitmaps. Bitmaps just mean your actual texture files. Once you've done that, it will ask you for a location. What I like to Well, sorry, what I like to do is I like to go to source files, create a textures folder, and in here, I like to make a folder for every texture. So this one is going to be simple tiles, for example, because we are also going to have a more complicated one. Let's save our folder. Format TGA, I always go for TGA myself. And for the rest, this will be just the outputs. They are just all the outputs that we have over here. And then the very cool notes if you press automatic export when outputs change, it means every time we make a change, it will automatically export. And this is very handy when we are balancing out our texture and are looking at it inside of Mam set Tolbag. So I just export my outputs like this. And now what I will do is I will go into Mam set Tolbag. Now, for Mama set Tolbag, I will have already a setup scene in this case, because this is, of course, a basic texture. If you want to learn how to set up the scene, I will do this in our advanced substance texture. That's where I will be setting it up. However, that might not be as direct scene as the rest. With that, what I mean is that I will be setting it up throughout the Advanced toil if you want to know why the way exactly how to set it up, without me also playing around with my textures in between that time, I would recommend going to my YouTube channel, which is Fast Track Tutorials, and over there, I have an actual free YouTube video on how to create a very nice looking MomsetTolbag, render scene. So for now, because we are just previewing, I will just go ahead and load up the scene, and I will show it to you. Here we go. So this is the scene in substance sorry, in Mama set Tolbac. So I've just saved the scene under our saves and substance basic. So this is like my little gift to you so that you don't have to, like, set it up yourself. This is like a very nice basic scene. It is basically just like a sphere. It has some lights in here, and it just has, like, a nice camera set up. So it's easy to preview. But as I said before, because this is a new program, I will not cover this in the basics because I assume that most people that are watching this are completely new to substance designer, have only maybe spent a few hours in it. So I will just go over this. We have now exported our textures. If we go to our textures, simple tiles, here you can see all of our textures nicely set up. Now what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go ahead and go to let's see. There we go. Mom's a Tolbak. First of all, I want to just quickly go to render and I'm just going to turn off rate racing. The reason I'm doing this because setting up a material is very slow in rate racing, but of course, you might not need to do this. I'm then going to create a new material. I'm just going to press this little plus sign up here to create a new material and just call this tiles. Now you can see you have your norm map slot, your albedo map, which is the same as your base color, your roughness metallic. If we go down here, we can go to occlusion, drop it down occlusion. We have an occlusion map, and if we go up here, we can go to displacement and height, and we have our height map. Let's get started. Dragging your height, tragging your normal, tracking your base color, tracking your roughness and dragging your amin occlusion. Now that we have these notes, all that we sorry, our metal ness. I'm doing this one. This is metalness. So metalness needs to stay at zero because this is not a metallic shape. This one needs to be our oclusion Because remember, we don't have metalness, so you can just leave the metalnes to zero and you don't need any maps. Okay, so that's looking more logical. Now, I'm just going to go ahead and drag this on here. And the first thing that you will see is that our height map is way too strong. So we need to go and set our scale down. Let's set it to around here, you can see, it's still quite slow. Let's do 0.007, for example. Now that you have done that, let's have a look. So you can go up here to texture and you can change the tiling, for example, to two, if you want. If you want to showcase a little bit more of your tiles. I think if I look at this, yeah, let's set this to like two. Now, next to this, you can also play around with your offsets, and this might be nice if you want to just get a nice angle. For example, I want to showcase some cracks. So what I can do is I can really just, like, set my offsets in a way that I can see exactly those cracks over here. See, so now you can see these nice cracks, and this will just be like a nice presentation. Now that I've done this, now what I'm going to do is I'm going to turn on rate racing again. This will be a little bit slow for my computer because I don't have the most powerful graphics card. Don't worry. I'm working on it. So for now, what I can do is I can turn it on, and you can see that that will actually improve the quality greatly. Now, if your aminoclusion is a little bit too strong, for example, I feel like it's a bit too strong right now. I can just go into my amen occlusion and just tone this down a little bit. So I'm setting this to around 0.5. I don't know it's really slow right now to render. I don't know exactly why. Here we go. But the handy thing is that you only need to set up these settings once, and then it's all cooled. So down here, you can see a slider. Whenever this is done, it will have been done with rendering, because, of course, raid racing it needs a second to render inside of Mamoset. So if we have a look at this, compared to this, what do I see first? First thing I see is that I want to tone down the strength of my stones, and I want to bring out the light color of the rest. So there is one thing I can do. I can go into my light one and also push the brightness up like a little bit over here. Okay, way too much. Let's set this to, like, I don't know. Seven. Set Let's set my strength to around seven. There we go. See, so that will just already make my lighting a little bit stronger. So let's go into substance designer. So first of all, this color. Let's make it a little bit lighter and also a little bit whiter like this. Our in between color feels a bit dark, so let's also make this a little bit lighter over here. Let's see. Then we have our stones. Let's tonee those down just by using our opacite. We have this dirt and this dirt it's not very visible. So, you can see that it has automatically updated already. So this dirt, maybe let's make it a little bit stronger. And then over here, we have now this extra dirt around the corners that you can see over here, which is looking quite good, maybe make it a little bit less, like a tiny bit. Wow, I made a really high pitched noise right then. So let's do that. And maybe in our ground dirt, maybe let's set our dirt height a little bit higher to make the dirt amount a little bit more. So we got these things. Another thing that is nice about the scene is that I can look at the sights and I can kind of have a feel for how the reflection will look. And right now it looks quite good. The only thing I would say is I would go in here and just set in my dirt. I want to set this a little bit higher so that we have a little bit of, like, the stronger dirt going on. And when we go in here, you should see over here, you can see the difference between the roughness. You can see it even better in this area. So this is starting to look quite nice. We got something quite interesting. I'm just going to go in my camera one. Let me just turn off this little lock icon and maybe set my sharpening to be a little bit stronger just to make it feel like a bit sharper. So here, you can see the normal map is now doing quite a good job, and then when it is done rendering, it will often, soften out a little bit more. Let's set my sharpening strength a little bit down. So I'm now just having a look and let's see. I want to probably reduce the normal map strength of our actual little tiles over here and probably add more of this generic noise norm map. I think that will look nice. So if I go to my where are you? Here, you. Let's go and just set this one to 0.015. And let's see. Then over here, we also add this generic noise. If we just go ahead for this generic noise over here, go into our levels and just reduce your centre slider so that we have more of that. So we get this. So here, now this generic noise is on all the tiles pretty much. And we still got that nice little breakup going on in between. See? So that's looking quite good. Now that we have all this noise, I'm just going to go ahead and I'm just going to reduce the actual noise itself using my intensity in my normal. Here. So if I reduce that a little bit more, see, so to make it a little bit more subtle. Okay, I can now see that now that we have added more of that noise, we have also added automatically more of the blackness in our base color. So that's basically it with substance at this point. You just want to go back and forth. To make sure and then have a look, to make sure that everything is just nicely balanced. And this sometimes just takes a second to get it looking nice. So we got this stuff over here, which is looking quite good. Let's see. How is my norm map? Yeah, that's fine. I probably want to make this dirt a little bit less strong so that it's not as overwhelming. Here, you just want to get a little bit of dirt in between. So we got that Yeah, we got some of these corners, and we got these cracks over here. I would say that if I can, I would like to make my cracks a little bit thinner. I'm not sure. There is a method to do it, but once again, something a lot more complicated to do inside of substance. So if I go in here and let's go into my edge detect, my edge width is already it's very lowest, as I can see. So does make it a little bit tricky. Yeah, so this edge detect, there is another note that I want to try out. And this note, I have placed it into your Safe folder. This note you can also find for free on substance share. If you just type in Google substance Share. It is called the Fin Edge detect note. So this one is often here, I can go a little bit more precise if you drag it in here compared to this one. So it tends to go here. We tend to be able to set our edges even lower often like, see over here. So although, no, yeah, that does work. You just need to go ahead and then quickly, like, invert. It's to invert grayscal. Yeah, see here. So they are able to go a little bit thinner. So if we do this, and just use this note, it's very basic. Hopefully, if we now look at the end, here, these now look a lot thinner if I go to a very end. Here, see, they look a lot thinner, so that's quite good. So let's have a look and see how that looks. So if we now go into Mm set, that one is still quite strong. Maybe we need to just reduce the actual height map a little bit. Or is it not updating? Oh, wait. Actually, it might not have updated. The thing that we have with rate racing is sometimes it has a little bit difficulty updating. If it has that, it's only with the height map, though. You just want to go ahead and turn off and turn on rate racing, and then you can often see here. If I turn it off, There we go, I think. Let's turn on again. Yeah, so that did update, but we did lose one of those cool ones over there, which you don't really like. So if we go in here, here you'll see, we lost a few. I'm not sure where that we lost them, but we just want to go into our fine edge tag. Let's make the edges a little bit stronger. Let's go into our Nump. Let's make them stronger. Here we go all the way to your edge tag. Oh, that is too bad that they do not show up like this. So at this point, what you can, of course, do is you can just, play around with some things like here, if we just go look at the normal. We can still go. That's the power of substance. I can now just go into my tile generator and, for example, go into my mask random and reduce it until I get a few more cracks. Like you can see over here, Here you see, so you can add some extra quicks, and then what it will do is it will automatically update, although I do need to turn off my displacement and turn it on again. Here you go, just to make it like update. So you can just go ahead and you can find exactly what you want within this, just like we've done last time. So I'm also going to do that, but I'm not sure if I want to spend too much time on this. So if I do not get it in a few minutes, I might just Yeah, what I might just do is I might just pass the video until it's done. It's pretty straightforward. It's just me playing around with my random seats and just with my general settings until I get exactly the kind of pieces I like. So I will go ahead and do that and then I will run through the settings. Actually, this one might be quite good. It's just example for the example. So I might be able to just do this. If I just turn off my rate racing, and I need to turn on and off my displacement so that it updates. And I just want to go ahead and let's say I change my There we go. Let's do something like this so that I can also see just like some interesting cracks like this. Okay, so we got these quacks now over here. If you want, you can turn on rate racing. And while that is being turned on, all I want to do now is I want to go in here, and I just want to reduce these quacks intensity by going into the blend where we blend between the quacks. Tone that down a little bit so that it's not as strong, and that should then also translate into here we see, tone it down a bit, see, then the cracks just become not as strong inside of our actual normal map and height map. There we go. So let's go ahead and save this. Hello, Emil from the future here. I made a very small mistake in our cracks, which was causing it to not look as optimal as I want it to be. Basically, what I had to change is it used to be that it looked like this. These cracks, as you can see, they work fine, but they do not look like this. The way that I made it look like this is very simple. In my tile generator, I simply set the luminous random all the way up so that we have slightly different gradients within our pixels. And then I just went through the blend like normal. And then I just added a quick levels, which pushed the white levels all the way up so that they are perfectly white. Doing that, I added my tile generator over here to be sorry, my blend with the gradients to be in our source input and the perfectly white pixels in our mask input. And when you do that, you get slightly better looking cracks, as you can see over here. So they work quite a bit better. Also, if I go here, you can see it. So that's just something I quickly want to show you. Sorry about that. That was my mistake. So many notes, sometimes you tend to forget one small little function. So I hope that this clears things up and that it isn't too confusing, and let's now go ahead and continue with the next chapter. 7. 06 Creating Our Stone Generator: Okay, so we have just finished the basic part of our substance oil. Now what we're going to do is we are going to work on our advanced material. And for that, I want to create a tarmac ground. Now, it's not just going to be a basic plain tarmac ground. That's when the advanced part comes in. So I want to get a tarmac ground and I want to use the power of substance of the procedurality, to have a slider so that I can make it go from perfectly clean tarmac all the way to very broken up tarmac. So, for example, when the slider is just fine, it will look more in the direction like you can see over here. But then we are going to go ahead and break it up in the direction like this with all these little stones. The reason I want to do this is because I have this idea in my head for the final scene that I will be creating for presentation purposes, to have a road. And on the road, we will have the tarmac, and I can simply paint in and out this broken tarmac. I want to try and capture that. So this is going to actually be very easy. We will mostly just focus on creating a broken tarmac. And because we will already have a mask that will mask out where these areas are, where our clean tarmac is, what we can do with that mask is we can just throw a slider on there to make sure that when the mask is completely white, everything will be completely clean. And then wherever there is black, it will show up these pieces. So that's the general idea for this. I have a bunch of reference images. They all look very cool. So we will be using for the broken pieces, we will go for something like this. As you can see, it's not just like a few stones. It's actually smaller stones in between, and they are all clustered together. Parts of them are sunken into the ground, other ones are just laying on top. So there's a lot of stuff going on here if you will look at it. We will not go for the moss. The reason for that is because these pictures, I took them myself. They are taken from a bicycle path, and you can already see they are white next to a forest area. That is why there is moss here. We will be creating it on a road. And as you can see over here, roads, they do not really have this type of moss unless they are bordered to something like a forest area or like plants or something, but ours will be bordered next to a simple curb. So that's why it wouldn't happen like that. So that is the general idea. I think we just need to jump right in. I want to get started, first of all, with our stones. Oh, I made this picture not very good. It's really blurry. There we go. I want to get started, first of all, with our stones, because I think that is like a very large feature because even these stones, we also need them over here. For this, what I'm going to do is I'm first going to create sort of like a stone generator that will just be able to generate the stones, and we will do this in a separate graph, and then we'll just throw it all together. Now doing this one, normally, I use one that I've made a long time ago, but that one is way too advanced. Even I barely understand how I made it because I followed a few tutorials to make it myself because it uses pixel processes and AVX maps, but I'm still learning those things myself. They are a little bit more technical, I should say. I would recommend looking on ArtStation. There are someone called Ben Wilson, if you want to go that technical in it. But for this, even though it's an advanced substantoil, I don't want to spend 2 hours on one single stone generator, so we're just going to go ahead and create a nice barebones version of it. So don't worry. It will still look good, of course. So basically, I'm just going to go ahead and create a new substance. I created this one, which is just like our empty scene that I called Advanced tarmac. And this one I will call Stone Generator and just press Okay. And let's close our TwiVew because we don't need it. So for this one, I don't need all of these outputs because we are not going to have a it's not going to just be like a texti map that we will output. We will actually create a node that we can use in other graphs. So the first thing we need to do is we need to start by generating the stone shape. Now, for this, the beginning part is very similar to our cracks. We want to go into patterns, but this time we want to go for a much more complicated one. We want to go for the tile sampler. Yeah, so I need to make sure that the patrons, sorry, the mask map input that we have at least a mask map input so that we can control that. And maybe, it's just nice to have a few of these inputs in general. So once again, these are just pixels. So what we can do is we can just go ahead and we can set them very high, so 64 by 64. And then you set the scale very low. 0.1. There we go. So we just have these random pixels over here. And now because we are going to one scale, use a distance node, the way that we scatter these round, that is where how big and small the stones will be. So if I go in here, set my scale to 0.0. Okay, that's too much. 0.05. There we go. 0.05, that is fine. Now position random. So yeah, you can change the position random over here. That will create some clusters. But the nice thing is with this node, we can actually just create some clusters very well. But we are going to expose all these sliders. Exposing the sliders means that once we are basically going to create a dot SPSAR file. You might have seen it before. This file, basically what we can do is we can drag this file into other graphs, and whatever slider we expose and exposure just means that we ask the slider to show up. Whatever slider we expose, you will be able to see that in the file. Now, at this point, I will mostly just focus on creating the graph, and then it's better to just show you in practice how this will look. So we got this stuff over here. I don't care about rotation for now. All I care about is to go into my color and just throw it like a color random over here. There we go, because that was remember how I added that extra little bit in the end of the basic tutorial about how I forgot to do that. It's quite important because else it mess up our distance note. So having this note, I'm now going to go ahead and I'm going to add a distance to it over here. And this time, what you want to do is delete this, throw this in the source input, and then in the mask input, we can just go ahead and we can have a very simple levels, and we push this out. Like this so that it's all perfectly square. Trow it in here, and then our distance will look something like this. So these are basically just going to be like our stones. And what I'm planning to get is once we actually have these smaller pieces, we can just, like, mask out some of these stones, basically. So that will look something like this. I'm just double checking. Okay. One thing not to forget is set your distance really high 5,000 or something, just to make sure that other colors are flat. Now what we're going to do is we're going to start working on the first type of masking. This will be generic masking out pieces. Now, normally, you would just go in here and you would set your randomized mask or something, like a mask random for this. However, we cannot do that because then our stones would become crazy big if we do that in here. See because the distance node, it will just try to push it out. Once you have the size that you like in your distance node, you want to go ahead and art a histogram select over here. We've done this before. Actually, we've done this before. Boost up your contrast. And now what we can do is here, you can play around with your position. Your position will basically be acting like your seed, just like a randomizer. Your range will be the one that will be used to really decide like, Okay, these are all the stones that I do want or do not want. So you got this piece and you want to blend it. Here, we just go in here and just blend together our position map with our distance and set this to be subtract. There we go. So now if we would go into here, I can just quickly check. Range, see, more stones, all the way to only a few stones. So that's quite nice. So we got that. Now what we need to do is we need to add functionality to also have the stones mask out based upon a very simple like anything we input. In this case, what we are going to temporarily input is like a grunge map, but we are going to expose it so that we can input whatever we want later on. Let's throw on a grunge Bps 01, for example. Now, I'm going to go in here and I'm going to maybe change my random seat. I just need something so that I can preview. Set your contrast all the way up. And basically, the way that the system is going to work that I want it to work is whenever there is a white pixel, it will leave the stone, and wherever there is a black pixel, if the stone touches a black pixel, it will simply just get rid of it. So of course, it won't be as precise as this. It's going to be a little bit lax, but that's basically the general idea. So, actually, before we do that, I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself. I need to just drop in a quick note in between here to actually convert this to stones because right now they are just shapes, and we basically just need to get Oh, wait, remember how we had that fine adj detect. I most likely want to use that one. So let me just quickly simple no Where did I place that saves substance? There we go. The fine djitect. Hello? Let's drag that in here. There we go. Okay, so you just want to plug this in here. Set your edges strength pretty much all the way on. Actually, do I want to do that? Because no, I do not want to do that. I want to set my edge strength. That's the tricky thing. So I want to set my edge strength to make sure that we have all of these separate shapes. However, sometimes it will cut in between the shapes which I do not really like. So what I'm basically going to do is we have our edge strength over here, that is fine. Now what we need to do is we need to dd levels over here. And I'm just going to go ahead and if we go to our levels, let's push this all the way up so that it becomes completely white wherever we want. Now, I just need to check. Is this already good enough? Because else we would need to overlay another fin anche tag just to make sure that Okay, that looks spot on. So sometimes we will have, like, a cut like this, but that shouldn't really matter because there are plenty of tinstones. Only thing is, like, yeah, this kind of stuff over here, it's if you set the black threshold to zero point and we can do that. In that case, it's a very minimal error. Out of all of these stones, there's a very minimal error, so I can live with that. In your levels, just flip around your black and white slider like this. And that will just make sure that our stones are white. So now we can do, proper masking out. So we got this stuff over here. At this point, we can throw this in here and that shoot still mask out fine. Checking. Yes, so it properly masks everything out. That is all correct. Okay. So now that we have these stones. The reason we need to do it like this is because we are going to use flood fills. And as you might have remembered, flood fills, they need masks. They cannot really get away with gradients, as well as masks, basically. So we got this stuff over here. Now we are going to go ahead and there you are. Start working with this. So we need a flood fill to get started with, and there is a flood fill to greascal yes, flood fill to gray scale. And basically what you can do with that is you can give it a gray scale input. So we are basically going to control how we want our gray scale to look, and based upon that, we can mask it out. So if we nicely like, throw this up here, so you can already see it happening. Flood fill to gray scale, and because this is a very contrasty mask, if this wouldn't be as contrasty, this would happen. So you can actually this is quite cool. If you ever want to use this, it's great if you, for example, want to have pieces sunken down at a very localized area. But if you set your contrast all the way up, it's basically the same as using your mask map input and then throwing on your slider over there, because I can now very simply use my balance to add more or less stones. That's the general idea for this. So we got that stuff ready to go. Oh, actually, we don't even need to. We can just put it like this. For some reason, I thought we were going to blend it. So we got these pieces. Now what we're going to do is we are going to go ahead and we are going to actually make these look like stones. We're going to do this in a few stages. The first stage will be that we are going to now add gradients to these stones. And once we've done that, we can very easily would like a levels decide how much roundness we basically want. So for the first type, I need to get gradients in the corners, basically. We can try a non uniform blur gray scale, but what I'm worried about is that the blurring will not be as nice. So if you plug this in here, throw up your samples and then your intensity. So it does blur, but it feels a little bit uneven in the way that it blurs. So let's keep it as an option. But often what I do it takes a few more notes is a flood fill. Yeah, we need to add another flood fill after this. So we need a flood fill. And let's move it down here, and then just do a flood fill to gradient. And because the gradient is going to be like one angle, what we can say is we can say up, right, down and left, for example. So zero. Double click this 190 degrees for this one. Let's do 180 degrees for this one, and -90 degrees. Now we have every single level, and then it's just a matter of blending them together and then overlaying them on top. So we got these blend, blend and blend. So I'm just adding more blends that I can add all of these pieces. And I believe it's going to be just like a simple multiply. Multiply and multiply. Okay, so we got this. Now, it's a little bit dark, so let's twine art and outer levels on top of this. There we go. Actually, the out levels is a little bit too strong. That's interesting. Let's add a normal levels, or you can add a histogram select. I think we actually want to go for histogram select in this case. The reason for that is because normal levels, it's great if you don't need to touch it. But if you want to expose it, you would need to expose all of these sliders in order to just get this effect in order to just get like, you can see already how I'm going to make this a little bit round later on. So instead, and I'm always mistaken which one it is. Is it histogram scan? I believe No, it doesn't feel like a histogram scan. Oh, yeah, yeah, i. And then the contra Yeah, okay, okay, Hicrum scan should do the trig. Although I also think like a histogram range would have done the trick probably or not. Oh, no, sorry, not Hicrum range. I don't use the Hiscrm notes too often myself. So I would look into it. But yeah, the Hiscrm scan is able to give us this effect that we get over here. And now we can use our Contrast slider to, for example, make it make the edges very strong or not. So let's play around a little bit more with my position. Let's set the position to 0.95. And then I contrast sliders for now, let's leave it at 0.45. Okay, so we got this structure over here to create like some general blur. Now, I also want to go ahead and I want to add some how you say it pointiness it's hard to show you this on the reference because this is still just like the technical pieces in order to make them look good. So yeah, it's basically just pointiness. Right now, they're all very nice and even. So for the pointiness, basically what you want to do is you want to go ahead and add a see, we have our flat feel. Let's add an invert grayscale note, I believe. Yeah, we need to invert it. And then we want to add a distance note. But this distance note, we're not going to actually plug anything in into a source input. Now, the maximum distance I always forget what to do, but we'll see. So let's add an infutGrayscale first here, see. So where you do not do that, you get these points over here. And once you've done that, we can add a outoevels like this here. I'm basically looking for this pointiness. So let's see. We got this piece over here. Let's blend this together. Using our points. And that's why we needed to invert it because else it will pick the wong areas. So we blend this with points, and we art this to be a multiply. Wow, that's really strong, but I believe that we can just, see. So now we can just control, like how pointy we want our stones to be. And if you want, you can even go ahead and we can mask this stuff out, but that's something that we'll work on later on. I first need to get the bare bones before I can work on that. I believe your distance in here can control Yeah, actually, it doesn't do much, so let's just leave it at ten. I was expecting it to control a little bit more of the pointiness, but it looks like that isn't the case. So, we got these two. We have them now nicely overlaid. Now what we're going to do is we are basically just going to go ahead and we are going to mask out some of the roundness. So we are going to give it control over how round you want things to be. And that will basically happen like this. So at this point, do we want an outer level? Yeah, actually, let's do just outer levels because with these kind of pieces, I like to keep them that the levels are going 0-255. If we don't really do that, yeah, we sometimes just get that with such a generator, it goes broken, basically. Wow, I really cannot speak in this tutorial for some reason. So I'm going to add a blend. And now I'm just going to control the roundness of our stones because of these stones they don't sometimes they have these points. Sometimes they have these nice sharpt, but also sometimes they just have some nice roundness going on, like over here. So that's the next thing that I want to work on. And after that, we'll call this chapter done. So art a histogram scan. Push your position and contrast all the way up. There we go. See this time, I didn't use the levels just for you. So the Hirscrum scan, we push it all the way up, and then we add a very basic blur. Should we do blur high quality? Let's start with a blur. Let's do a blur high quality. Blur high quality is just often, yeah, higher quality. So we just give it like a little blur, like you can see over here. And this blur is just here to make the fall off. Now if we go into our HGRm scan and just lower down the contrast, well, yeah, it should be able to mask. There we go. Actually, said higher the contrast. Sorry, higher contrast, lower down the position. And then we can control basically the roundness of our stone. So we can say, like, Okay, stone roundness. We then blur this might be a bit too much, so blur it. And then in the blend, we set this to be a um multiply? Yes, multiply. So the reason you want to blurred is that the stones do not have a super sharp cut off, but they just, like, nicely and softly mask out, as you can see over here. So now, this position map will basically control how sharp we want the stones to be. So we can go all the way from, like, little pebbles. To just like sharp corners, like you see over here. But they will still be sharp in some areas, and that's the nice thing. So this is where I'm going to leave it off. As you can see, it's slowly starting to look like stones. They are like nicely clustered together. Yeah, we need to, of course, keep working on the variation and make sure that this looks not very procedural and just very organic. So let's save your scene, and let's continue with our stone generator in the next chapter. 8. 07 Creating Our Stone Generator Part2: Okay, so what we're going to continue with now is we are starting to get some quite nice stones. The jacket edges over here, I don't really like. Now, there is this technique that we can use, which will also immediately, it's a bit difficult to explain. It's kind of like soften things out. So if we go ahead and add a slope blur gray scale over here, and then if we go ahead and add a blur, high quality grayscale at the top, what we can do is if we just give this, like, a little bit of, like, a blur, throw this into our slope gray scale, set the samples all the way up, intense it down, and then you get like here, you get this bit of a soften effect. It's really intense. Let's see. Can I go for 0.005 or something? 0.001. Here, so basically just gives us a soften effect, and it allows me to also push things out a little bit. But the values are way lower than I expected at 0.005. So it does work. You can see the difference that they now become like these nice soft pebbles. But, yeah, I need to keep in mind that the intensity, the clamp for this with clamp, I mean, like how sensitive this seems to be very sensitive right now. But, okay, so we got these pieces over here. Now, we can already just quickly add to normal maps and then throw this to OpenGL. That is to twe. So, we are starting to get some pretty decent stones. Now let's start by getting into the variations of this. One variation that I want to do is I want to have some of these stones just simply being cut. And the way that I tend to do that is I tend to add a flood fill, and I believe at this point, we would need to turn this back into a mask, or can we just use Let's see. Can we just use this one? I just need to check because I am, of course, here, I'm pushing things out a little bit. Yeah, you know what that should be doable. If I go ahead and add this hcrm scan over here to our flood fill. And the reason why I don't want to turn this one into mask is because these edges are so close together that it might give us arrows. So then add a flood fill to gradient over here. So if we just at an angle variation, we now basically have random gradients, which means that we can randomly cut off some of these pieces over here. Now, another thing that we need to do is we probably would need to end up with some masking, but let's first of all, add a quick blend. Like this. And these gradients, as you've seen here, the masking doesn't fit perfectly. So I would recommend just adding a very quick blur, high quality gray skull after it and just give it a little bit of, like, a blurring like this. And then throw that onto your foreground. Now, if you set the blending mode to be a mint darken, what will happen is this, you can see over here, you can see that it will start to cut off some of these stones. Here on the normp you can really see. It starts to just nicely cut off some of these stones. Now, one of the problems that we do have in this case is that they are cut off everywhere and I do not really like that. I do want to create a quick mask. If I just go ahead and go in here and I will probably you know what? We can probably use this one. Oh, no, sorry. Yeah, no, no, we cannot use that one. We need to have a I have a little brain freeze over here. Yeah, so we need to go ahead and add a flood fill to a random gray scale over here, flood fill a random grayscale and just throw in the same flood field that we've used before. And then we are going to go ahead for a histogram select. Wow, I don't know why I have that brain freeze over there, but I can say, okay, only these pieces, I want to have all of my smoothening. And now if I just go ahead and duplicate my blur behind this. So we soften this out and we throw this into our blend. So now it should only happen on a few stones and not on all of them. See? So now we get even more variation in between those pieces. Okay, so we got that stuff done. Now, I do need to remember that later on we also need to create masks for this so that we can cluster stones together better. But let's at this point, continue on by I think let's just start by adding some general warping and some overall noise on this, I believe. See. Yeah, I think that's the next way to go. Let's add another plant. And for this plant, I basically want to have actually, I want to grab our flood fill to random grayscale. And I just want to throw on my blur. So I'm basically doing this. I have my flood fill to random grayscale. I blur it a little bit. And I throw this into my blend and set my blend to be a multiply. And when I do that, if I load down my opacity, I can have some of these stones to basically be very strong and sticking out, while other ones are just kind of sitting a little bit in background. This is mostly for a height map because in a height map, it means that we will have different heights in our stones. So that's why this is handy. So I'm going to leave my opacity at around 0.4, in this case. There we go. And what I'm going to do after this is I'm going to add let's see. Let's add a quick directional warp. Let's add a quick directional warp and just throw in a few waves. So if we go for some parlis over here, give it like a random angle, and you basically just want to set your parlis scale quite high and just give it a little bit of like an intensity. I expected it to be a bit stronger. It was my intensity to like ten because if I said to ten, I can just easily move it down. Okay. So one thing that I do see, do you see those lines here? I need to keep an eye out on those, not that it's like breaking the tiling. So I basically just give a little bit of a warping around this and I will be able to control that. And after that, now for our noise, if we have a look, I think, actually, this is the best image. Okay, so looking at this noise, most of the noise is sitting on top and then it just cuts around the edges a little bit. So let's start with the classic, which is going to be a slope blur gray scale. And with the slope blur gray scale, we want to throw in a moisture noise over here. Just throw it into our slope. So that now if we set our samples all the way up, intensity all the way down and just set our mode to minimum. Oh, it's really sensitive. 0.05. No, even less. I need to go very careful with this. 0.01. Yeah, I just add some generic noise to this. That's one. And then on top of this, if I just add some very base noise, if you add another blend, we can just grab something like let's go for a where's fractual sum. Let's go for fractual sum one. Actually, let's do fractual sum base. The reason I want to grab the base is because this one has controls, so I can set this like to be a bit rougher. And if I now go ahead and blend this together with something like B&W spots one to basically create a bit more variation. So let's blend this as a multiply. Just tone down your paste a little bit and just throw it might still be too big. I might need to make this smaller, but we'll see. So throw this into our blend. Set this to be a multiply and just like tone down our obste. Let's go into normal because I cannot really see this. Anywhere else. Okay, so yeah, so what I'm first going to do is I'm going to add the transform in between here and I'm going to set this transform to minus two in order to just tie it twice and make it even smaller. So that's one. And then this slope blur is still too strong, actually. So 0.005. No, it's 0.008. There we go, to reduce it a little bit. We are also later on just in our actual graph. We are going to add even more details to this. But I first want to just go ahead and start with something like this. Okay, so we got these stones over here, which would then be considered like the big stones and then later on we can add clusters to this. So they will have random cuts. They will have random angles. Now, I might want to also just give the option to also have random tilting in the stones, which we do after this blend. So we basically go after this blend, and then we duplicate our flood filter gradient along with our blur over here. And then we just, like, change the angle variation a little bit so that our angle is slightly different. And then I plug this basically the top and also set this to be a multiply. So now I can control if I want stones to be slightly angled, as you can see over here. This all works way better in our height map. So don't worry once we actually preview this in our height map, it will look a lot better because the norm map is mostly a support in this case. So we got these pieces done. That is all fine. I still feel like the stones are too perfect. I don't know if I maybe want to do something with a multidirectional warp. So you have this warp, which will just do some warping in one single direction. However, we also have a oops, multidirectional warp gray scale over here. And if we grab a noise for this, let's ty like a Clouds one noise just to see how it looks. If you throw it in, yeah, it's really strong. So you can basically set your intensity here, and it will just basically like warp these stones. You can set the mode, and I'm going to set the mode a minimum because I want to, like, kind of try, cut into these stones a little bit. And then you have your direction. So one direction would be like a normal warp, and then you can go all the way up to four directions. So let's see what does chain do? Now, chain probably doesn't work. Let's go from minimum. And let's actually have a look and nom. So I can see some arrows here. That's why that's why I think minimum doesn't work as well. Here see, you can see these arrows. So the average or chain. Actually, you know what chain might actually work. I've never used it before, but it actually looks kind of cool. So let's set this to like one, and let's just call that today for now. Okay, so we got this stuff here. I'm just going to set my OSD. Oh, that is the warping, isn't it? If I go to this slope, grace ground, set the intensity off. Oh, no, wait, it's still this slope blur. I know why it happens. It's because we have a lot of gradients now sitting in here, and the slope blur, it will twice go around the edges, but it has a difficult time doing so. So maybe I'm actually going to get rid of it before. No, I don't want to get rid of it. Then I'm just going to set very low. 0.005, no, 0.003. Yeah, it looks a bit better. There we go. Okay, so we got some bass noises sitting in here, and we got these stones. Now we need to have a think about how we are going to use all the functionality to also cluster it here. The first thing I need to do is I need to give it an option to also basically play stones and apply a mask where you do not want to have stones. This is for later on. So now we're really going to go ahead and we are going to start with the exposing and everything. So before I forget, I need to do this mask because I'm always very forgetful for this stuff. So if we go all the way to the font, let's see where do we mask out again, Wait, we do that over here, don't we? So generic mask, and here we are starting to add this mask over here. Now, what I basically want to do is I want to be able to have this king map, and then I want to add a blend to it. And I want to add a note which is called an input. And let's do an input gray scale. So this input basically allows us to later on apply whatever we want, we can just throw it in here and that will be added to this mask. So if I go ahead and call this No Stone's mask, for example, and just copy that identifier and also paste it into the label so that it will show up correctly. And this doesn't really matter. I just press art item and just leave it like that. I want the artist on here, and I want to set this to be art because I expect that let's see, is it masking out? Oh, sorry, I need to set this to be subtract. Because I expect that we input whatever is white. We do not want to have stones generating on top of that. So if I set this to subtract because this mask is the other way around in this mask, everything that is black, we do not generate stones at top, this should do the trick. So I will basically show you how this will look later on so that you have a better understanding of the exposing. So we got this stuff over here. Now, we have a normal, but we don't actually need the normal. We just need a height map. So I'm going to create an output note, and I'm just going to call this Height, for example. Copy the identifier into the label. You always need to do this because the label is basically how it will be named whenever we use this. And then if you save your scene, and then press right click and press publish dot SBSRFle. Now, I'm just going to paste it into the same folder as where we have our save file, and I'm just going to press Save and press Okay. So now we get this. We get this stone generator dot SPsRTs basically how it will work. So we have our advanced star max sine over here. This is going to be our empty scene. You basically then drag in the dot SPsR file, and now you can see what is happening is we have a height output, and we have that one input that we created. Now, there are no settings here, but now what we can do is we can expose all of the settings we want to change, and then we can change them in here. As an example for the height map, let's say that I go for like a grunge Mp Z one, I can do this. I can plug it in, and what will happen is it will avoid. See, I will not play stones wherever I have it white, so that's already working. So now that you know that, we can simply go into our stone generator and just close the tree view, and now we can start by exposing it. Okay, what kind of control do we want to have? We have these pieces. We want to have control over the X and Y amount, and we want to always have this control to be even so we can use the same setting. This will basically say how small we want our stones to be. So what I can do is I can go down here and I can press expose above my value. Now, then it will ask you for a name. I always go to new and give it its own name. So this is going to be stone underscore scale. I then press Okay and press Okay again. Now you can see that we can no longer edit this value. This is because now it is exposed. Now for the wire mountain nice is that you can reuse the same values because I know that these will always be the same. I can go in here and I can just click on Stone on the score scale. So that's basically all that that will do. So let's see. We art it to a distance. That's fine. We then detect it. That is fine. And here we are starting with our first one, which is we are reducing pieces in our histrm select. Now, we are doing this. Let's see. Are we doing this using our range, I believe? So if we go in here, we can expose this, and this will basically randomly get rid of the stones. So Random stone unscoreRmoval. Pass okay. Okay, so we can now control how many stones we want to randomly remove. Then what we do here is we have our mask. So what we can say with this one is we can give it a mask input. So let's add another input. Actually, if we add another input. Oh, yeah, you know what? I'm going to do this. Because what I was thinking about, in the other graph, we would probably just combine all the masks together where we do not want to have stones. So we can just as well input a single mask here and just say, Okay, so this is going to be our random stone input. Now at this point, because this is black, you can see that nothing will really work anymore. So I'm going to temporarily leave this on here. And I just need to remember because it's just for previewing purposes. So what do we do next? Over here we add our roundness. So we do that using so this is just like the pointiness, and I don't think we need to do anything with that. Yeah, we don't need to do anything with that. I just want to go into my let's see out levels. There we go. I want to go into my histogram scan, and I want to expose my position and just press new and call it stone underscore round and press Okay. Okay, so we are exposing the stone rounds. So now we have control over that. Then what we are doing is we are basically pushing this out. I can go in here and I can expose this and just call this stone underscore blow out because we are basically pushing out the stone towards other pieces. So just press Okay. And then we blend it, and this is going to be the angles. So if we go for, let's see, flood fill, no, the angles are fine. I just want to go in here, and I probably want to control this one, this range. Expose this and just call this angle underscore cut off underscore amount. Now, I will show you another thing that we can do in case you want to make this note very generic for many different projects is, for example, over here we have without angles. What we can do is we can actually add a switch, and it's called a switch grayscale. And what you can do with this switch is you can say if so we can expose this and we can say if, for example, angle cutting is true, we will cut the angles. So if angle cutting is true, we use this blend. But if it is false, we will use the blend before we cut our angles. Doing it this way with a very simple switch, we can turn on and off the actual cutting of our angles over here. This is handy, for example, if we want to create pebbles, like the actual smooth pebbles that we often have, I don't know, on the beach or whatever. So let's see. Then what we do is we add Okay, so this one expose And call this random height variation. And I'm just exposing the simple opacity so you can pretty much expose anything you want with this. Then this is the expose this one, new random angle variation because this one will expose the angles. Then we have this directional warp, and then we have this noise over here. It's just expose this. Noise underscore A unscoe intensity. And now we have this one, which is a moisture noise. A No, it doesn't. There we go, expose. New and just call this stone cutting amount, I guess, I'm bad with naming. And then we have our generic noise sitting on top of here, so I can just go ahead. Alright, that's this noise. All I had that turned off. Well, we can still use it. We can expose it in just new and just call this generic underscore, noise underscore amount. And press okay. Okay, so we went through and try a graph and we have now exposed a bunch of different pieces. Now all we need to do is, let's first of all, save our scene. You want to click on your stone generator, and here you get all the settings of what we just exposed. Now, remember how I was talking about the labels. Here you can see that these do not all have the correct naming. If that is the case, you simply want to copy the identifier and paste it into your labels over here. Just like that. That will just make sure that they are always called the same whenever we use them in different graphs because else it might, of course, be a bit tricky. And here you can see my switch so I can here turn this on and off. See? I can very easily change the ankle cutting. So I'm just doing this. Now, I'll show you a few extra things. They are not really needed, but I'll show you. If you go to presets, you can change whatever you want. So here you can see all of our exposed values as sliders. So in presets, you can just give it a name so you can call this default, and these are the default settings, and you can just simply press new. And when you will do that here, you can see that it just gives you a new preset which you can very quickly select in your dot SBSR file. Another thing is if you want to limit the amount, you can use something, for example, with the stone amount. You can set your minimum and maximum. Right now, the minimum is one, the maximum is 64. So what I can do is I can set a minimum to well, one is the minimum, yes, but I can set the maximum to 25, six, for example. So we can go much higher in that version. Once you're happy with it, you can save your scene, and then you can right click and press publish dot spSRFle as previous. And once you've done that, if you go to your new scene, it should have auto reloaded in here. And you can see here preset, so we can set the preset to default. And if I just have a look at this stuff, stone scale. See, I can very quickly now set my stone scale way smaller, so I can make very nice little pebbles, or I can make these very large stones. So we very quickly created a very simple stone generator, random stone removal. Little stones, many stones, stuff like that. It's actually turned out surprisingly well. I was a bit worried at the beginning because it was a long time since I've made a stone generator. But here I can say stone roundness, so I can really make these little pieces. I can go to the stone blowout, which that one is very sensitive, so it doesn't do much. The angle cutoff amount, I can make the angle cut off, like, a lot of them or very little, or I can just turn it on off, height variation. Angle variation is working. Noise intense noise intensity is working. This is like one of those pieces where you can set the limits if you want. So that you cannot go higher than, say, two, for example, stone cutting amount. Oh, this is, of course, very small. And then the generic noise amount. So now I should be able to go for Slack preset and go back to default, and then it will just reset all of my settings because that is the default that we have created. Awesome. So in our next chapter, we are basically going to start by actually placing all of these stones together. So we will go ahead and create a field of stones that will have big stones, small stones all clustered together in a really cool way. So let's go ahead and continue with that. 9. 08 Creating Stone Clusters Part1: Okay. So now that we have our stone generator, we are going to put it into practice, and we are basically going to start by placing our stones. The goal for this is to get these clusters that you can see over here where you have big stones, surrounded by small stones. But also the big stones are often in, like, small little clusters. Like you very rarely get like a single big stone just sitting there. They are always surrounded by multiple big stones. So that's something that we want to capture. So here we have a stone generator in our Advanced Tarmac. Now it is black because remember how we changed our mask to our input. So that's something that we just need to do. That does mean that for now, I will just grab something very generic because I don't have a mask yet. We need to create that, but I first want to create some stones. So I'm going to go in here and I'm going to say, Let's see. Actually, let's just use this mask over here. So if these are going to be our larger stone clusters like you can see here, there we go. Okay. So now that we have these, now let's go ahead and I believe that our preset over here is already fine because we pretty much already set it up. I'm going to have a few less larger stones. So, this is the size I want to go for, I think. We can always change later on. So random stone removal. Let's throw that up so that we have a few less largestones, but we still get some of these clusters over here. Let's go for something like this. Okay, so anything else I need to do? No, I think that is about fine. The generic noise and everything we can work on later on. I'm first focusing on position. I'm now going to duplicate this. Oh, I need to expose a mask output. That's something I need to do. We might be going back and forth because sometimes I just tend to forget some stuff. So if we go to the very ends plug this one back in so that I can actually see what I'm doing. If we go to let's see where does our final mask end up? Well, I think, because we do do the blur. So it might be better to add it after our directional warp over here and then just blur it. Yeah, that might be better. Let's go ahead and add a levels after this directional warp, push levels out that we get like this quite strong mask, and then just push it out even further so that it also surrounds like a tiny bit of space around our stones. So if we plug this over here and then add another output, and we will call this stone underscore mask. And don't forget, copy it also in the label. And now we can just go ahead and we can save a scene and we can publish our SPsR file. Okay, let's go back in here. Oh, that's too bad. So outputs themselves, for some reason, they only work when we completely reopen our graph, while our actual settings, they will just reload whenever we have it. So if we just close this and just go ahead and open it up again. I was afraid of that. In that case, I just need to redrag it in here. So it's good that I show it now. You can close down entire substance, but I'm not really in the mood to do that. So what I'm instead going to do is I'm just going to copy my stone removal. Huh? Why are you the same setting? That is strange. Oh, wait. There we go. Okay, so basically what we need to do is I just need to quickly go back in here again because I once again forgot to set my input mask. So let's do this. Save, publish our dot SSR file. There we go. So basically, just update. So this one we can get rid of. So now we have this one over here, great. Okay. Our stone removal, let's tone it down. I'm not sure why it still shows up like this, but okay. So big stones are going to be 0.7. Let's go 0.7 for that. There we go. And now we also have our stone mask over here. So what we can do with this is basically this. We can duplicate this note. And in this one, what I can say is, Okay, these ones, I want to have medium stones, for example. So I can go to my random stone removal, add a few more, and then go to my stone scale and add like a bunch more stones. Now with this, I can go ahead and I can still use this mask most likely, but I probably want to let's duplicate it a little. Let's duplicate it, and then just make it a little bit bigger. And then what you want to do is you want to add a blend and you want to grab your stone mask over here and you want to throw this in here. Now, if you set the stone mask to be a subtract so that it will cut out, it should make sure that no stones, see, no stones are generated where our large stones are. So they should be just generated out like this. So now we have these bunch of stones. So if we go in and we add a blend, we can blend our original ones, which are just like with our height with the smaller ones and set this to be a max ten blend. And there you go. That's basically how we are going to create our clusters. As you can see over here, we now have these stones. Now I would say these are going to be medium, so not small yet. So I do want to actually remove a few more. But here you can see the difference between before. Now we are these clusters, and now what we would then do is, for example, duplicate our stone generator once more. And for this one, I'm going to set the size really small. And just like I don't know yet what I'm going to do with soil removal. We basically have this stuff. And now we do need to now mask out both of these. So if we just go ahead and grab a very quick blend, we can just blend these two masks together. Just set the blending motor art. There we go. So this mask we can now cut out. So if I now go ahead and use this grunge map over here. The reason why I'm just making this one bigger so that we have some spill out, but we can play around to this. Throw on our stones and set this to be subtract like that, and throw this into our stone generator. There we go. So we have all these really small stones. And now, if we blend this together, using this height, Max, Lighten. There we go. See? So now we get this effect. We really get all of these little stone clusters that you can see over here. It still feels very generic, mostly because there's almost nothing in these areas, which makes sense because that's how we did our mask. And then there might be a little bit too many in these ones. So I'm going to go ahead and let's see. I'm going to start by probably making our stone scale a little bit smaller. It's also fun how we can see how they become. So it looks like that expect them to go 512, and expect them to go much smaller. I think we cannot really go smaller. It's a limitation, and this limitation basically comes from the fact that the generator, because it needs to generate specific shells, there's only so much it can do. But that is no problem. Like we can just scale down the overall thing. So what we would then do is something in the direction of this where we have our larger stones over here. And we will probably set them to be even larger like this. And then we have our medium stones over here. We would set those to be a little bit larger like this. And then we will have a small stones sitting in here. There we go, see? Okay, so the small stones, those are much easier to get into these areas. So knowing that, what I would do is I would go ahead and probably now duplicate this crunch map. Once we have our actual mask, this will be much easier. But for now duplicate it and just see, I want to get this to be maybe if I just tone down my contrast, I can. Yeah, so we get a few of them. I'm just really worried because it feels like there's way too much stuff going on here, but let's actually preview this in a normal map so that we can have a better sense of it. So let's add the normal map and you set this to be like ten. Okay, that's maybe a bit too much. Let's say five. Okay, see? Yeah, it feels very, very generic right now, so that's something I do want to work on. The first thing I'm going to do is in our small stones. Let's go down here and let's go into our height variation, boost this all the way up, and our angle variation. So that should give us quite a bit of variation. Also in our medium stones, some height variation, some angle variation to get rid of some of those. So got these stones over here. Now, what I was planning to do is later on to simply just tile my texture a little bit more. So I'm just dialing it twice in order to get those stones. But it is basically a lot of balancing out. If we would already just have a quick setup for exporting here, delete this. So let's set this to three. And let's also plug this into our height map and add an Ambienclusion note. And remember, you can hold control to duplicate your output. There we go. I'm an occlusion. By the way, I'm the inclusion, turn on the GPU optimization. So we got this stuff over here. Let's just go ahead and save us scene and export this so that I can actually see it with temp inside of Momset. Here we go. TJ Export. That's all fine. Let's have a look. So we got that stuff. Yeah, we definitely need to work on the stones. What I will do is I will still in this chapter, just already set up like a basin and Mamo set. I know that we had already scene set up for the basic version, but what I'm going to do now is I will slowly show you how to actually set up the scene. But we're going to start with something very basic. So here we go. Here we are inside of Mamaset. Now, the first thing that I will do is I will actually give you the sphere that I used. So if I go into source files, measures in here. Now, this sphere, you can actually find it inside the base installation folder of substance designer. So it is basically in the substance designer folder, and I'm just going to navigate. Here we go. So in your program files, if you go to subs designer, if you want to find more of these, you can go to resources, view three D shapes, and in here, you will have your material ball, rounded cube, and all of these extra shapes. So that's literally where I got it from. I just go to my sphere two tiles, press control C, and then I simply going to go ahead and go to my actual folder where I can just supply it to you guys. There we go. So it's in the mesh folder, and then I just drag it in. There we go. So we just have this very simple sphere in here. So what do we want to do now? Let's start with a few settings. I'm not going to use rate racing for a while, in this case, and this is just because rate racing is more for a final render. I'm going to throw on my ambien occlusion over here. And I'm going to set the strength a little bit up. I always do that. I always set it around eight. I then want to go ahead and go down here to my resolution, and I just want to copy the 1920 and also paste it into 1920. Because what I can do then is if I go to my main camera, I can turn on safe frames, and the safe frames will basically react based upon the resolution we have set. So if you set the sa frame opacity all the way up, we get this black bars, which will give us full focus on just our sphere and nothing else. Now for the sky, I'm not sure yet what sky I want, so I'm not going to worry about it. I'm just going to set my mode to color. And when you set your mode to color instead of ambient sky, you can choose a background color. So I can just give this like a dark color simply by selecting color. And that's it for now. So it's very basic. All I really want to do now is just press the plus sign. Call these ones stones for now, actually, sorry, tarmac. And now all I need to do I just need to go ahead and import those three textures that I have. So the first one is an easy one, it's the norm map. We can plug it in here. The second one we have already covered, it's the occlusion, if you go down here and go to occlusion and the occlusion map. And the third one, oat, we have actually covered the third one. If you go to displacement and go to height, you can drag in your height map. Now, the height map is often very strong, so just already tone down your scale and throw this in here. So this is what we get right now. Now, the first thing I want to do is I want my roughness to be quite dull because I just want this to be quite a dull texture. I want to set my emclusion quite low because I don't want to have it as strong, and I want to set my texture over here, the text tiling to two. These are settings you get used to them. They will be the settings that you use hundreds of times after a while. So the next thing is, let's work on our displacement, because right now our displacement, as you can see, it doesn't have enough geometry. So very simple. All we need to do is go into our sphere to tiles and go into sphere and just turn on the subdivide. Now, depending on how strong your PC is, you can go quite high with this. I'm going to go probably up to, like, a few million polis. You can see it down here. So 6 million. Let's see. For now, I think 6 million is fine just to preview. So what I can do now is I can just go ahead and I can, preview how strong I want everything to be. So these are stones right now. They are okay, but they feel like they, something feels wrong. They still feel too generic. So I'm now just going to go stone by stone from the bigger ones to the smaller ones, and we're just going to play around with things. So let's get started with the big stones. What do we find? We find that? What do I find? I find that they are not here we go to sight. They are not prominent enough. They aren't standing out as much, so I want to have them stronger to Willi peck punch, and I would probably want to have a few more of them. So I go in here, and the cool thing is about substances that everything is procedural. If I add more stones here, so I can just set my random stone removal down to add more stones here, it will automatically detect all the masks, and it will just generate all the other stones still around it. So we got that. I got a few more stones. Good. Now what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to probably let's first of all, try out the levels to see if I can I can push it as much. The thing is you can add the levels, but there's only so much you can push it before the stones start to look strange. Yeah. Like you can add it, but after a while, they will look flat in certain areas. So it's just like we just kind of need to see. So for example, now I have pushed them quite a lot, so I can now go into Mamsat and I can now see over here. How well the height is working. So if I set my displacement up a little bit, it just had to reload here. So the height is working quite well. So I'm basically going to focus my displacement on the salestones. The salestones are working really well, actually, as in height wise, see? Because you can see some are higher and others are lower. So seeing this, the first thing that I notice is I need to tone it down a little bit. So I'm just moving my right slider back down. Going to Mm set, again, the all the Mm sets don't have this, but these ones you sometimes just need to double click on your displacement map in order to reload it. So there we go. They are now standing out quite a bit more, and that's quite nice. I like that. They are quite smooth, but I'm not too worried about that. I'm more focusing now on how everything will look. If I now go in here, what I sometimes like to do is I like to just go to, for example, this blend and just turn it off for now because then I can just focus on these pieces. Here, now I can just turn this on and off, see? So I can now just really focus on these little stones that we have over here. What do I notice? The stones, I probably want to make them a little bit more pushed out and, more or less. No, I think I have enough of the stones. Yeah, they are these ones, right? So maybe make them tiny bit smaller. So let's go in here. And let's set the stone scale down a little bit, well, set it up a little bit, depending on how you look at it. I will also actually later on, just go into my generator, see if we can push it down even more. So here, let's see. So I'm adding these over here. Now I'm adding a mask down here. What I can try to do if I'm careful is I can try and this mask is most likely very sharp, it is. So if I add a very quick blur, high quality gray scale, I plug my mask in here and just like a low level. And then at the levels, I can push this back in so that now if I go to my blurry quality gris cal, here, I can do this. And I can basically control how close I want my stones to generate to my actual masks. So if I go and blur this more, you can see what will happen is that the stones will generate pretty much on top of our other stones, and that's what I want. So not literally on top. I don't want them in, like, the center, but I don't mind if they are sometimes overlapping a little bit like you can see here because it will give us a feeling like they're really close by. Now, the next thing I want to work on stone roundness is fine. Stone blowout. That was the pushback, right. 0.5. Yeah, that was the pushback. So if we set this to 0.1, that's fine. So the angle cutoff amount. For these stones, they are smaller. I think I want to just set like a few more angles to be cut off. A random height variation and angle variation I was already happy with. Let's go for a noise A intensity. Okay, that's really sensitive. Et's go for 1.2. Okay, let's see. So we are placing these. They are quite close together, so they are being clustered, so that's good. If we just go in here. Tone down my occlusion map a little bit more. Okay, so let's see. So they are being clustered. I don't think I think I actually need to go one more subdivision. This might take a second. Oh, I didn't need to go one more subdivision. I just had to I forgot that I had to reset my mask. But, luckily, I just mispressed. So Okay, so that is fine. Yeah. Yeah, I can live with that. That's looking good. Okay, so we got these clusters over here, so they are working, and now we want to just have tiny stones in between. Now, we are running out of time. So what I will do is in next chapter, I will start by creating these really, really small stones to have them in between here. And once we've done that, we can take it from there and just continue with this texture. 10. 09 Creating Our Stone Clusters Part2: Okay, so we are slowly getting there. We now got this. I'm now going to start working more on the really small stones over here. Yeah, that's pretty much it because I don't think the overlapping. Like, I'm not sure we can push this even closer. What was that roundness? No, it was not a roundness. I believe it was like the stone blowout, but it can only go one way, doesn't it? Let me just quickly check. Let's go into our stone generator. And it's basically. Basically, what I want to look at is where are you? This one, I believe. So I'm doing the blowout over here. Okay, so I didn't expose it, so that's why I couldn't find it. Yes. So I did the intensity for this one, but I also want to go ahead and expose this one. And I think that was what I was missing. So this one I'm going to call Stone Underscore fatness. Honestly, I don't know. Just going to give it like a random name. And well, it doesn't actually matter that I already switch here because I can just save my scene, publish SBSERS previous. And I just need to double click on here so that it reloads. Okay, so Uh, excuse me. Don't tell me I just lost all my work, did I? That's not normal. That resets the presets. That's definitely not normal. And I once again realize why this is the case because for some reason, I have something with just forgetting to actually do this, to just set it back. I don't know why. I do apologize. It doesn't look very professional in the tutorial, but mistakes can be made. Okay. So we got this stuff, and now basically what I wanted to try is see if I can increase the blowout a little bit more, not this blowout. I mean, the stone fatness over here. So this is very, very sensitive. So if I said this to seven, Okay, so we are getting close to that. 0.010 0.02. Okay, so I'm pushing these out, and now if I just play around my stone blowout. Okay, so this one can now control kind of like the softness. So if I set this to 0.2, yeah, I wonder if that works. For now just Yeah, there we go. So now the stones, they are so close together, that's looking a lot better. Okay, so I got that stuff. Now, what I had in mind for this one, if I just add it. So these stones, we couldn't make them a lot smaller, but we are able to actually change the size by going just into our stone roundness, I believe. So if I go and set my stone roundness. Here, see. If I go and set my stone roundness lower, I can actually make these a lot smaller. So if I go in here, and I set my stone roundness lower, but I'm going to set my random removal. Also low so that they basically just show up in more areas. Now, with this technique, they still feel a little bit generic, like we cannot get as many pieces in here. But what we could do is we could just go in and we can do like a blend. And if we just go ahead and by this point, the stones are so small, I might be able to get away with just doing a generic blend. So if I just change my random seed for this to randomize the position, plug in these two stone masks and just said this to be a max Lighten. So I hope that this blend will just work and that we don't need to separate these out, but we'll see so that we get a few more stones in those areas. Turn off on and off my displacement. Okay, so we are getting the stones. That's good. And yes, as I expected, what I'm not happy about that over here, they are still too far out with the spacing. And yeah, that's just something that I cannot get around. So I do want to actually fix that because it just doesn't look as nice. So if we go into a stone generator over here, we can have a look and see how that we can fix this. So over here we have a distance note. Now this note is basically that's how we are basically controlling all this stuff. So there's only so much we can do with this. If I go, let's save my scene. Let's save my time scine. If I just go into my stone generator, what I can do is I can just fiddle around with the settings in my preset over here. So if I just go, for example, well, it doesn't matter because as long as I don't press update, it should be fine. So if I set my stone scale all the way up, they become lower. If I go 512, here see, there's only so much they can do. And it probably has to do with the amounts over here. That is quite interesting because I would have expected the amounts to be just increasing, basically. So 512, Are they getting smaller? It feels like I'm getting more. Do I just need to push this to like an insane amount? So let's see. If I go like 2000. Come on. Little dude, give me 5,000. Give me an insane amount of Wow, it's really as difficult. Okay, now it starts to break. So now it is starting to break. So it does actually give me some really small stones. I'm just not sure how far we can push them. Why does it doesn't add more to this. My levels still dd it. I'm am I doing anything with my masks over here? Um, no, I don't think so. So I'm not masking anything out. I think this is just a limit of the system. I think we cannot just push this anymore. Now, we could wine set the overall scale bigger in order to have them filled up more like you can see over here. Ooh. Like you can see over here, the scale was too small. That was the cast. So basically, if I'm setting the scaling lower, it's not able to capture as many pieces. So if I set my scaling to let's say let's set the scaling to the point that we want to have the most Pebble. If I go in here and I set my scaling probably to because this is too much 0.2, I think that is as small as I want to go. I think if we go any smaller, I think it's already going to break the system, if I will not forget this time. Let's go into the very front and let's just see if this broke the system. It is very close. It's very close to our limit, but it should be doable. Okay, so that's great. So now that we've done that, we can just go into our stone generator and just press reset on this. So now that we know about these stones, we can save our scene and we can publish our dot SPsR file again, and that should do the trick. So I'm glad that it wasn't anything more difficult. I was quite surprised that it didn't work, but knowing substance, sometimes, yeah, you just miss something. Okay, so we now got these pieces. I'm now going to actually get rid of this stuff because I no longer need it. I just need this one, and I'm going to set my stone scale here, see. Now it's also being pushed. Now I only need to go up to 100 to get as many stones. So if I go in here and set my stone roundness and a little bit up over here is that the stones are quite close together. My random stone removal, I will just set a little bit higher and now I can just play out my stone scale. Nice. Let's have a look. Turn on and off my displacement. There we go. That's what I mean. That is what I mean. So now we have a bunch of little stones just sitting in between there. Let's not look at the top over there. But it's starting to look a lot better. So we will get some of these clusters over here that you can see. And if you want, what you can do with this is you can even have clusters that are really, really close by over here. So if we create a mask that the blend, that is going to be this mask over here, along with this stone mask over here. So let's just set this to art. So we got all of these little pieces. And now if I go in and just duplicate this one, so just duplicate our smallest one, set a random seat. In the no stone mask, what I want to do is, let's see. So these are just stones, right? Yes, they are. What I want to do is I basically want to go ahead and, I want to get this, but I'm not sure if that would be, for now we can just do that. Let's move our shapes over here. Here we go. I'm going to change this masking system later on, but I first needed to actually work. So for this one, just basically set your balance a lot lower so that's only around these areas. And what should happen then is that if we add a blend to this and just blend this into the bottom, since you subtract, it's that we only capture basically the white spots in between of all of the larger stones. So capturing only those white spots means that we will have most of our stones here if we set the random stone removal quite low or like this. Most of those stones will be in between here. So then logically, if we just add a quick blend, and blend this last one together as a max lighten, you can see that now there should be even more stone clusters around the larger stones, and then it just slowly fades out until there's almost nothing left over here. And where there is nothing left, that is where we can now focus on just creating a few extra stones. But honestly, all we need to do for that is we just need to go into this mask, I believe, and Yeah, probably, like, play around with the balance a little bit more. It is a little bit tricky. So this balance, right now, what it is doing is, yes, it is adding more stones to the rest. So what I might want to actually do is I might want to actually push this balance down a little bit. Like you can see over here so that the classes are more there. And then I will just probably art something on top using a blend. And this will be more of like a generic mass that we can just throw on top that will just randomly scatter a few stones here and there. So for that, I'm probably going to go, let's say, a Clouds one with the levels. Throw that on top and just set this to be a art. And if you play around with your levels, you basically just want You know, I just want to see if I can maybe even set my cloud scale up. There we go. So I'm trying to capture that it will just randomly be placed in certain locations. See? So big clusters here, once and twice some stones over here. Let's just see before and after. Yeah, that works. So we got those extra clusters. Now if I go in here to unlove my displacement. There we go. I think we got it. So we now have our fairly decent stone clusters going on. That is really nice. Yeah, I think that looks great. One last thing I will do in this chapter, and that is that I will just create that effect. So where the scent is kind of like piling up against all of the stones because it's quite an easy effect to do. The only thing we really need to do for this is we need to go in here, and then we need to first of all, yeah, we need to create a mass from this, but we can probably just steal this one or not? No, I think we don't need to steal it. Let's add a non uniform blur grayscale. That's what it's called. I want to throw this into my grayscale. Then I want to add the levels in here and push these levels all the way up. This is just to mask out our stones, basically. Throw this into my blur map. And I then need to invert my levels. There's always a few steps. I need to then invert my levels, add the samples all the way up. There we go. And now we basically if I low down my NTNC here, you can see like a fall off happening between the stones. Once you've done that, there's a reason why I didn't make these levels as strong. It is because I now need to reduce my levels until they properly blend. And this is the reason why I didn't pick this map because this mask over here would be way too strong. So if I do this, it might reduce some of the stones. I need to see how it looks. It needs to be very subtle. Oh, wait, I don't think it's actually plugged in. It is not. If you just hold Shift, you can swap around your masks over here. Okay, so we got that stuff. Here. So now we got some of these stones, and now they are starting to sink into the ground. So that's what we have here, and that's what I'm trying to get. Let's set our intensity a little bit lower. And yeah, then the levels, it's a tricky balance to get between the really small stones, but still having, like, around the big stones, some more pieces. Let's see, how does that look? Because what I'm worried about is that it will give us a little trim around it. Actually, that doesn't look too bad at trim. Now I look at it. So we got this. If I just do a very quick blur, high quality gray scale, let's see how it Oh, there we go. See? So if we just blur this like a tiny bit, 00.2, there we go, see. So now we don't have this hard edge around it that you can see. So now we get a little bit of that sand that you can see over here. I just slightly piling up in between our stones, and that's looking really nice. When we turn this texture into like a four k texture, it would look even better. The way that you would want to do that is you simply go. You probably also need to go to your stone generator. If you click on your Advanced tarmac in here, you can set your texture to four K, and then it will also export as four K. The only thing is when doing that is the SPSCR files, they themselves would also need to be in four k in order for it to work. So if I set this to four K, and then I do need to double check that it's still looking correct because se, so that's still looking correct because four k does change some of the masks a little bit. But if we, for example, save this and publish it, we should be able to go back to our advanced Sarmac you should be able to see the resolution down here, four K, there we go. And now I just want to look at my end result. If it isn't too much here see now you can see that some of these stones have become brighter. And that's what I mean with the problem and here you can see, these details really sharp. But that can sometimes be a problem. But it doesn't look too much like problems. So this is now texture in four k. So yeah, you can see that it looks quite a bit nicer if I would open up my subdivision levels once more, which will turn it into like 24 million, I believe. So it's a lot of subdivisions. That's why it's taking set gloat. Wow, that was spot on of me. Yeah, 24 million, you can see that it really starts to look nice in how our displacement works. But of course, it's a very expensive texture now because we have 24 million Blis on it, but it's just for previewing purposes. So we got this stuff. What we're going to do in next chapter is we are going to focus on creating our flat tarmac and creating a mask in order to blend between the two. So let's go ahead and continue with that, but this is already a really good result. So let's continue. 11. 10 Creating Our Base Tarmac: Okay, so we are making some good progress here. Now, there's of course, some things like over here we have some strange cutoffs going on, but those are most likely just because of the clamping of our me these levels. Basically, what you can do is you can just go into your normal click on your levels and just push this down a little bit more, see, until we are getting rid of those really small little pieces that are being cut off. So we got this. Now what we're going to do is we are going to focus on, first of all, our plain piece, which will look like this little area over here. So it's just going to be plain and then having a few more extra small stones on top. So that's the general idea. And once we have done that, we can go ahead and we can start blending everything together. So if I go here, what I can do with these pieces, is I can go ahead and move them, let's say, down here, art frame, and just call these ones stone nscore clusters. Now for these pieces, if I have a look at this, for the very base, you know what I'm tempted to do? Maybe I can actually use my stone generator to create a very rough base and then have something on top and then clamp it down. So let's try that. Let's grab, for example, one of these, and we don't even need the mask. For the mask in this point because we want to have these literally everywhere, we are going to go for a uniform color, set it to gray scale and just make it white. Throw that in here. Now once we've done that, random stone removal all the way down. Sorry. Looks like we cannot go all the way. Oh, that's too bad. Interesting. Okay, but that doesn't matter too much. So we got this piece. Now for my stone scale, I just want to set this way up. So it just becomes like this. It just becomes this very gritty looking texture that we have over here. Angle cut off amount. Let's just boost that up so that we just have like a bunch more Stone fatness. Let's set this to 0.0 0.0. No, sorry, 0.1? No, I did that w 0.01. There we go. See poo on that they are very close together. We have some gaps here, but don't worry about that. Basically, the idea is that it will look like this. If we add a normal map to this, and I want to just grab the same strength as this one. So three, OpenGL with a strength of three here, see? So that already starts to look a little bit like this piece. Now, once I've done that, because I want to have more stone sitting on top, I need to kind of like soften this out. And the way I'm going to do that is very simply with the levels. I'm grabbing levels, and I'm just pushing my black and white slider closer together. And when I do that, we get basically here. If you look at the normal. See, you get this really soften out effect like we can see over here. So this is like our base, basically. Now that we have our base sitting over here, now what we can do is we can say, Okay, let's have a look. These stones are in clusters. They are all very close together, but they are all very small. So I feel like the best one would be if I duplicate this one over here. So we have this one. For the clusters, I'm just going to go for something that is let's go for something that's quite generic this time. Let's do clouds, too, and add the levels to this because we need to turn this into like a sharp mask. Then just play around, first of all, with your black slider and then your white slider. Here, see. So quite generic. We can throw this in here. And there we go. Now we have our stones mostly in those areas. Now, if I just go to my levels and just tone down, we probably need to throw something on top of this. What do we? No, you know what? No, we probably don't even need to do that. So we got these pieces over here. They are clusters. They are close together. I'm going to at play out my levels and just reduce them a little bit more. Let's see. I kind of looks like Europe here in Italy. Sorry. Never mind. I always get distracted like that. So we got this stuff. I want them. Let's see. Random stone removal. Let's have those a little bit less that we have a few more of those. And let's you see. So if we have our levels that are blend on top, And this time, this blend is actually interesting. So this blend that we want to have them on top, we don't so much want to blend them together. Now, I can try and first of all, blend them together. Let's see, because maybe if we just art them on top, you know, see art. Multiply, no max Lighten. Okay, so we would need to press art. I just want to make sure that I'm not losing too many. Okay, so I'm not losing too many. So we can just add these on top like this. And then if we go into our blend, we do probably need to just set our best we like a little bit lower. I think this one is more important within the color to actually work with. So we got those pieces like sitting there. Here you can see that they are slightly different color. There are sometimes some patches over here, and these patches, I think those are quite interesting to capture. Yeah, if we do that. I feel like the background, it is right now there are too many plain stones over here. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to add some patches, and those patches will basically just have a variation that is the stones are so small, they're just going to be pixels. So if we go in, let's first of all, just grab the pixels. So if we go for a let's see which one will work best for this stuff. Probably maybe fractural some rough base. If we boost up the contrast, no, I don't like that. Fracture sum one. Let's throw in normal on this and just see. No, I also don't like that. Let's try and duplicate my stone generator and just boost up the stone scale to, like, really small. I mean, that's good work. And we basically just want to also then boost up our levels and then blend between the two. So we are going to blend between this one and this one. And then this levels down here, you guys will be a little bit darker so they are further down than these guys. And then they will just be blending along with a very simple grunge map, for example, grunge map 001, change the random seat, play around with your balance and contrast a bit. And throw it in here so that we get this effect. And now my hope is, Okay, so that's not my hope. I think we just need to blur it, but my hope is that we can blend between the two, and there will be enough of a difference. So if we go ahead and blur, high quality gray scale, this one, click on your normals and only blur it as much as you need to. Here, see. And now if I just say, let's make this a little bit stronger so that this is a bit darker. See? So now we get these down bits over here. And then we add these stones on top and these stones are now probably want to make it a little bit stronger. There we go. See so that now starts to look a lot rougher. So we get a little bit more of variation. And now it's just a matter of maybe going into my levels and maybe pushing them up a little bit. You can also go into your blends and play around with your opacity a little bit. Just to get this exactly how we want it to be. Okay, so we got that. Let's tone down this opacity a little bit. And at this point, we can already just have a quick preview at it. So if we get rid of our normal and actually just hold Shift and just here swap this around. So let's see norm map and Eclusion map, height map. So that should have Auto exported. So now if I just refresh my displacement, there we go. So this is our current tarmac. Sorry, brain freeze again. This is our current tarmac. I think if I set my tiling to three, just to Yeah. Okay, so inside of substance, I probably want to set my tiling to make everything a little bit smaller. Yes, that's probably the best case. And I'm going to make these a little bit less intense. So first of all, let's make these a little bit less intense. Now if we just go ahead and add a transform today, tone this down. I'm not sure if I like that. I think doing the tiling was a mistake. Let's not do that. Yeah, here, I think the tiling was a mistake. I think something like this is better. So we got these two pieces over here. If you want to see them bit sharper, you can go into your main camera tone up the sharpening over here to make it a little bit easier to see how they are working. So let's see. Yeah, I think once we have the color, that should give us enough height information. And the only thing is like those Oh, no, wait. Here they are here, the patches. So let's just see how that looks. Okay, so those are those ones. Let's see. There may be more interesting looking patch. So if we go for maybe tone down our blur a little bit. Another thing that we can tie is this. We can twin out. I'm basically just playing around with it. It is okay, but I just want to make sure that it is as best as we can. So what I can do is I can play around with this and just blur it and then add the levels on top, which will give us this very sharp transition, but it will hopefully ah. Okay, it definitely did not do it the way I wanted to. Yeah, let's not do that. Okay, in that case, I'm going to call this one done. So we now have a base. We probably still want to play around with it a little bit later on. But let's say that this is already like our base tarmac. So we can go art the frame, call this base underscore tarmac. And now what we'll do in next chapter is we will start by blending these two together using a mask that we will create. And then everything all of a sudden will comes together, and then we can just add some extra details and then move over to the next texture maps. So let's continue with that. 12. 11 Balancing Heightmap And Adding Cracks: Okay, so we got our masking here, Dan. It can still use some cleanup, but I like to only clean up my graphs at the very end because there's just so much that's going to change, probably. So what I'm going to do now is basically if we swap to Mm set, I will go over with you on things I want to improve. Now, I will do this in real time. Like I'm not going to go turn off the camera, magically know exactly what I want to improve because that's not how the process goes. I will basically, the way it just works, it's very simple. I look at my reference over here and then of course, look inside the Mum set. Now, of course, when doing this, there's a lot of stuff we still have missing because we still need to work on it. So just try and keep that in mind. So, for example, what's the first thing I see? I see that my plain tarmac over here is a lot softer than it is over here, so I want to have that less strong. So then we just go back and forth with these kind of things and just do some nice balancing. So this is mostly these ones over here. So if I go in my blend and tone those down, let's see how that looks. Sometimes you just want to turn on after displacement. Okay, I feel like maybe the general displacement is also a little bit strong. So if we just go into our, so we do that here. So if we clamp these down a little bit more like this so that they become less strong. And these ones also. Here we go. So we soften it out. We add our pieces. How does that look in our normal? Okay, I think that's starting to look a lot better. Yeah, yeah. So that's now already a bit softer. We have over here these patches which are where we denting everything in. I want to have those a little bit less, so I'm just going to go in here and just make this a little bit lighter, with your sliders. There we go. So that should get rid of those patches. I know it's a little bit annoying that I need to keep doing displacement thing. Maybe if I update my mom set, recently a new version came out, so hopefully that will fix it. So what else? Okay. I'm now going to focus probably. Let's focus on the fall off first. So the fall off I see here, what I often see here is that the falloff, it has much rougher stones around that. So I do not see and capture that. We already have these stones on the top, so maybe we can just use those. So we have these. And if I just make these a little bit stronger, I might be able to use these if I can capture my mask. And that is this mask over here. Okay, so if I capture this mask, and if I do an edge detect, and then invert it. I should be able to detect pretty roughly like these edges. Sometimes if you're not sure, you can just add a blend and just blend these two together quickly and just set the blend to be subtract and then tone down your sti, see? Okay, so we are hitting exactly the edges. That's exactly what I wanted to make sure of. So with this edge detect, because we have this stone generator or this mask in our stone generator, I can blend this blend these on top and I want to set these to art yeah, I believe art. Yeah. Okay. So when I set these to art, I can make sure that there are actual stones sitting there. Now, another thing that I need to make sure of that is when we blend this out. Okay, so the stones are on top. I just want to make sure that we do not accidentally just mask it out. Now, this over here, this over here basically happens because we are pushing out the colors a bit too much, and I do not really like that. So the first thing I can do is I can go in my bevel and see if I can do some smoothing. Okay, so the smoothening actually makes it worse. And that's interesting. In that case, let's see. I'm adding that on top of here using my mask. That is quite interesting. But honestly, can we even see it? Let's going here. Yeah, we can see it. So you can see the strong edge. These stones here on the corner, that's already looking a lot better, so that's working. Okay, so these edges on the corners, that is not very good. So that's something that we definitely need to fix. And I feel like I want to make my tarmac a little bit less strong. That might actually fix it. So in beginning, I pushed it a little bit too much. So let's just tone this down a bit. Something like this. Because I feel like the stones themselves, they would have been broken up, but the rest not. And hopefully that might also fix our normal problem. So let's push it down a little bit more. There's always going to be some balancing. Sometimes I feel like it looks good, and then I change my mind a little while later. Okay, so we still have some of these edges over here. That is quite What's the word peculiar? I'm not sure. Quite interesting. One thing I can do just to test it is I can add a blend. Oh, sorry, not a blend. A blur, high quality gray scale to this. And then just look in my normal map and then play around with my intensi just to see Okay, see? Yeah, that is interesting. So apparently in the bevel, the smoothening doesn't work as well. So we can just add like an intensity here and set the intensiy low enough that you only just get rid of these pieces. So 0.35 seems to do the trick. And then you don't really need to touch it anymore. So just press D to dock it. Okay. Here. Now all of these pieces are nice and smooth, so that's good. Okay, so we got that stuff. Now I'm going to go ahead log Camera one and go into actually, you know what? Duplicate Camera one. Call this free Cam. That's what I like to do often because the free Cam has all of my settings already in here. And if I then go into my free cam, I can use this to, like, have closer looks and everything and just make sure that everything is crack. So stones. If I look at this, we have some areas where there are no big stones. Let's see, do we have those? Very little. So we might actually want to just, like, reduce the big stone amount a little bit, just to capture that area. Another thing, my stones. Are they too big or not? Um, maybe make them a tiny bit smaller. So we'll make them a tiny bit smaller. Let's see. The stones in between. It works great over here. Like, these areas are looking good. Also over here. Maybe I'm going to create like a few patches where we have an insane amount of stones, just like scatter out in a few very small areas. So I'll do that. Okay, so before I forget, let's do that. So a little bit smaller. Wow, I already forget half of what I said, but don't worry. These ones. I should really stop saying too often. Sorry about that. So stone scale. Let's go set my scale. I need to go higher in order to make them smaller. So there we go. Just want to be careful? Oh, yeah, I want to not have as many of them. Before I do that, I just need to make sure that Okay, so the stone scale is now good. Now what I want to do is I just want to reduce them. So first of all, let's go for the random stone removal. Oh, Wong Wong way. Let's do that. And if we just have a look Yeah, so they are still all over the place. So if I go to just this one and I'm going to adjust my mask a little bit, I'm going to add a blend to this mask, and I actually know of a grunge map that might work. It's grunge map 004 because it's literally patches. So if you just push this, sorry, not the balance, push the contrast up that might I don't know if it removes too much, but we'll see we can set this to be subtrat. Okay, so let's see how that looks in our normal Let's see. Is this too much or not? So now we have these big stones sitting over here. And then some areas so here, lots of big stones. This is really nice area over here. This is exactly what I like and over here. And let's see, sometimes you have an area where there's almost nothing like you can see over here. Okay, this is good. So this will work. So we got those pieces done. That is all well and good. The next thing I was going to add some extra clusters. So let's see. I'm already doing something like that over here where I'm adding them in some of these areas, see? I'm adding a lot of them in those in between areas now I think of it. Hmm. If I'm already doing that, then what would be the best way? Because I don't want to have this overwhelming. If I look in okay, I didn't do that, that was automatically. If I look in that area, where is the area like all these stones, probably in this area. Yeah, you know what? I'm not sure if I maybe around some of these edges, I want to add like a bunch more stones that could be doable. And yeah, let's do that. So let's art around the edges, a bunch more stones, and I'm just going to art those as like their own little thing. So I'm going to art blend on top of this. I'm going to duplicate my stone generator over here. And for the stone generator, I basically want to We have this edge tact, but I think I want to can I use this yeah, you know what? This is far enough out. I should be able to use this. So if I add a blurs blur. Sorry. Actually, I changed my mind. Let's add a blend. And let's just go ahead and art our Edge stat on top of this, and now we basically need to break up our edge stat, that's not all over the place. Didn't we have a Clouds one in here. Here we go. Let's see if we can do that. Let's plug in our Clouds one. Sets to be subtract. So here, now we have some of those edges. And if I plug this in here, some of these edges will have lots of stones. Now, I'm not sure if this will look that's good. So that's something we'll see. Let's plug this into our blend and set this to be Maxton. So let's see before, after. So we really start to push in those clusters. You know what? That actually. Yeah, that works. Yeah, you can see like we have added a bunch of stones just sitting in some of these areas. I was a bit worried about the transition, but I think this might actually work. So, let's go back to Camera one. Okay, so that's pretty good. So we got those stones sitting in there. That's all fine. Our normal map is I don't think it's too strong. I think it's just because of the there's only gray in here. So that's pretty good. So we got this softness going on. We got this going on. Anything else I need to do on the shape before I move on. Let's see. So yeah, like these really light shapes, I wouldn't do those in the texture because my texture is tiling. If I really want to get something like that, I would make a unique norm map and just use it as a norm map only decal on top of the road. Okay, so we got those stone formation sitting in here, cracks. Let's start by adding a few more cracks in between our stones. I think that's quite nice. I almost forgot about that. And for those cracks, honestly, what we can do is we can just open up our basic material. Where are you basic, basic I need to find it. 1 second. I found it. So what we are going to do? Because why would we remake the exact same thing? I'm going to steal up until, um, Yeah, you know what? Let's steal up until this point. The cool thing is you can literally just copy this. You need to remember, actually, let's also copy this mask and this mask because else it wouldn't work. Copy this and you can then just go into your advanced tarmac and you can just past it in here. So I can now go in here and this needs to be in the broken tarmac, so just do this. Oh, we didn't need that. Now, of course, we need to do some cleanup, make it work for our version. But what we can do is we can just select it, right click Ara frame and just call this frame and cracks, for example. Okay. And if you then double click, it will regenerate all of your thumbnails. So let's have a look at this. We have a tile generator, a blend, a distance node. These cracks, I'm actually going to go in my tile generator, and I probably want to make the cracks a little bit smaller. So let's set this to 64 by 64. We then do outer levels, Finag detect Um, yeah, actually, the edge string should be fine. Invert, warp it around. S. Do I need to, like, slow blur it? That's fine. And add some more warping like that. Okay, so that's fine. I just want to go into this warp and probably in this one because these cracks, they are here see, they are quite a bit more warpy, so warpi, probably not even a word, but let's set the scale up a little bit for Burling noise, and then just tone down density a bit more. But, yeah, we just get some of that warping. And another thing I want to do is I kind of want to I might need to make them bigger in this specific case. But maybe this slope blur already takes care of that. So what I can do is we have this plant over here. I can add another blend on top and just throw in our cracks. Then if we go ahead and set this to be multiply, now we have our cracks on top of this. Now, what would be cool is if we have the in betweens of those cracks a little bit rougher. So this one that we have over here, let's see if we look at the intensity, one thing that you sometimes might want to try is add a transform on top of your moisture noise, and you set it to X two, which means that we scale it up. Now, this will often give us larger details, although in this case, they are too large. So in this case, I'm not going to do that, but if you do that, I would also recommend because if you press space, you can see that it's no longer tiling, because if you scale something up, it is no longer tilableOly if you scale it down. So then I would add like a a make it tile photo grayscale note. That's we'll just make a tile again. In my case, I'm not going to do it because it turns out that it actually looks nice like this. So we'll just have to see. So we have these cracks here. Let's tone down the opace quite a bit. They can be quite sloppy because we break them up, and what we will do is in the version where we will have only clean tarmac later on. In that version, we won't have them as strong. So let's start by doing an opacity around 0.17 Okay, so that is really intense. So the cracks work, but I need to really mess them up a lot more. So first of all, let's start by just fixing our intensity. 0.09? I think 0.09 works. And now I'm just going to basically go in and let's start by, for example, this over here, let's, we cannot push that too much, actually. 0.04 in this one. Here, let's push this one up to an uncomfortable position just to see if it breaks because it might look very noisy, but what I'm hoping is that because there's so much noise going on over here that it would actually work. So seeing this, now that we've done that, we actually want to probably make this a little bit stronger. 0.17. Sorry if I don't always call out the values, but there are so many values that we're working with that I sometimes forget. Okay, so that's looking pretty good. We got those cracks. Let's go into our free cam. Okay, so we got those cracks. They might feel a little bit strong and if I just go in here, let's set this to 0.13 0.13. And if I just go into my very fine cracks over here, maybe if I just add like the tiniest bit of a blur. So blurring it will just make it and look softer, but also look a little bit bigger. The only thing that is risky is that the blur might make it harder for these cracks to actually register. But here, you can see that when I blur it, there's actually quite a big difference here before and after. So that's what I mean it might damage some things, but we'll see Now, you know what? It doesn't. These cracks are good. Let's go into our showcase. I like to, of course, make everything look very nice compared to Camera one because that will be our main camera that we'll create our beauty render from. So I'm going to make these 0.15 in the final strength, and I need to break them up a little bit because we now have a few to many quacks. So we can do that simply probably after we've done our let's do after our invert rascal. Let's add a simple blend. Let's add a uniform color that will be a gray scale at white, throw it into the top. So we're basically just going to use a mask, and we are going to mask out some of these areas. For this, I'm going to go let's do clouds two with the random seat this time because I don't want to just keep using the same clouds to. Ater levels, and I'll later on show you how you can optimize this stuff. It just pushes out I think something like this, throw it in here. See? So now they are only in some areas, which will hopefully also translate correctly here, and that I don't lose the ones that I really liked, I'm losing the ones I really liked. Because this area, I want to have this area also to show some cracks if possible, because I really like those. So if I just go in here, I can simply well, I can actually look in here. It's probably around this area. So if I just play around with my random seat, see? So now I can see some more cracks. Yeah, so we got some cracks here. We got some cracks here. We got a few more. Here and there, I think I want to have a few more cracks. So when you want more cracks, you can just go in here. Push this, push this more towards the black, like this. There we go, let you do the trick. Okay, cracks, check. We've done those things. I still feel like my asphalt is too high, but when I look at it from the side, no, it's not, see? So it's just like a bit of an illusion. So we got this stuff done. Okay, what next? If I have a look over here at my stones, for example, these stones that I have over here, they feel very round. Now, some of these stones actually do feel round, but I feel like I wanted to get a few more sharper stones, especially like the big ones. That might be nice if I can capture that, if I can capture that. So now that we've done a racks because we are running out of time, in the next chapter, what we'll do is we will go ahead and we will continue and start by improving the stones, and after that, we'll have another look at what else we need to do. 13. 12 Creating Our Damage Mask: Okay, so it is mask creation time. So a few takeaways. Big shapes. So they are all solid shapes. We don't want to have tiny little bits in our mask. We just want to go for big shapes. The far off that you can see over here we want to capture. So that far off is going to be a little bit interesting. It feels like the stones are incorporated with it, which actually within substance makes it handy for us because this effect that you can see over here, that is literally the max lighting effect, basically where they are just merging together. Oh, let's go ahead and get started with this. So yeah, we are going to later on, replace them here, but I first want to just generate a mask, so I'll go down here or something. Something nice, big shapes. We can do big shapes using, blurring and everything. So that's not really that big of a problem often. Getting rid of those really tiny small shapes, that's a little bit annoying, but we'll see. So if we Go for I feel like I'm just using crunch map series one too much lately, but we'll try it again. Okay, so if we do this, balance down, contrast all the way up. Now, this has a lot of little small shapes, but hopefully I can find a way to mask out those really large shapes. And I want to make this fullly procedural, so I want to have control over how many of these shapes I want. Let's go for this one again. So I believe this is pretty much the same as this one. So we got this. Okay, now, to blend out these large shapes, what I want to do first is I want to go ahead and I just want to add, like, a bluh, high quality gray scale. And I might need to do a little bit of fiddling around here in order to make this perfect. But I think it is good if I do this camera instead of just magically showing you how I did all of this. So we got these shapes, like you can see over here. So now we already start to get some of these large shapes. Now, all these little tiny pieces over here, I don't really care for them. So the first thing that I can try to do to mask those out is I can add a flood fill, and then I can add a flood fill to bounding box size. And what this often does is it will often basically make the larger shapes lighter and the other shapes, of course, less. But we can use this to our advantage. So we can add like a histogram, select. And if we set a contrast all the way up, we can hopefully set our range, see? So we can kind of, like, control how many pieces. Let's see how many pieces we want in something like Yeah, something like this seems like enough pieces. Okay, so we got this. Now the next problem is going to be like we have all these Well, basically this, it's looking very strange. Yeah, we definitely need to play around to that, because right now it's just like one blobby mess, and I don't know. It looks very strange. What I often do like to do is, I like to throw an edge deact just to see if I can it doesn't always work, but just to see if I can get some really large shapes like you can see, I'm trying to just use an edge tact, basically to my advantage to get some really funny looking shapes. And here, let's press innards. I don't know. This could work. Now, this looks very silly because it doesn't really feel like this. But if I would add like a slow blur on top of this, that could do the trick. Yeah, that could do the trick. These patches, I think for now we can leave them. I'm not sure yet if I want to remove them or not, but if I do, we can just use the flood fill method for that. So let's say we got this. Now if I add a slope blur gray scale to this, which remember we can use to cut out pieces, we can add a purlin noise to this. So I'm going to add my purlin noise here and let's make this a little bit bigger. And then in slope blur samples all the way up, mode to minimum and here. You can see that I can start by cutting out some of these pieces. I'm not a big fan of what is happening here, but we'll see. So this will cut out some pieces, let's play around to the perlis size to see if we said to around 22 and then intensity to around 1.3 ish and then add one more levels. See, we can start by creating some cuts like this. Okay, so we got something like this. Now we do need to make sure that this works with a height map and everything. The first thing that we can try is we can try a very simple bevel node. And a bevel node just basically arts or it will tw art like a bevel. If we push this out, the bevel will become nice and round. If we push this in, it will become quite sharp. In our case, we probably want to go out because we want to go for nice and round bits. And you can also play around with your smoothing in order to, like get the same fact. So it's basically like a non uniform blur, but with more controls and with a flat base. So let's say something like this. If we would add a normal to this, it will look like this. So based upon that, I can also play around with my smoothing and let's see. A mask like this might work. Yeah, yeah, I think that could work. If we add the stones in here, I think this could work. So let's give this go. So we got these pieces. Now, I want to decide I'm going to have my White pieces to be perfect to be clean. Yeah, white pieces to be clean. Okay, let's get started. Let's start by adding a blend. We want to add this to here, which is our clean tarmac. And then we want to add over here our broken tarmac to the top. And I'm going to, first of all, just get started by adding my height down here. Okay, so this would now be blending together. Now, what I want to try and kind of get is I want to mimic also having some stones over here. So let's see, right now, I'm just masking this out. I basically need to make sure that I'm not masking out extent like other stones. But the coincidence is because this is the exact same look that they do fit quite well. So let's first of all, just see how this looks just because I'm quite curious about this. So if we just hold shift and just flip this around, Oops. Here we go. Okay, so I'm not sure if the heights is working as well, but we'll Yeah, here. So when I see there's a few things, we need to make sure that these stones they keep going around the corners. So for the rest, we can keep the stones here. They are actually working quite well. So coincidentally, I do not need to do too much about these masks that we have over here. I can just kind of like leave them. But yeah, I definitely need to get the stones closer to these edges, and I need to have the fall off to most likely be, I need to have the fall off to be stronger. So let's get started by see bev fall off. Actually, a befo fall off is fine. I think what is wrong is it is the blend over here. So if we just add a quick outer levels. Here see? Oh, yikes. Never mind. Because we have very specific levels in this. We just need to add the normal levels. And if we go in here, we basically want to push this all up. So that over here, it also gets pushed up. Here, see, now this gets pushed up quite a bit, which is good. So now we are getting close the height that I want. Okay, so next stop is going to be having the stones closer to that area. So what I can do for this is let's bring these mask out over here. I can Go ahead and basically do something like this. That's Art Blend. So it's a bit of tink work. So basically what I can do is I'm going to master this out so that we won't have the stones around this area, but the only reason I'm doing that is so that I can see where they are. So if I blend this together and sets to be subtracted, I know that in these areas we will not have stones, right? Yes, because they go into the white areas. Based upon that, I can go in here and I can play around with my balance. Here they do now go around these areas over here, but just not everywhere. Based upon this, I can play around with my balance and I can say, I throw this in here, so the stones will be quite close to those areas. That is fine. Now what I want to do is, let's see. Over here, I probably want to go ahead and do the exact same thing where I plug this one Throw this in here. Let's see. So we add this and then we add even more stones over here. And then we are like a bunch of x or stones next to it. So it's mostly focused around the larger stones. No, sorry, I need to invert this. Instead of subtracts, just send to art subtract. There we go art subtract. That was the So art subtract and now you want to go ahead and push this out. That's not working the way I want it to. I think I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to invert this. I'm going to invert my mask because normally art subtract is like a cheap way to very quickly do it. So we are going to set this one. There we go. Multiply. That should do the tick. Multiply should do the twick because now the stones are being placed. Oh, my God. I'm still messing this up. Subtract. Yes. Okay, subtract. Sorry, guys. I'm really sorry. Subtract is the right blending mode. Jesus. Uh huh. Okay. I'll take a break after this one. So we set this to be subtract, but we need to do it with an invert like this. And what that will do is it will basically place all my stones around here. Add these extra stones, throw it all together and boost it like that, which means we get this. So now the stones are very close to our other pieces. Great. That is exactly what I wanted. It just took me a while to get there. Okay, so that's looking pretty good. So we have our stone sitting in here. I feel like the fall off and the intensity can be a little bit stronger. So if we go, first of all, for intensity, push up the white levels, and then for the fall off, if we go over here, let's see. Maybe it's the smoothing that is causing here. Maybe if I set the smoothing a little bit lower Yeah, that should hopefully work a bit better. There we go. See now, we have a stronger flow going on. Okay, so now we get a look like this, which is pretty decent. What I'm going to do now is I'm just going to finish off by just doing some very basic random setup so that we can get a better look at this. Let's get started by going over here and just right click and press art camera. Now, in camera one, this will be our main camera that we are not going to move. So let's turn on safety frames. And using this camera, what I'm going to start with, I'm just going to give it like a nice angle. You can hold Shift and right click to move your sky around. Let's say an angle like this. Just place it into place, something like this. And then what you can do is you can press the little lock next to your camera so that you can no longer accidentally move it. Now, it also locks my setting. So I just need to temporarily turn it off, set my sharpening a little bit sharper, set my bloom around the same level as my size, and throw my vignetting a little bit, just to give it some dark corners around here. Next to this, what I also tend to do is I tend to go to tone mapping and set this to HJL and then I just like play around a bit with my exposure and contrast. So this will just give me a bit more interesting tone mapping, which will make it look a little bit sharper. So we got those pieces. Now the next one would be for me so lock to go into our sky and we probably want to go ahead and we want to just grab like a sky. So if you go to presets in your sky, here you have all of your skies. If you've not yet downloaded them, you need to double click on the sky in order to download it. If you have downloaded them, it's just a single double click, and then it will apply. So Ali Halway see, I can very quickly apply my different skies and just find something. And for now, I want to go for something that is quite neutral still. See. See, basically I just need to find something that is quite neutral in terms of color, maybe a little bit in the here, something like this might work. So a little bit bluish, but still with some orange in here. Let's go for something like this, because it has also some strong lighting. Of course, this will most likely change later on. Once you've done that, so you got your sky now ready to go, basically. The next thing that we're going to do is we are going to go ahead and add a light. If you right click, you can add a light and add a directional light. Now, this directional light, if you click on it, you can go up here or you can press W and go to translate. I like to always move them a little bit to the side. And then if you press E, you can go to rotate or once again, you can click here. And I'm basically going to have this light to come from my it's a bit hard to see because we have a white texture, but I want it to come from my right top. And then you can see here that it already adds a lot to our scene. If we just have like a single light with just some shadows. You basically want to get this light if you want, you can even set the brightness, to have half of our cylinder or half of our sphere. Into the light, something like this. And once you've done that, just tone down the brightness, give it a little bit of an orange color. That's what I often do. Just mimic like the sun. And for now, let's go for 6.5. Of course, remember, we are looking at a white texture, so it might change. Next this, I also often like, add some rim lights, but they often don't yet work as well with white. So if you press Contra D, you can duplicate the light, and a rim light is basically this. You basically let your light come from the very top and there you basically, like, rotate it so that it looks and that it captures just like the very tips. This is great to preview your roughness map, like your material response from a distance. But yeah, the thing is that A see. I often do something like this, and then this one I make always like a little bit more of like a bluish color. And then just tone down brightness. But the bitnss is going to be a bit stronger. I'm going to wait with the other one. There will often also be one in the left corner. But I think in this case, because we are still looking at the we texture, I will leave it to this. So we now got these pieces. Now, basically what I want to do here is I'm going to first of all, let's go in my inclusion map and just set this a little bit stronger, like this. I want to go up here to our little settings and just make sure that high DPI is turned on. This will often give you a little bit more like a sharper look. And for the rest, go into camera one and maybe set the sharpening a little bit stronger, like this. And I'm going to save my scene. I would say that it's like a decent basic setup. Say, everything still feels a little bit blurry, so I also need to double check my texture to make sure that there are no problems there. One cool thing if you are ready for it, what you can try to do is already turn on rate racing just to give it a nice look. Aateracing often with stones like this can cause problems with the shadows if you do not have enough resolution. So it's kind of like we need to double check. Okay, so this is currently our rate racing. I think the brightness of our sun might be a little bit too strong. Yeah, if we'd like, go into our tarmac. So because this would, of course, often be like a little bit darker, as you can see over here. Here we go, see? So when it looks a little bit darker, it feels a little bit more logical how everything looks. So then we've set our light to like eight. Really, eight is that bright. 6.5? That's strange that there's such a difference in brightness, 6.8. Yeah, basically, just to make the rate racing look a bit more interesting. It works better when we have a fill texture, but here you can already see. Now, looking at this, last thing I will do is I will go into my camera one and I'm going to just set my contrast to be a little bit sharper. It looks like that I cannot reach the contrast amount that I want. You can also play around with your sky to try and capture exactly here, see? Because like this, the sky is very bright. But if I just rotate it, I can get more of my sky to look into the darkness like you can see over here. So that's something that you can work with. Now, we can see some interesting things going on with our rate raising. I am personally going to just leave it off for now so that I have this look. And the next chapter, what we'll do is we will do some quick polishing. And after that, yeah, we will just do some improvements and then start working on the sand in between and adding variations and doing a bunch of different things. So let's go ahead and continue with that. 14. 13 Creating Our Ground: Okay, so the pointy stones that we have over here. You can probably remember that we actually did something for that. So if we go ahead and go to our stone generator over here, we can go in and, you know, temporarily swap this around. Yard. There we go. So here we like this pointiness. So let's see what we do. So we add this pointiness out the level, so that's all fine. Although it's the pointiness, we might be able to push this up. But what I'm thinking about is we most likely end up cutting some of it out. So let's go. Actually, no, we don't do that everywhere. Let's go ahead and look at this version over here and now start by adding the pointiness. I need to make sure that I don't break it. So if I add this pointiness, it pushes it out, but it does add some of that sharpness. I don't think that's worth it doing it over there. But what I can do is I can go ahead and basically what I'm doing here is I'm creating this mask and then adding poisons, but I believe that I can add that mask somewhere else, too. You know what? I might be able to add that mask in my advanced tarmac. Oh, sorry, I forgot to do something. I forgot to just copy this. And doing it in my advanced tarmac, I feel that is a little bit safer in this case, because I just need it for 1 stone. You can do it in your stone generator, but because we already have set up our stone generator in a very specific way. I don't want to risk accidentally breaking it again. So if we copy this stuff in here, I believe that we have this stone mask over here. Now, if I throw this into an invert gray scale, distance it, invert grayscale again, out levels it, I should be able to now see, so we add our levels. Let's do this before we add our levels. Throw this on top of here. And I will mask these out later on, so don't worry about that. Yeah, so it's multiply the only one I can on Mint darken. What is Mint Darken doing? I think let's have a look at my norm map because I can read this way better in my norm map compared to the rest. So Mint darken adds some sharpness to some of them, that's actually pretty good. And the multiply multiply just destroys it, so that's not good. So let's go for Mint dark. Let's also look in some other areas just as a second opinion before. Okay, so Min darken definitely add some sharpness. So that's good. Now that we have this one, the tricky thing is with this sharpness, it's right now it doesn't it kind of needs more samples almost. But then we get into that funny area where if we want to be able to smooth this, we would lose that sharpness. For now, let's not do that. For now, let's actually just have a quick look over here. Let's go to my free cam. Okay, see, so yeah, now we have some of these sharper stones. That's actually really good that we have that stuff. Let's start by just masking them out because I don't want to have them all over the place. And I can just very simply do that by going over here. So here we have our invert grey scale. I need more space. But I will nicely clean this up later on. And we can go and start by adding a flat fill. See, I'm going to do this before I invert it. Flat fill flat fill to random grayscale. And then in here the gram select, push up your contrast. Tone down your range so that you don't and then you find whatever pieces you don't want. And now we can just go ahead and we can add a blend over here. Throw this in the top and just set this to be a subtract. So let's see if those edges cause any trouble. No, they don't. So then we can just ignore them. So now we have this sharpness only sitting on, like, a few stones, not on all of them. That's pretty good. So we got that sharpness in there. Looking at it from a distance, I'm not sure if I even need to blur it. Like you might want to blur it a tiny bit, but for now, I'm actually happy with this because here, I can see these nice little points and the sharpness. So this is actually working quite well. See if I tile it even more. Yeah, see here because once you tie it even more and becomes these wy small tiles, you can see that, that detail becomes a little bit more difficult to see anyway. Doing this tiing, this actually looks quite cool, so I'm not sure if we might want to go for a tining that's higher than two. Because if you do that, you would need to tone down your displacement, so it would look something like this, for example. Let's see how that looks. I think this might actually be a nice render for us to work on because here, we can still see everything quite well, but we get a bigger overview of the entire material. So yeah, let's do that. I quite like that. Let's start by doing something like this. Let's hope that the rad racing will also still agree with Looks like it does. Okay, so that's quite cool. Okay, so we got the pieces done. Let's turn off raid raising and let's get started with the rest. So for this, maybe at this point, I just want to, like, rotate this a little bit so that I get a little bit more of like the bigger stone patches over here, you can see. And now what I want to do is I want to start working on the sand in between the stones. So the sand in between the stones. For that, technically, it's just more stones, but at that point, we have so little resolution that we will just go for, like, noise, basically. Yeah, let's go here, see. Sand in between the stones. Let's go in here. And I think maybe good if we just do a very quick cleanup pass. So this one over here. Oh, this looks ugly, but let's call this mask generation. And also, of course, things that you can start doing is, for example, you can start docking things that you no longer use. Things like here, like levels I don't use because it's just a clamp, the bounding box size I don't use, adjtet I might need, the pearly noise, you can like dock. So yeah, you can dock a bunch of that stuff. Another cool thing is that if you want to align your notes, you can select them, and up here you have your alignment tools. So this will just very quickly and neatly organize things for you if you want, so that you can then hear like nicely. Place it down. And it just makes everything feel a little bit more clean. Also, I'm used to using this type of previewing. However, what you can do is you can go up here to the rectangle links, and that will basically give you this type of previewing but I cannot read this. I actually find it difficult to read this because after years, I'm just used to seeing this. So you'll get better at it that it will be very easy for you to read exactly where everything is going and stuff like that. So we got those pieces all ready to go. Another thing that's annoying me is that my outputs are so far away, so let's do this. Okay, Sand. So this is all still going to be our height map over here. Set our levels. Yes. So I want to set my sand over here in between these pieces because before we mask it out, so let's go ahead and start with that. Let's add a blend here, and we will just create our sand like in this area. For the sand, the sand is going to be super easy. It's basically going to be a generic noise, like a factual sun base that is a little bit stronger in roughness, and it's going to be like a rougher noise, for example, the B&W spots one. And we are just going to blend these two together in order to create sand that has different roughnesses. So if we set this to a multiply in our blend and play around with our obesity a little bit, we can then add a norm map. OpenGL. Okay. And when I look at this, let's start by just toning down the roughness of our fractual sum. That will actually matter quite a bit like this. So now we get some rough sent over here. You can play around, yeah, we might actually want to go for the more smaller send over here. But basically, you can also hear play around like your roughness. So it's very easy for us to just play around with these few sliders to get something that looks like sand. Now, once we've done that, we have this one, but, of course, we need to capture a mask, and I believe that we can just reuse this mask because this send is already included. So if I just reuse this mask, I can throw this on top. Throw this at the bottom over here. And I want to set this to be Max Lighten. I believe let me just double check. Yeah, Max lighten and then tone down the opacity a lot. And let's just have a look. You basically just need to look mostly in your normal in order to know how strong. Okay, so this is bad. So we don't want that mode because we are losing it. Another cool thing that we can do is if it doesn't work in a temp because this sent doesn't really need to be in our tmp per se. What we can do is we can just do this after we've already converted it to a normal map. So here we have our normal map. I can then do, for example, this because a norm MP is a lot more forgiving because a nomp you can overlay without affecting anything below it. So I can add a normal node to this. Open GLD, and let's keep it as one for now. And then in my normal, I can go for a normal combine and set the normal combined to be high quality. And I believe that we've already done this in the basics, actually. And now with this normal map, just add a quick blend. And the top, just add a normal Clog node, which is just like a plain norm map, and then use your mask in the bottom. So is this? Yeah, see? No, wait, sorry, I need to invert gray scale my mask. There we go. It's in between. We throw this into the normal combine, and there you go. And now you can just play around with your normal intensity in order to, like, get stronger or less strong. Sand, which should look something like this, see? So now we get to send in between. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to make it a little bit stronger. Let's go for like three. And another thing that I noticed there is we have some patches that feel like, let's press space. We have some patches, O over here that have almost nothing in them. You know what? Actually, that might actually be fine because it gives us a little bit of a calm effect. So in the massive mess that's going on over here, you all of a sudden just have a little bit more of a calm area, and we will just in our base column make this look a bit more interesting. So we got these pieces over here. That's looking pretty good. Now, what I will be doing in the next chapter is, I'm just going to go off camera, and I'm just going to have a look this time so that I have a little bit of a plan going on because there's just some thinking. And then we'll just continue. But we have all the base stones are here. For example, maybe we want to break up some of these areas a lot more in certain areas where they are no longer cracks. They are just going to be like these broken up patches. But that's something that I will have a think about and we will work on this in the next chapter. 15. 14 Adding Large Patch Cracks: Okay, so I had a look and yes, I think the last thing we need to do for height map is we need to break up our solid surfaces a lot more. So right now, we have them way too perfect. So I want to have a few things. One, I want to have very slight height variation in between the pieces. Two, I want to add like this breakup like you can see over here sometimes, just like some random patches. So we'll just do those on the outside. Here you can see it even better. And yeah, I think after that, maybe, like, add some randomized stuff in there and we'll see how it looks. So for these pieces, probably need to start by doing most of it after if it on load after we've done our blend. So here, this right now it feels very plain. So I'm going to get started with this. First of all, what I will do is I will start by going over just some very soft height variation. The way that I'm going to do that is I'm just going to add a very simple blend after our levels over here, and I'm just going to basically throw on a very large pearling noise. And set is to be like multiply. So that should create some denting in. You won't probably be able to see it, Wi in our normal map. Oh, yeah, you probably see it a little bit. Maybe semi peronal noise is a little bit bigger. You see, kind of like if I said it smaller, you can see it a little bit. And just like we need to make sure that I don't overdo it. Yeah, you can see it like a tiny bit, maybe make it a little bit stronger you multiply. Here, see? And it just gives us that effect as if on top of everything having been broken, a lot of trucks went over it and it just got some bumps and bits and all those kind of things. So I think that's quite interesting. Another thing I want to do is I want to improve my mask a little bit. So, if we just press D, I have this mask. I'm going to start by just going into my mask and throwing on a very large slobber with also once again, a purlin noise. This can hopefully just break up some of my edges a little bit more. Might be a little bit too much, but we'll see. So slow blur, samples all the way up, intensity down. And probably, you know what? No, in this case, we can actually go for, like, blur. So if I set my direction I was hoping to get these things. This is what I'm hoping for. So where they have a large green, maybe it works better if I do minimum. No, that's maximum. Mm. Yeah, I think it actually works better if I go for, like, a maximum. So we basically just have these pieces that are being pushed out, which will look like this. And hopefully, what I have in mind is that it will kind of fade in here, see? Yeah, it does work. So you can see that you get some fading in where it just slowly starts to fade into the rest of the ground. So almost like it has been crushed together. And that was basically my general idea. The only problem is that we sometimes get these areas over here where I just need to make sure that my mask is sharp enough that it doesn't accidentally generate stones on top of this. But I think, yeah, here, this kind of stuff, it is working a lot better. So let's just see where so we use this mask. Oh, but we aren't Oh, wait, because we are pushing it out, that's most likely the problem. Yeah, because we are pushing it out, it doesn't work over here. So instead, what I want to do is I probably want to go in and use this mask. I will only use it in this one over here. No, wait, I need to use it in all of them. I'm going to use it over here. I have this. Come on. It doesn't allow me to that's always so annoying. There you go. Okay, so we need to add it over here. So we have this mask. We plug this in here, so it's still soft, and then we all shift and plug this around. And then this mask, because this one goes over here, before we do the invert grayscale, I will just leave this on here. That's not really a problem. The goal is that right now it is picking up on this mask, which means that it will hopefully not generate everywhere. Here you see and now some of those stones get removed, and that's looking a lot better. Okay, so we got that stuff going for us. That's pretty good. Let's go into our camera one. Now that I have that softness, I feel like that maybe we want to push this out a little bit more. So if I'm switching between free Cam and everything a lot. Yeah, I think I want to push it out just a little bit more. So if I go up here, we have these levels. Let's just push them out a bit, because we are, of course, kind reducing them again because we are adding a pearling noise on top. Yes, there we go. I think I'm looking mostly around here in the top left corner. And I think I'm happy with this. Okay, cool. So we got that stuff all ready to go. Now we are going to just break up some of these edges, and that's probably the last thing. So I don't want to have it everywhere. I just want to have sometimes some random edges that have these broken up patches. Now, we had a noise, and I will see if that works, the grunge map, this one. So this might actually work if we push up our contrast and it's not so much this one that works, what will hopefully work, it is a edge detect on top of it. So if we set the edge detect and just tone down our roundness and just like an invert, we can almost use this as cracks, basically. So if we have this version, and let's start adding that here, let's start adding that on top of here just because I can see it a bit better. So we will push out this version. I will start very easy and just throw this already in here and just set like a subtract. And let's see how it looks. Okay, so we are pushing it out in certain locations. Do I need to do this in more locations? Um, no, I think this is fine. Now what we need to do is we need to mask out to only have this like the very edges. So if we do another edge detect, we probably just want to grab this one. Make this a very large edge detect, something like this. Oh, and invert it. So now we have these edges over here. Twice some my edge a little bit higher. So there we go. So we got these patches. Now if we blur this because we do, of course, want to not have them strong here. So we kind of just fade them out, like you can see over here. So just fade them out a little bit. And now, lastly, what we need to do is we just need to go in here and just steal some of these pieces. Contras Contra vie. Here we go. So we steal this, this, this, this, and then it goes in here, which will hopefully break up the edges even more. Another thing that we can do is in the edge tack this time we can set our edge width to be probably a little bit thicker because these do look a lot thicker over here compared to all of our other cracks. So we can make those a little bit thicker. And I feel like that maybe we want to add a few more. And the way that I do that is I just add a blend and a transform. And I basically just push these two together and just slightly move the transform around in my center, which will do this. If I said this to art, see? It will just push this around, which hopefully in our architect, it will not become too overwhelming, but we'll see. There we go. Okay. So that is the first generation. Now what I want to do is I only want to have this in certain areas. I should be able to do that. Also. Well, actually, I can do it on both sides. I can do it or here. Or in our mask. Let's try our mask first. Let's add a blend. And we are basically going to grab a Berlin noise at, like, a large level. Maybe change your disorder in order to get, like, a slightly different angle and then add a levels, and we basically want to use these levels to push out some of the blacks and whites to get something like this. If we throw this on top and set this to be subtract, that should mask out here for now, play around with my disorder. See, it should be masking out in certain areas, and now we can just choose how much or how little we want of these broken pieces. Let's say something like this and you can just play around with your disorder to get them exactly in the areas you want. Finally, tone down your obste that they are not as strong and let's actually have look in our normal first. They might feel a little bit sharp in our normal, but we'll fix it later on. Let's actually see how this looks. I see almost nothing. I need to make them bigger. Let's go ahead and set our e detect a little bit stronger. Also in here, let's say this a little bit stronger in our opacity. Now I'm starting to see them. Okay, see? So we start to get these broken up pieces. It's going to our free cam. Uh, I have no idea where I am. Okay. Anyway, here we go. I just want to get something like shadow. Okay, so we got these pieces sitting in here. What I want to do is I want to have them a little bit less strong. I want to have them a little bit blurry. Let's add a blur, high quality gray scale in between our cracks, just to give them a little bit more of like a softness to them. You see, quite subtle. So we got some of that softness going on, and maybe I want to have a few more. So maybe I want to go in here and just in my levels, push those levels back a little bit so that we get a few more of them. I feel like this might still be too strong, but we'll see. So it's starting to get there. We're starting to get these nice pieces. Let's make this a little bit less strong, even There we go. Now we're slowly starting to get there. So here, we just get some of these random cracks sitting in between. Seeing those random patches that we get over here and there. I'm going to probably, it's mostly in this area. I'm just going to change my disorder because I think we have enough, I just want to have it in a different area. Here like this. And if we just have a look, yeah, okay, so we have plenty of cracks everywhere. So maybe we want to, like, set our edge detect a little bit bigger so it's going a little bit more towards the center. There we go. See? I think that will do the trick. So we got that stuff. I'm going to make it just a little bit less strong, and then I'm going to call today because it's just a little bit too overwhelming. But I need to keep in mind that most likely when we start adding our base color, based upon our base color, we want to, like, increase it or decrease it a lot. So that's something just to keep in mind. But this is looking good. I quite like this. Yeah, here, I just play around with like my offsets Yes, I like that. That's looking good. Okay, so we got all of these pieces ready to go. So I'm just playing around to my offset a little bit more. See if I can get a nice angle. Okay. So we have done this stuff. I would say that for now, my height map is done and my normal map also. So not as many notes. If you even imagine this was me five years ago, I believe, this was me five years ago, to create a similar material and see how many notes I used and how unclean it looks. So it just practice makes perfect to be able to know how to do your materials in even less and less notes. And at one point, you will just get less and less and less, and it just becomes very nice like this. Although even this is still quite messy, but that's something we can work on. So we got these pieces. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to add a frame to this, and this is going to be our large patch Oops, cracks, something like this. This over here, I'm just going to the frame and call it. Height map underscore, combine. This one will just be called normal map. These pieces we can call outputs. So this is just some cleanup before we move on to our base color in the next chapter. Then with this kind of stuff, I would just make them nicely aligned a little bit more, you can see over here. Just to clean up. And what you can also do already, if you want, is you can see if you can clean up some of these notes. I'm not going to do that yet because I want to dedicate my own chapter to it because else it might get lost in translation because it's quite important for you to know this. And I'm sure that not everyone is watching this specific chapter if they already know how to do most of this stuff and just here for other stuff. It's just how tutorials work. Not many people actually follow the entire 100% tutorial. Some people just cherry pick whatever they want to get in it. I'm just going to call this done for now and in the next chapter, what we'll do is we will start working on a base color. Our base color will be most likely in the direction of probably in direction of this color. So a little bit darker so not so much gray, so a little bit more like this darker color and a little bit more dusty and sandy instead of mossy and wet. So that's the general idea for this. So let's go ahead and continue with that in the next chapter. 16. 15 Creating Our Base Color Part1: Okay, so let's start with the base color. Now, I'm going to start with the clean tarmac part of the base color, and then we'll move over to the stones. For the clean tarmac, what I want to do is I most likely want to use the gradient map technique. We've used it in the simple tiles also before. So let's go ahead and add a gradient map to get start with. And for the clean tarmac, I want to probably grab this one before we add our pearling noise. Yeah, this one should hopefully do the trick. Let's just grab this height map, throw it in here, and I'm basically going to capture somewhere in this area. So I don't know if I can show you if I go to Grennthropi gradients. Wait, maybe I can show you. Can I scal this down? There we go. Okay, that should be doable. So let's see. Let's go for let's start over here. It's a bit tricky for me too. Okay, that's not looking good. Let's do something like a bit shorter. I was hoping that it would bring out those little stones a lot more. I think that the stones are not strong enough for us to pick up, you can see a tiny bit, but it's not as nice as I would have hoped it to be. So if the stones are not able to pick up, I should be able to just kind of split them up and more likely use something like this. So let's see if I, I should be able to just use something like this. Whatever I do this, I grab this one. And then what I will do is I will have another gradient map, and this gradient map will be for our stronger stones so we're basically just going to split up the texture in a few bits. So we start with here, this is already starting to look a lot better. So we are going to start by grabbing gradients, and this is just going to be our bare stones. So, if we go over here, we just want to grab something like you can see over here. Actually, that might be we will balance out the colors, don't worry, but I still want to see. I always like to try a few different colors and just see if we want to do only, like, a very short line like this, or if we want to go for more like a noisy line like that. I think we want to go for, like, a little bit more short. Sometimes takes a second to get exactly what you want. Here, let's have a look at something like this. And now what I want to do is I want to try and get more of my brownish dirt in between here. That is this one. So if we turn this here, like a more brown dirt. And let's see. So here we have our flat stones. I want to have these a little bit more gray scale. I'm just here, let's delete this one. So delete this one. Let's delete this one and this one and this one because there's almost these gradients don't really do much because they are not affecting as much. And now we can just go ahead and we can, by hand, maybe, balance out some stuff. You know, let's turn this into, like, bit more darker, something like that. So we just balance it out, and then here we have our orange. Let's turn this into a more dark orange. Let's get started with something like this. So this is like a very, very basic base. And then this one over here, we can do a grant dor. And we can grab, for example, more of the darker bits like over here. Mm. Something in this direction, for example, and then maybe grab some of the more lighter areas and just push them down a little bit more. See, I'm just trying to find this is the one, push it down a little bit more so that we get like this. Now, this might still look silly, but don't worry we will work on this to make it look more interesting. So if we now go ahead and first of all, blend, and I will need to blend the darkness spots. So if I add an HSL note, what I can do with that is use saturation and lightness. I can simply push my lightness down for this so that it becomes a bit darker and maybe also play around with your saturation a little bit, if you want, and you throw this into the top. Now, all I need to do is I need to grab the same mask that we use over here to blend them. Throw it in here, see? And then we can just playro with our pass. We don't want to have it as strong as in our height map. So we get something like this. Then we add another blend on top of this. And this blent will be for this graded map. And all we really need to do is we need to grab the stone. Actually, no, we cannot grab the stone mask because the stone mask is too large. So let's just grab a levels. Throw that as a mask and then just push your white slider up until, like, around this point. You can even, like, move your white slider back a little bit to have it blend a little bit better. So now we get these pieces sitting on top. Of course, what you can do at this point is you can if you want, play around with your obst a little bit, actually, you know what, no, I want probably just go in here and d HSL note. Because if I play around with my obste I can see the stones below it. I didn't think it was that bad, but it looks like it is. So here I can play around with my lightness to just and my saturation to get it exactly how I want it to be. So we now got something like this, so it's starting to sort of look like Tami. It might not look like this yet, but that's something we'll work towards. So we got these pieces over here. Now what I want to do is I want to start by just adding some very base dirt. So if we add a blend to this and add a uniform color, this uniform color will just be like a brownish dirt color, something like this, for example. And then in the bottom, what I want to do is I always first like to try and use the actual DRT node in this case, because the dut node can hopefully generate exactly what I need. So I have this du node, and basically, I need an ambonuclusion map and a curvature map. Those are the two important ones. Now, you know already how to create an ambien inclusion map. You just add an ambiclusion node. Curvature map is literally a curvature. That's what it's called, and it basically needs a non map input. So if we set this to OpenGL, we can start with the ambien oclusion. For the ambien clusion, I can just grab this version over here. That is no problem because here, because the em uclusion is strong enough to actually pick up in between all those cracks and everything. So you can plug this in. Curvature map, we need to add the norm map because we cannot use this one since it's already split up and just plug this into your norm map sent it to three so that's strong and throw this into your curvature. So then a curvature map is basically like etche highlights. That's how you can see them. Once you've done that, you should be able to get this. So now if I play around with my dirt level, you can see that I can basically create dirt in between all of the cracks, and I can also set my grunch amount to have more or less dirt. My etche masking doesn't do a lot when we have such very specific shapes. But basically, if you throw this into your blend, you should be able. Let's go in here. There we go. See? You should be able to get some dirt in between here. And now we can also just go in and we can, play around with our dirt level to have more or less play around with the colors that's not as overwhelming, but I just want to have this color to be like a little bit more of like an orange color. And also in our roughness, this will matter a lot in our roughness because we can make this look dull in our roughness so that it's well, dull, not shiny, and that we just capture that effect. Now, always with the base color, it's almost always a miss at the first time. You just need to get the bases in there, and then you need to balance it out. So when I look at this, I can see some white patches in here. Those might also be nice to just try and capture. For now, what I will do is I will just add a very simple blend and just duplicate my uniform color and just make this uniform color like whitish. And then in our blends, what we will do is I often just grab a grunge map for this kind of stuff. So let's say grunge map 013. Maybe play around a little bit more with your random seat and your balance and just try and get some nice masking to get these white patches, see? And then tone them way down so that they are just becoming, I need to play with my random seat. I need to have it a little bit more generic, something like this. Here you see. So now you can also play around with the contrast make them stronger or less strong. So yeah, there's a bunch of stuff that you can do in order to make this look more interesting. Now that we have this, this is a very basic base color. I first of all, just want to already try it out and make sure that we take this one completely to final before we move on to the stones version. For that, we need to do a few preparations. First of all, or the first thing is that I will add this one to my base color. And we also have we don't need a metallic map. We also have a roughness map. Now for the roughness map, what I want to do for this is a roughness map is gradient, as I said before, so we can do a gray scale conversion, and I just want to turn this one into grayscale conversion. The nice thing is because these stones are slightly lighter than the background, in our roughness map, they will actually also be slightly shinier than our background. We can then add the levels on top, and in these levels, we will throw in, for example, our dirt, like this. And we set this to be art, so the dirt will be even duller. Then we can add another blend and we can, for example, set this dirt up here. Also the art. So this dirt. Yeah, it will just basically add like a bunch of different dullness. Finally, if you just go ahead and add the levels after your gray scale conversion, this is for later on because we most likely just want to make this also a little bit lighter and we just want to play around with everything. So we throw this into our roughness like this. The very final thing we need to do is we need to actually set up a switch so that we can turn on and off the damage. Now, this switch we can most likely use all the way over here. So if we simply technically, if this would work, let's see. Let's add a gray scale that is white because oh, no, sorry, I did black. Yes, we need to have this to be black. Technically, if I would direct this into my blur, nothing should I should just nullify everything and should just become plain. Okay, so we still have some pieces in here. Where does this happen? Over here, over here, it still happens that we start to art more pieces. Now, that is no problem. That just means that we need to move this one a bit forward. And I believe I want to add this one then after here. And the reason I do that is because these outputs go to different areas, and it might be easier if I just add like a blend. Sorry, not a blend. A switch Grayscale. If stones is true, we will have stones I stones is false. So if I turn a switch to false, it will almost looks like we need to have a double switch. We need to have a switch over there, and we need to have a switch over here. So so these de vals. How is this? I think only the ground is the last thing that I need to do, I believe. Yes, because I add the ground after. See, before, after. Because I add the ground after, I can also because the ground will only show up whenever we have our broken pieces, I can also add the switch color this time in here, and I can say I Stones is true and if it is false do this. And swap it around. See? So this is now going to be our plane tarmac. So knowing that, we can just already expose this because I don't want to go to three switches all the time, just to turn them on and off. So I can go in here and I can press expose, and I will call this damaged underscored tarmac. So if damaged tarmac is true on all of them, it will happen. So this switch use the same value, damaged tarmac and this switch use the same value damage Stomac. And that should do the twig. So now if, for example, look at my normal, I click on my advanced Sarmac. We have this switch over here. Once again, just duplicate your identifier into label and damage give the second to reload that. No damage. And there we go. So that very easily turns it on and off. So now, this is all going to be like clean tarmac as far as I can see. Yes. So let's give that a go. I don't know how the height map will react. Okay, so the height map seems to be reacting just fine on this. Perfect. So let's go in and let's actually start by dragging in the taxes. It's always a scary moment, but we'll see. Set this all the way we in our be the map. Don't forget to do that. And dragging your base color and dragging your roughness. Okay, yeah, it's not too bad. At this point, I would like set my displacement to be a little bit stronger often. But okay, this is not too bad. First of all, it's way too shiny. So let's go in and set these levels a lot more a lot higher and then push all of these pieces also like up. Like this. Oh, by the way, I actually want to invert this because I want to have my stones to be darker and not the background. So if we invert this and just swap around our levels, we should be able to get this effect where it's more like the stones are darker and not the rest. Let's see. And then we have our 30 in between here, see. So now if I go to my free gam, you can really hopefully see it. The stones should be a little bit more shiny. Let's make them even more. Let's go to my levels. Yeah, let's try that. You see, you can see the shine coming off them. And that often happens when you look at tarmac on the road, you can often see, like, little specks of shine, and that's basically what I'm doing over there. Oops, won one. There we go. Okay, so we got that stuff done. At this point, let's have a look. Whether I want to bring those stones out a little bit more I need to keep in mind that I'm not just working from memory, but actually looking at something. Okay, so those stones, I want to be a little bit darker. Maybe at this point, I would also want to just turn on raid racing, just to give me a closer look at everything. And I want to just see this everything feels a little bit too blurry for my taste in my normal map when we have this one. Now, I'm not sure where this blur is happening. Most likely, let's see, over here, or is it just because it gets arded. Now, a quick trick that you can do to just see if it's where the blur happens is to literally add a sharpen note after it, which will, if you just push the sharpening out, that sometimes even already fixes it. Okay, so now we have our rate tracing turn on, as you can see. You can definitely see because my PC is a lot slower. So the shadows get quite nicely picked up right now because of the rate racing, which is, of course, a lot more accurate like this. Having a look at this. So I think I probably want to go in and start improving my render a little bit. Just like adding an extra back light to this. So if I just quickly turn off rate racing because moving lights around with my graphics card during rate racing is not fun. So let's just duplicate Light two. Go to rotate and have this light come from here from the very bottom and make it even like sharper. So we make it only just from the very bottom. Make the color to be like a little bit more of like a softer color. Yeah, don't make it too bright, but we do want to make it like let's see, I want to try and make it like quite sharp. So that is sorry, the rotation is quite sensitive. So that's only, like, just hitting the side over here. Okay, so we got that one. Now if we go to this light over here, um, maybe I can say, a little bit brighter and maybe I can make it a little bit more orange. Here we go. So it just feels a little bit more like a sun. So basically what I'm talking about, it's already I think the sharpness worked, so it is already looking a little bit better, but I still feel like there are some kind of blurriness going on. And I'm just wondering it's most likely because we are using a art with an opacity, which is causing some of the blurring to happen. So I just wonder if we can literally make it as easy as just adding some sharpness notes or if we need to do anything else. So if I go ahead and add another sharpness note over here, in this case, sharpness works quite well because it literally just brings out the details a bit. Here, see, you can see the difference. So there was definitely some blurring going on over there. I can turn on and off my displacement just to check. So that blurring seems to be working better now. Now, if I just swap this around so that I also have my sharpness included in here, will that not give me any errors? No, I don't think it does. Okay, so cool. So now what we can do is we can start by just balancing this out a little bit, because right now it does not look like that, and we, of course, do want to fix that. So if I have a look at this, the first thing I would say is that the colors are too monotone. I'm going to start by bringing out the stronger rocks over here. And I can do that by going into my HSL and just set my lightness to be a bit darker bit more maybe. Too much. Lightness is very sensitive. So 0.49. Okay, so that brings those out a little bit more. That's good. Now what I'm going to do is we have our dirt over here. Let's go ahead and just push this a little bit more so that we get, like, a little bit more of this dirt coming in between everywhere. Okay, so that adds that little bit of extra dirt that is good. Now on the base, I feel like it is too monotone, which makes sense here. It looks very monotone. So if I just add a blend. Actually, let's do this after we add after we drag it to our roughness. Let's add a blend. And I want to go for more let's say some more whites, probably. So I can just reuse the same uniform color over here. And I want to go for actually, maybe we can just something we can reuse this one, we might be able to reuse this one just to save some space. And if we then add the levels on top and just press D, docking levels like this so that I don't need to scroll all the way down just to get it. So now I can just play around with these levels. And, I don't think I need any blending modes on this. No, Max lighten doesn't do anything. So let's just push this and then have a look at the ends that in the end, you can start seeing those. Maybe make my levels a little bit sharp. There we go. So we can start seeing those pieces in the ends mostly, and they're really starting to, like, come out. Okay, so it's getting there, but it's a little bit too strong, so let's tone this down. Okay, see, so it's slowly starting to get to this. Of course, we need to ignore the fact that we have all of these little bits and pieces over here. Now, if I have a closer, this one is tricky because it's too dark, so I need to stick with this one. If I have a closer look to this, let's have a look at my free camera. So in my free camera, I cannot see how it would look in slightly different areas. So let's go to Camera one. Maybe if we set a sharpen a little bit higher. Yeah, if I shut my sharpen a little bit higher, and at this point, I might want to already turn on my rate racing again over here because that will change quite a bit. Yeah, basically, the reason that I am doing the rate racing like this is because I want to have these as my final render. So right now, what I see is that the rate raising it is very strong. If we just go to our first light and you set our diameter of our area shape higher, what that will do is it will soften out the shadows a lot. You'll see so now the shadows are a little bit softer when they hit these little stones. So we are slowly getting there. But yeah, definitely, we also need to work on our roughness, and we need to work more on our color and just make everything feel a lot more interesting, maybe also like our occlusion, stuff like that. So let's go ahead and continue with working on our color in the next chapter. 17. 16 Creating Our Base Color Part2: Okay, so we are back. So this is what it looks like now. So it's starting to look quite good. But yeah, we still need to work on this a lot more. What I probably want to do first is I probably want to go ahead and art a little bit more roughness. So we got these little specs here, which are great, but I just want to push this a bit more. Now, out of curiosity, if I set my tiing to two, I just want to see how that looks. And while that's loading, we can already go in here and actually play around with our roughness. So in this case, what I'm going to do with my roughness, the most basic thing is I'm going to art a blend and can I maybe steal something here? No, I cannot steal that one. Maybe, yeah, I might be able to just huh. Where's my levels. Sorry, I lost my levels. I can just steal this one over here, throw it into the top. And sets to be subtract this time. So if we set it to subtract, it's because we want to have some more shine. So this will just give me some randomized shine in here. Okay, so here you can see, when we make our texture a bit larger, you can see that yeah, it's a little bit more readable, but that's just from this angle. I'm not actually going to focus on that. One thing I do see when doing this is that my sharpness are too strong. So these ones, I'm probably just going to set them back to one. Because I feel like else, it will be too strong. Yeah, that's a little bit softer. And yeah, my roughness, I have just reloaded those, so that will, I can see a little bit. I think some of my lights over here are a bit too strong, and they are actually hurting me previewing my roughness. So if I just go into this light, I just made it less strong, and now I'm just going to go and make it a little bit more visible. See now I can see like the roughness showing up. And this one I actually want to keep this strong because that's part of my signature when I render my materials. I always go for like a three point lighting setup, one light here that's soft, one light here that's very strong, and one general light that is halfway through the cylinder, and I find that that often works best. So we start to get some of these little specks in here that's looking great. I would like to have these bits over here to have even more specs to make them a little bit more shiny. I think at this point, I am going to go ahead and go back to a tiling of three and if we go in here. So for those specs, let's see. Because I'm not adding those. Oh, am I? No, see, I'm not even adding those to my roughness, so that's why they don't show up. So if you add to blend after this, just grab this mask over here. There we go. Art is to be an art. Give that a little bit of an opacity. Yeah, that you do trick like. I know that over here, yeah, okay, there is more info in here. Let's add this one. Basically, the reason I want to add this one is because it will give us different intensities or specs, which might be nice, and then use this one into the mask. And if we set this to be I don't know, we cannot Well, yes, we can set this to copy. We just need to tA levels here at the top, so that I can now push all of these stones to be a little bit lighter. So let's see. So we got something like this. Maybe now, yeah, play around with your past like a little bit. We can get away in the roughness with lines like this because you often will never even notice them. So let's see if that even works the way I want it to. So now I'm just dialing it smaller here. So you can see, like some of those specs sitting here. So I'm just trying to capture the light to make sure that they work all correctly. Yeah, yeah, I think that's starting to look quite nice. Okay, so we are starting to grab those specs. That's nice over here because there is a light beaming on top of this. That's why you won't see them as strongly in here. But it is starting to look like tarmac. That's pretty good. We got some of those white patches in there. Maybe I also want to get a little bit more of the white patches in between my stones, almost as if that we have the dirt. So we have this dirt over here. Now what I can try is I can try to add another blend. And this blend has those white patches. And then I basically just grab this same dirt that we have over here, but I blend it using a grunge map in order to not have it everywhere. So I grab this. I use like I don't know, like a clouds in the top. I set this to be subtract. Add the levels to your clouds in order to make sure that you don't like to push it in only certain locations. Um Something like this. Let's start. Okay, we definitely need to, like, play around with the clouds too a lot more. There we go. See? So now we get, like, some of the brown bits, and now if I just tone down my opacity for the light bits, we should hopefully get, like some nice color variation in between the two. It's not as I want to have the bits stronger. I also need to make sure that it's not just because it hasn't updated yet, because with the rate raising the update is a little bit slow sometimes. So we got this stuff over here. So we got some nice roughness. I'm happy with that. We got those white bits here. You can see them sitting mostly over there and over here. I want to make these a little bit less strong. I mean, I believe it's this one, right? That's causing this or not. Maybe it's I don't think it's this one. Oh, yeah, it is that one. So let's tone this one down a little bit. So this is just like some overall lightness, so it's not as important. Okay, so let's say we got this stuff. One last thing I like the art. And I only like to offer that artist when we work on stone or concrete, and it's basically a blend. And this blend will have a gradient map, and you want to grab your curvature. So your curvature because it just shows some edge highlights, throwing this into a gradient map and then throwing this into your blend, what you can do is if you sent your blending mode to art subtract, it will actually add those highlights, and it could be nice to just give us some extra sharpness and just some general highlights in our texture. It's just I want to have it showing up, but I do want to keep it quite subtle. Yeah, I think something like that could work. Let's go into our free cam just to have an extra look around. Yeah, see here. So you can see the little bits of highlights sitting in there. So that's looking pretty good. Okay, so we got those highlights all done that is also good. So that's also now working. Now I think what I want to do is I'm going to first of all, select this, call this clean tarmac paste color. And this one I will just call roughness because the roughness often doesn't have as many nodes. So we will be working on the damaged version next. But first, what I want to do is I just want to play around with my skies and see if I can find better sky because I've only done, like a few of them, and I just want to make sure that I got something that just looks as optimal as we can. Because, for example, here, I just clicked LD Construction, and I think that one is already better, but just kind of swap between those. And just see. Now, if this is taking too long here, this kind of stuff is also quite interesting because it has a really darkness to it that you can maybe use. Early robot dog might also work early trees. These are great because they have a lot of tarmac in them, so it kind of reflects back on top of actual tarmac. Hmm. Cars entrance. No, I don't like that. City Hall. Ah. Good work. Sorry if this goes bit quick. I'm just trying to, like, Okay, so courtyard, let's keep that one in mind. The courtyard. Oh, sorry. That's what happens when it needs to download. It shoots all the way back up and you need to, like, scroll all the way down. So that's a bit annoying in the first time. So yeah, we had the courtyard, courtyard garden, go round Graffiti rundown. Um, Lagoon coast Lagoon ghost also Lagoon goes dusk, actually. No, actually, lagoon ghost dusk has a little bit too strong lighting. So lagoon Cost, if I rotate this around. Okay, so this one, so we are between lagoon ghost. Courtyard. This one, I would say that I would go for the courtyard right now. And then if we compare that between which one was it Ally trees? No courtyard still wins, Aynaro no robot dog. Okay, so have more control over my goal. So Ay robo dog between that's basically I just figure out the nicest one. Cor chart. Okay, courtyard wins. So I'm going to go for Carchart D accursio. I probably say that wrong, but I think because it just has the right amount of darkness in here that we can use if we rotate our sky round, but still have the right amount of lightness. So having this now all we need to do is just balance our lighting a little bit based upon this. So let's set this to 6.9, for example, just to push it out a little bit more, maybe seven. There we go. I want to go, for example, into my camera one, and I just want to make sure that my contrast is not too strong, but also not too strong. Let's see. We have our exposure here. Let's tone down our exposure to around 1.25. Our contrast is just around one. So we got that stuff done. And then what you can also do is if you go into your sky, if you ever want to have your sky brighter, you can actually set the brightness of your sky. So I would set that a little bit brighter just so that it shows off a bit more of my material. I think I got it. Okay. So I got this. So yeah, we got something. Maybe the contrast is a little bit too strong here. I don't know if I can just rotate my sky round in order to fix that. No, I need to go into my camera and probably set my contrast a little bit lower. There we go. That we can just see some of the bits. So one and maybe set my exposure to 1.4. Okay. I think I got it. So yeah, it's just a bunch of tweaking. So now we can kind of see this side, so it is still in shadow, but our eyes are mostly just focused immediately towards this area, and then they get focused towards the light, and then we also see some of those specs. So if we have this light over here, which is the back light, let's see if we can make it a little bit more intense in brightness. There we go. And then we have the bottom light. Let's see if I can just make it a little bit more visible and maybe rotate it a little bit more towards the bottom. There we go. So we've got those lights, we can see those specs. That's all looking quite good. I'm going to save my scene at this point, and in the next chapter, what we will do is we'll go ahead and we will start working on our damaged version. 18. 17 Creating Our Base Color Part3: Okay, let's continue. One thing I did off camera is I already set my textures to four K. Remember, same way as before, just click on here and set this to four K. The reason I do this is because I know that my final renders in here I want four K texture because they are going to be portfolio rendos. I want to have the absolute highest quality to show off my material. It's way easier for me to downscale from four K to two K than the other way around. So that's why I'm already deciding to do this. We got these pieces over here that is all looking fine. Now what we're going to do is we are going to work on the damage version. As you can see on the damage version, most of the stones will be roughly the same color, although we do need to make a ground below it. So we will see how it goes. Let's just get started with some base colors, shall we? So if we go over here, I'm going to, first of all, go into my advanced tarmac, and in our damaged tarmac, just turn on the actual damage so that it will generate everything. Of course, with four K, it takes a bit longer to generate because we already have quite a large graph over here, but it's not too bad. So we got this stuff over here. Let's go ahead and get started. The first thing that we want to do is we want to go ahead and create like a masking system. Oh, that's clean tongue. Masking system so that we will only show our clean tarmac on our clean versions, of course, that you can see over here. So for that, I believe that if all we need to do is just add, like, a blend. And for now in the top of the blend, I'm just using a black uniform color just so that I can properly mask this out. And I need to go in here and I need to figure out exactly where the mask is that I want to use. So it is this one, I believe. Actually, with our invert, this one, I believe. So let's see if it is this one. No. Trust one without the invert. So this bevel over here, although no wait, we are adding our slope grace galaxy. So what I might want to do is I might actually want to grab this over here and then just do a very quick let's just select this line. Invert gray scale. There we go. So that should do the trick. Okay, so the only thing I'm worried about is this fate over here. Because of course with stone, you either have stone or you do not have stone. It's not something that can fade, but we can see how it responds. So if we do this and go to our marmoset scene. Okay, this is a bit tricky to actually look at now that I see it, I'm going to turn this into a white collar. Hmm. Oh, wait, I need to probably refresh my displacement map because of the rate raising. So that's why it's most likely not showing up as well. Okay, this is interesting. So it looks like that my height map doesn't look as strong when we start applying textures to it. That's no problem. So for now, let's just ignore that, and let's actually just create a generic base material. And once we've done that, we can just balance it all out. So that doesn't really matter. All I needed is the mask. So for now, this mask, I guess, is fine. And if it is not, then what we can do later on, we can already put it in place is we can add a levels behind it. And the levels would be, for example, if we need to push this out like this in order to make sure that we cover every single bit, like you can see over here. But honestly, for now, I'm just going to Undo that and we'll see. So for our damage, let's have a look. We need to first of all, start by just masking out our stones over here. So we have ground. We have stones. Let's start by creating some masks. Let's start with the ground mask. So the ground mask is going to be quite simple. Let's move this all the way at the end. The ground mask is going to be most likely just like a gradient map. And this gradient map, we just want to grab something that has some noise in it. So let's say like a fractual sum base, for example. So when you plug this into your gradient map, we are going to grab it. Let's make this a bit smarter so that we can see. Gradient Editor, let's see where can we grab this from? I can do it here, but what I'm worried about is that it will look blue because these images look very blue for some reason. So yeah, okay, I guess I can try. So let's start by just doing a pick gradient. Pick it around here. You know what this could actually work? Because what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you trick to very quickly change the color. So if we have this, the only thing is these green ones over here, just get rid of those because they are way too strong in terms of color. So we have this really noisy map over here, but it's completely blue. That's, of course, not very nice. But there is a note which is called replace color range. And with this note, what I can do is I can set like a source color. And then if I set my target color, the same as my source is by clicking on the picker and clicking on the source. What I can do then is, first of all, set source range all the way up and go into your target color and just make this like a more like a brownish color, like you can see over here. And that can very quickly just change some colors. You might need to go in here and just play around with it a little bit, but we will see how this looks. For now, what I'm going to do is just for quick balancing, I'm going to add a blend and a uniform color. And this uniform color is going to be the base color that our durt would have. So let's say our durt is going to have a base color like, um something like this. We can throw this on top, well, we can first of all, display around the blend modes to see if there's a blend mode that actually works quite nicely or not. N, it doesn't look like it. In that case, we can just simply use our past to set our past to 0.5 in order to overlay that. So yeah, basically, we just have a very basic ground texture to get started with. The next one, if we are the gradient map, I want to split my bigger stones up from my smaller stones most likely. So if we go in here, I want to have these ones in a graded map, and I want to create another graded map and this one I probably want to just actually add some new blends because I need to blend this one together with this one, Max lighten and blend that. Sorry, blend that one together with this one. Max Lighten, and blend that one together with this one. Again, on Max Lighten. There we go. So those are just all of these four. Now that's done that we have this mask over here, and what we can do is we can just plug this in this graded map. There we go. So now we can just easily split them up into two. So for these ones, should be pretty straightforward. We should be able to just grab, if you just go to these stones, you just grab from one of these stones, for example, let me just scale this down. That is the nice thing about pure rev that I can just scale down and still keep it on my screen. Else I would need to do it on my other screen. Pick gradient. Start by picking something, yes. Start by picking something like I feel like having the gradients is not going to work very well. Yeah, that's not going to work very well. In that case, just add the very quick levels on top and push your rocks to become white like that. Then they will just be plain colors and we will just need to add more on top. Yeah, the I don't like that. I don't like that, the fact. Let's do this. Sorry if I'm going back and forth, but I'm just trying to make sure that I get the optimal look. Let's have these masks. Let's then add a flood fill and add a flood fill to random gray scale. Because doing that, the gradient map is able to read the different gradients as like their own little thing. So if I would now go in here, drag around here, these rocks, should they should become different colors. Oh, it would be nice if I actually attach C. So now they just become slightly different colors. So I can go pick radiant, go around here, try and find a nice area and make all of these rocks. See, something like that. Now all the rocks are just like nicely different colors. I can do the same over here. We have this one. I can add the levels to this and just push the white slider to the right to left. The flood fill and flood fill to random gray scale. And let's go ahead and d this to my gradient map. So this one, once again, big gradient. Let's grab from different area like this. There we go. Okay, so we now have two gradients over here. So we got these really interesting looking shapes. They're a little bit long, but okay. The goal is that now we have three textures that we can now start masking up and combining together. So let's get started by adding a blend, and we want to probably have our dirt always on the base because it's dirt. So we have that on the base. Then let's have the big stones on the top. And what I can do is I can actually use this same mask over here as our Obaste now the stones are here on top. I can then add another blend, plug in our small stones, and once again, use the same mask. So now we have our small stones sitting on here. Now the thing that we need to do is, yes, you do not want to have ambienclusion or anything inside of your base color because then it will not be as accurate in terms of PBR. However, I do definitely need to make this look like stones. I'm going to do that in a few ways. The first way is an easy one. It's going to be the same technique with our dirt blending. So we basically add a blend note with a uniform color, and we make this color to be a little bit more like a brownish Brownish dirt, something like that, for example. We then add a very simple dirt, dirt, actually. Dr node. I know it's quite expensive, as you can see over here, but I like it, so I want to use it. An Amoclusion and a curvature. Here we go. Okay, Aminuclusion. We want to grab This one, I believe? Yes, because we are masking everything out. So we want to grab this one for ambien occlusion. As you can see, tone down your height, depth, and just turn on GPU optimization. And I want to add a normal node and just hold Control and just plug the same input of your ambien glusion into your normal, set it to three, throw it onto curvature. And now we have some dirt. So this dirt, let's tone down our dirt levels. We've already been over this, so I'm not going to go through these pieces. I just want to throw this on here, and that we already here. It's already make our stones look a lot, less flat because now the dirt is being built up in between the stones. It might be nice to just make this dirt a little bit lighter. Like this. And then what I'm already going to do is I'm going to add a blend because here that curvature technique that we used, so green map with the curvature actually works a lot better in this one compared to the small stones. So this gray map with our curvature, let's throw this into our blend and set this to be art subtract and then tow down your Passy. You see? So it can immediately, make your rocks look a lot more interesting. Now, the stones are probably in really silly colors right now, so we most likely need to work on that. But the goal is that I can, for example, now replace this. And this is now how our texture would look. So we now got this a very base. You can then, of course, go into Mm set. Okay, let's have a look. First of all, ground is too dark, stones are too dark. The color of the stones is actually quite interesting. So yeah, definitely something that we need to work on. I think I'm also going to go in my sky and just set my overall sky to be a little bit lighter around 2.45. Okay, so ground. Let's start with that. If I go here, I should be able to just set my uniform color lighter in order to get a lighter ground. Course, we don't have a roughness for the ground yet, but that's no problem. Let's make it a little bit lighter even. Here we go. And yeah, because the roughness actually adds quite a bit to the ground, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to already now add a blend. And this blend will actually be the same blend as over here, use the same texture. And then in the top, we can go ahead and we can go, Cal over here, we can make the roughness for broken pieces. So I'm going to add by a greyscal conversion for our ground Add the levels and it This is a ground. It's very dull, just make it very light, something like this. And then you probably just want to add like a blend. And this blend will be for our stones. I want to probably pick these stones over here. Let's add a Actually, no, we can just reuse this. We can use this one over here because the way has everything added. Throw this into the top, set this to be art or subtract. Let's go for subtract. No, no. I don't know. Maybe I do want to get some shine in there, but not too much, so we'll see how it goes. We might need to do some fancy masking on it, but we'll see. So for now, just throw this in here. Maybe like an extra blend for your dirt, since we're here anyway. And just set that to art. See? So yeah, okay, that can work. So because there is dirt over here, the stones will not be as intense in terms of shine. We got all of that stuff ready to go, so let's have another look. Here see. So now that we made this dirt a lot duller, it also looks a lot better. It looks very plain, so let's go actually boost up our norm map dirt, which is this one. I sets to like five. Okay. I want to actually twin and capture some of those specs that we have over there. So if we go add a levels, so this is our dirt that we have generated into normal, go ahead and go in here and like an extra blend on top. So move this up. And we will just have like levels down here and then a uniform color that is completely black at the top. Then your levels, you probably know what you need to do. You just need to twin and capture only a few of those darker specs like this kind of stuff. Um, push our levels out. It's a bit tricky to get it. But yeah, something like this, and then just throw down, yeah, like your robaste inside of your blend. So it's just going to give me, like, some of that darkness. Okay, so we got that stuff. Let's go into our free cam so that I can have a closer look to my dirt before I move on. Hmm. Yeah, so my dirt, I don't like the dirt. Yet, I need to go in, and I'm going to, first of all, make it even duller over here. So just push this out. Yeah, I need to have some noise in there, basically. So if this dirt isn't working well, what you can also try to do is to simply grab some white noise and throw that in here. And then for this white nose here, you can see the difference. It just adds like lots of little white specs, which I was hoping would give me, maybe if I said stronger. I was hoping it would give me some noise. Okay, so we got that. So now if I go in and maybe throw in a splash of color. So if I add a blend and I just throw in some very strong orange color in here, something like this, I just want to throw this in something that's highly tilable. So let's say Clouds one, for example. So we have Clouds one, we throw in like a levels just to push it back so that we do not have that many pieces. Yeah, we get like this highly tilable texture. Huh. Why are you so strong? I'm not adding that much stuff. Basically, there we go. It had some trouble updating, I believe. Yeah, okay, so we now get, like, some of that dirt. If I just go in and just make my levels a little bit stronger so that they cut off a little bit quicker in our clouds one like this. Okay, so now that we have that, I want to Set fall off a little bit stronger. And then I want to just, like, tone down the intensity a little bit more like this. There we go. Season now, we start to get a little bit more of a color variation within our dirt. Maybe make it like a little bit stronger. Yeah, I think something like that should do the trick. If you go to Camera one. Yeah. So now we see a little bit of the difference between dirt. Okay, so that's pretty good. Now, another thing that I like to do is I like to just go ahead and go to my render and turn off rate racing because changing height maps during rate racing is annoying. And I just want to set my height based upon my stones, and then I can just balance out the rest later on. So if I go for 0.008, I feel like that's correct height for my stones, and I can see now that I need to probably push the actual tarmac a little bit higher in order to get exactly what I want. So if I go in here and push this a little bit higher just by moving my white slider So I probably want to do that over here. Let's tone down our pearl noise, and let's add the null levels here just for, like, some final balancing. Yeah, see? So now this looks a little bit more logical, the way that we had it before. Okay, so we got that stuff done. Let's turn on rate raising again, and now what we'll do in the next chapter is we will just basically continue with this. We need to balance out our stones. We need to make them look a lot more interesting. And overall, we're getting closer to the texture, but there are still a lot of stuff to do in order to make this look as good as I want it to look. So let's go ahead and continue with that. 19. 18 Creating Our Base Color Part4: Okay, so let's get started first by balancing out our stones. I think that's a good way to start with this. So our stones, I'm quite surprised that they look so dark because they feel really bright. If I just have a look at my actual texture, yeah, yeah, that brightness. Yeah, okay, I guess they are about as bright. This is the tricky thing because now I need to kind of like imagine how it would look with this type of color with my stones. So I feel like I would probably want to still make them a little bit brighter, yes, and probably make my ground also a little bit lighter. So let's get started by, you know what? I'm just going to add an HSL note. After my dirt over here that I can just very easily like my lightness. Now remember, we probably want to before we do the HL note, drag this one into our roughness so that it stays at the same level. That will make that a little bit brighter. Then if we go to our stones over here, let's have a look. We have a few stones that are very, very dark. If I just go in here and just delete some of these really dark areas, they will revert back to their to more even colors. And over here, probably the same where let's delete this one. Let's make this one just like manually a bit lighter. There we go, see, because they are still the same stones. I don't want to go too over the top in terms of color. So we got that stuff ready to go. Now, all I really need to do is I need to add HL notes to these. And then we can, like, set our lights, for example, a little bit brighter. There we go. And if we just have a quick look. Oh, okay. That's nice. That's cool. So here, that lightness definitely works. So I do find that right now everything feels a little bit noisy and that's something that I do need to fix. So let's see. Does it have to do maybe with my lighting? I just want to make sure that when I say noises, when I look at this, it feels very overwhelming. So it doesn't feel very nice and sharp and just maybe maybe it's just my sharpness because often my sharpness if you set your sharpness too high, you actually get Not as nice effect. So let's set our sharpness to around 0.95. Okay, so that does look a little bit softer. So we've done our sharpness over there. That is all looking good. Down here, is that our ambien occlusion? It feels very strong. Do you see that darkness? I feel like my contrast here, but I'm not sure I don't think it's my amen occlusion. I can, of course, just lower this to make sure. It's going to turn off rate racing. Yeah, here, see? I don't think it's my amen inclusion. I think it has to do with like a shadows. So if we just turn on rate racing again. Because, at this point, it will basically be a constant balancing. That's just how it is. We just need to keep balancing this out until we get exactly what we want. Now, I'm actually fine with my contrast on my camera, sometimes I'm just, like, playing around with things. So seeing this, I do want to make right now, the colors feel too even. Everything just feels like a very plain looking color. That's something I want to fix. Also, in between here, these dark spots that doesn't feel very logical to me. So first of all, let's make our ground even lighter. Let's see if that Yeah, yeah, I definitely works better if our ground is even lighter. So our ground is even lighter. Now, let's have a look at our texture. So what are we doing? We add our stones. We add our dirt on top. Let's make this dirt also a little bit lighter. See how it looks if it is like this very light dirt. Ooh, see? That actually makes quite a big difference. So let's see if we make it a little bit less brown and go for a little bit more like a whiter. Yeah, I think I like that more. Maybe a little bit brown. See, that's the only thing, like we get some really high quality previews using Momset, but we do need to, like, switch back and forth quite a while when we are at this stage, but that's about it for us. So our curvature. Yeah, I think our curvature is fine, so I don't think we need to edit that sometimes we do need to, of course, wait for this to render out. So looking at this, I would say that maybe after all my dirt is maybe a little bit too strong, but I don't know if it's probably just a color that is too strong. S here, it's probably this color. So if we just tone this down, it's probably the noise because if I look in my normal map, that does not feel as strong. Also, these pieces over here, I think I still after I want to just try and get rid of the error. So that error happens over here. There we go. So if we just add a blur, high quality gray scale to this, set the intensity all the way down, and now look at your nom map going to your blur. See, give the tiniest blur. 0.2 is already enough so that we keep the sharpness, but we just get rid of that really, really sharp look that we have. So that should already take care of that to make that look a little bit nicer. So we've got those pieces. Let's have a look. Let's have a look. Yeah, I just know that these specs over here, if we would do branches and everything, they will simply will not look good because we just don't have the resolution for something like that. So if I look at this overall scene and I look at this, I think I want to have it warmer, but I think I can actually use my light to partly focus on that. So if I just work with my lighting, I should be able to kind of like your sets to make it look a little bit more interesting because I want to keep my texture quite mon and tone because the lighting will actually affect it a lot. You have seen it when we change our sky, how quickly a sky can basically make everything change. So we got this stuff over here. Now, another thing that I would say is that it's doesn't feel as sharp as I want. Like, I know that I'm working in ten ATP right now, so I do need to keep that in mind, but I think I'm actually going to my sharpness a little bit higher now that we've balanced out our normal map because once we render it out with rate raising, once you've rendered it out, it will add a little bit of blurriness to it. This is just like the denoising. So let's keep our sharpness to around one and do that. Now the next thing is I want to probably break up my send even more. So here I'm adding this stuff. Yeah, that's fine. What I want to do now is I want to add another blend, and I want to just grab some white colors like this. And then add to transform and just grab our noise that we use for the brown colors, move it around a little bit, and throw it into the white colors also. See that basically I'm just trying to get more breakup in the sand because right now it just doesn't look as nice. It looks a way to monotone. Everything feels very monotone right now. I'm trying to basically youll see, I'm just trying to get a lot more different colors in here. I think I also want to do that probably with my basetomach at this point. If it just go back to moms set. Yeah, my baetomach let's also go in here. So let's see. What do we do here? So we add dirt, white, this one. I want to probably increase this one also. There we go see. So we just get some extra whiteness in here. I think that will look quite interesting. So we got those pieces. We got our stone sitting in here. I feel like that by this point, probably because I set my sky brighter, it is not giving me the effect that I want. So let's tone it down a little bit more to 1.7, probably. And now let's go into our second light and just make that a little bit lighter in the brightness. And our third light, let's also make this a little bit brighter. Here we go see. So this already does make for a slightly nicer render Um, let's see. So sorry if I take some time to think about the things I want to do. So we got this stuff ready to go. Yeah, up close, if we have a look, it's looking pretty decent. Yeah, especially here, but I feel like my stones, they are still too monotone. I feel like they just don't have enough detail in them. While if you would look over here, for example, here, these stones first of all, they have a little bit more noise on here, but I'm not sure if it's good for us to have that noise because that noise will make everything just feel more noisy. But then again, they do have actual colors and everything in here. So I want to see if I can capture that. So if I go in let's start with these one. So here we have the plain colors. If we just go in and we can start adding blends to this, actually let's do this before we do our HSL. So Grady map. Let's add a blend to this, and let's just grab probably like white. Here, Let's reuse this white color that we have over here. And I just need to get something with a lot of tiling in it. Let's go for Clouds tree. No, Clouds tree is too blurry B&W spots. That might work. Let's just set this as a mask like a quick levels in order to push this out. And it's basically to add variation to our actual stones. So if I also add the blend over here or hold control and just re select that white, use the same mask. It's all about just getting some of that random colors inside of our stones. You'll see, you can now see that some of these stones now start to get some of the colors in here. Yeah, I can see that. So I probably want to have this even stronger. Let's go into my Grady map. Oh, sorry, in my HSL map. Yeah, here. Sorry I want to tone down my whiteness. In my HL map, let's actually just boost up my saturation a little bit, just to get a little bit more like a stronger color palette. And the reason I'm doing it here is because I know that we are losing a little bit of those colors later on. So let's play around a little bit more. Let's set our B&W spot scale down like this. Play around with your levels to make them a little bit sharper in terms of transition. Here. And then by the time that we get to this area, the stones because of the dust, they will still have all of these colors, but it's different because these colors they should not show up as much like, Okay, yeah, they're showing up a little bit. So now we just need to tone this down a little bit to get because in here, now you can see that we start to get interesting colors. So now that we have this, I just want to tone it down a little bit, mostly in our smaller ones. So if we sent it 2.5, am I losing it again? No, I do not. 0.5. That's interesting. I expect it to kind of lose that effect. In that case, I need to actually go back into my gradient and change it. So if I go into my gradient map over here, I can go in here and I can say, no, not that one. I want to know where this stuff is coming from. Let's get rid of some of these colors over here also, just so that we do not have as many different colors going on so that it's easier for me to manage. Yeah, let's take down some of these green colas over here. And here we are with, like, the blue color. So I'm just trying to There we go. See? That's the one I was looking for. Tone that down. There we go. So that's looking more logical. So this is model I want. I think some of the green is still too much. So let's just push this green all the way to, like, the side. There we go. And now they are gray that should do the trick. Okay, so those are now balanced out. That's looking good. Now what I'm going to do is, I think I now want to just start working on why this is not looking as sharp. Now, in order to make sure, because I'm now working on a lower screen resolution that I'm used to, I'm going to show you how to just create a quick rando so that we can make sure that it is not just my viewpoint or my eyes or something, but that it's actually inside the texture. Because sometimes if we use a blurry mask inside of the texture, we accidentally make stuff look less sharp, and that's basically quite a tricky thing to get white. Let's turn local reflections and just boost those up. I like to always do that. But basically, what we want to do now is if we go over here into render and output, you can remember how we set the resolution here. I'm going to set a resolution to 2560. By 2560. There we go. And then the next thing that I want to do format, let's go just for JPEG format, and we want to set where we want to export this. Here we go. So I set my output size or my output location, and all I need to do is press render Image, and it will just take a second to properly render it. But once that is done, I have got a folder over here with images, so let me just pass the video. Here we go. And if I just open this up. Oh, sorry, that's my fault. Make sure that you go down here and in the render cameras, turn on camera one and turn off main camera because ls it will only try and export the main camera. Here we go. So now we have a nice, and this is 2560 by 2560. So what you can see is this is what I mean, because I'm working on a 1080 screen, I'm not able to see to be able to zoom in and see the strength. But when I look at this, I can actually see confity that there isn't as much noise. So when I look at this, the noise isn't as bad. And that's basically what I'm talking about. And this kind of stuff is like, really nice. Yeah, all this stuff is really good. We can even reduce the sharpness. It is just something and over here, we can reduce this. It's something that's very important to keep in mind. When you're looking at this, we are looking at it from a distance. But if we use our free camera, there's only so much we can do to really get a close look. Like if I look up here and let it render out, it is real and render. It does look fine. So I hope that that point comes across. So sometimes it's good to just take an image. And for example, if I look in this image, I can leave this over to my other screen and I can know so we need to, for example, reduce some of these things. So yeah, let's just already do a bit of reducing in this chapter, and then we'll just continue with the next chapter. So here we go in our sharpness. Let's set this to around 0.5, and let's set this one to around 0.5. So we are reducing the sharpness. The generic noise that we have on top. Let's see where do we this noise. So those are cracks. Oh, do we artists noise? Wait a minute. We are doing this Wong. Yeah, we are doing this one. Um, that was an arrow. I can't believe that I only now saw it. Right now, what it is doing is it is combining our entire normal map. With this noise, but it's doing in the wrong way around because I believe, yeah, because this is supposed to be ground. This is supposed to be ground. And right now, I don't even know what it's doing. Okay, it is adding it to the ground, but it's ignoring our actual big shape. So that's my fault. That's something that I didn't realize. It means that in this mask that we have. So here we have our stone mask. You guys might have already figured this out long ago, but I only now am really looking at it. I thought this noise came from that we add like some generic noise on top, but apparently not. So we have our stone mask. All we need to do is we need to just throw in our this one over here, which is our breakup mask and just said this to be, I believe, art yes, so we said this is the art. There we go. That should make a big difference. There we go, see that now looks a little bit nicer and softer. Now, it does mean that I actually might need to end up adding some extra noise, but we will see how that goes in our next render. Okay, what's the next thing when I look at this? For some reason, our scent is being a real pain today. It is still not as nice as I want it to be. Also, our stone's height is a little bit too intense. Now, I can have a look and I can, of course, just change the displacement inside of marmoset, but we just had like this height over here. We just had it nicely. So what I can instead do is I might be able to just literally tone down the actual height of this entire thing. So if I go in here, and I just want to do this for the ones that are going into our height map because I don't want to risk accidentally messing up my base color. So I just another balancing levels over here, and all I need to do is if I look in this, just move my white side down a little bit, that should push every single stone a little bit down. Then if we go in here, we do most likely need to just turn on and off rate racing. In order for it to register. Here we go. So that now should have a slightly different height, which it does. Let's see. What else do we want to do. The nice thing also with this is imagine if you are sending a picture for feedback to like a lead or senior artist or just some friends. This is how they will look at the picture and how they will give feedback on it. So I'm basically doing the same thing over here. So if I see this, the blackness around our stones over here, I don't really like, so we probably need to fix our ambienoclusion a little bit. And yes, the ground. The ground. Why? Because you can see it just doesn't look like that. It just looks like one massive plain color. And I'm not very happy about that because it should look like a little bit more decent, at least, if I look at this kind of stuff. So let's see. I'm adding this. Do I just need to change the tiling or just need to make the other stuff like, way more intense? It's a bit tricky. Let's make it Let's push it to an insane level, both of them, just to make sure that we just make this like really bright orange, just to make sure that they do actually show up as we want. So if I do this, I can go in here, here, see. So now they are really, really strong, and now I can just go in. I can start by just carefully toning this down, but I just don't want to tone it down too much this time. So that is looking Better, I think. Yeah. And now let's also just tone down the white. A little bit more There we go. I'm going to leave it like this because I want to close off this chapter because we are already running over time. So in next chapter, we will fix our amen oclusion and we will just continue with polishing. This is simply something that takes a while. So if you ever see a substance artist that knows exactly what to do, immediately, good chances that he has already made the material beforehand and stuff like that. Because I personally often like to spend 20% of my time literally just polishing things up, 20, 30% of creating the material. But we're very close to finishing this, so let's continue to the next one. 20. 19 Creating Our Base Color Part5: Okay, so let's continue. So I rendered out another image, and now we can have a look. So this is also very handy. So I have this image, and now I can just flip to the next one. So this is after we've done some of the feedback, and you can see, if you go a little bit closer. So a few things. We probably want to get a little bit more noise on our actual tarmac to make it a little bit more grainy. Our scent is definitely improving. Like, the whiteness bits are a little bit too strong, but for the rest, the orange bits I can live with. Our height map is also probably a little bit better. It's a bit difficult to swap J back but yeah, you can see that our heights like a little bit better, so that's looking good. So let's get started with the first one. First one, we want to create some noise on our actual piece which is over here. So on this one, we just want to create some generic noise. If we just go ahead and all the blend. Okay, so generic noise, we need to have this noise closely assembling something in the form of rocks or something in that direction, but it can be so small that it doesn't need to have an actual shape. How is Dirt four doing? No, dirt one. We might let's see dirt five. Okay, so we might be able to do something with Dirt one. If we grab dirt one, let's make this a little bit larger, maybe what we can do is we can blend dirt one with a transform node, and the transform node is also dirt one, but just like a different position. Just change the position and set this to be a Max Lighten. So we have a lot of these small little bits of noise. If I throw that onto my blend and I set this to be I think I'm just going to go for an art. I'm going sets for an art, but at a very low level, let's have a look at my over here. So let's see before, okay? Now if I just set the art here, see, that might actually work great to have maybe a little bit stronger. Over here and don't forget that you might sometimes just need to turn on and off your rate racing in order for this to work. If you go to our free camera, Yeah, see here. So now we start to get some extra noise in there. So that's looking pretty good. The next thing was that I was going to reduce the whiteness in my ground. So here, let's just tone that down a little bit. Okay, so I reduce the whiteness in my ground. And yeah, actually, the rest is pretty much fine. Maybe also just gets rid of some of the specs a little bit more. Okay, so we reduce the whiteness into our ground before or after I like to just keep looking between the two. So that's all looking good. So we got that kind of stuff, ready to go. Oh, yeah, the ambient clusion. We were going to fix that. Most likely, if I click on my ambien occlusion, you can probably see No, no, it's not that bad around the stones. I was expecting, like, a lot of black lines around the stones, but it doesn't look as bad. Now, if you just go ahead and set the samples to 16, just to push them up to make the absolute highest quality. Okay, so maybe it's just too intense. If I just tone this down, it's going to my camera one. The first thing I want to do is literally I'm just going to turn off my aminoclusion, just to see if that is actually the problem. Okay, so it seems like I'm not sure. Is that a problem? It's going to our free camera. No, it might also be in our render if we go for this mclusion. Well, that's interesting. The stone just kind of like stay black around there, but I don't believe that we have anything in our base color that's causing black et shred stone. I mean, it could be that the brown dirt that we have makes everything look darker, but I don't think so. If I turn this off, it looks like that might be actually the case. Yeah, that might actually be the case. We might just want to not have this dirt as intense. But in that case, you need to think of what do you rather want? Do you want to have the dirt or do you rather want to have not that strong lines around here? Then I would personally rather have the dirt. I'm just going to turn on my ambient inclusion map. And for the rest, let's just have a quick look at this. Let's see. What else do we want to fix with this? So we got these pieces. These dark stones, can I maybe get a few more dark stones in this area because it feels very empty right now. So let's see. I'm adding those over here, and my stone generator happens to mask out exactly these areas, which is interesting. So if we just set our clouds, this is what happens when you sometimes just set the same clouds everywhere. They just tend to keep going in the same area. So let's try something like this. If we look at our norm Okay, so that might actually work a bit better. So now we have those stones in some slightly different locations. So now we do need to turn on Nova displacement map, here we go. So I feel like that looks a bit better. We have some of these stones sitting in there? Maybe we can make the stones a little bit darker even. Not too dark because then it will probably not look very good anymore. But if we go over here in our outputs, they are quite dark already. Okay, let's just make them like a little bit darker. Just set the lightness to 0.48 over here, just to push their darkness a little bit more. But for the rest, I quite like the location, so that's looking quite good. Let's see. Is there some cool rendering start that we can do? You can try and art a fog volume at a very far away level, and that will give you a little bit of softness. So if you write an art fog over here, and then you, let's leave it to exponential. You set the color to the color that you want your background to be. So it's going to be a bit of a more darker bluish color. And then you just need to set your distance to be a little bit further away. So let's set this to like 2000 to the point where it's only just affecting your sphere. Let's set the color to be yeah, we can play around with the color, su. Something that's a bit more interesting. And then I like to just tone down my distance. It's almost like getting adept of field, but for your sphere. So I think I'm going to go for like 1,500. There we go. For your lighting, everything, it will just give a certain softness to it. It's a bit hard to explain. And it's also very subtle. I can probably now set like my brightness over here a little bit higher. So here, if I turn it off, you see it? It's very hard to see because it's very subtle, but it actually does add quite a bit. And also, this fork responds based upon your light. So let's do 6.8. So that's why I'm just balancing out my lighting a little bit more. And for example, this lighting over here, I can just push the brightness a little bit more. So there we go. So we got something like that. I quite like that. It is blue, but it gives more of like a greenish tint to it, and I quite like that. That's looking quite nice. So we got those three things done. For these second light, maybe also just set your diameter up a little bit, which will give us slightly softer shadows. Let's see. What else do we have? So we've done that stuff. We've done our lights. So that's all looking fine. I can't remember that I'm forgetting something, but I'm not exactly sure what it is. We can, of course, do a turntable. A turntables very easy. If you just select your sphere, right click and press art turn table. What that will do is it will just have a rotation. So if I would press the play button now, you can see that it will rotate. And what you can do with this, you can, of course, I tend to go for a length that is what is it? Actually, FPS, 60 FPS. That's what I tend to do. Yes. And then I like to set my speed to like 0.2, for example. And now I play around with it, you get a much softer rotation as you can see. So that's nice, if you want to go ahead and render out some turntables. I will do those at the very end. But I'm not yet one I'm cent sure that this texture is done, I still want to do some things to it. So first of all, let's boost up my bloom a little bit. Here we go. Let's set it to around 0.05, just to give it a little bit more of like a glow around these areas. So we've done that. Oh, yeah, I wanted to play around with my dental field. So if we go into camera one and go into focus, you over here have a daptal field. So this datal field in spheres, I don't need a nearblur so I can turn it off. But it's cool because I can set a far blur over here, and then I can play around my focal distance to sometimes get a very soft blurry edge, but I need to be Careful because I don't want to have it as overwhelming. I just want to have it, like, very softly because what this also does is it mediately also works with your glow bloom. Sorry, it works with your bloom in order to give you an even stronger glow. And it also brings more focus to the center. So if I do I need to be very soft, let's do 100. There we go. 100. You can see that we have the tiniest bit of blur here, and it will just bring more focus to our actual material like this. So having this done, at this point, make sure to save your scene, and I'm going to just render out another image over here and just see how that looks. Okay, so let's have a look. So this was before. This was our second update pass, and this is our third update pass. So you can see, it might seem subtle, but we are actually adding quite a bit of detail in here. So it's starting to look really nice. And if we zoom in, here we get like these really nice crisp looking rocks and everything that's also looking good. So that's nice. Our noise, I'm happy with our noise now. The stronger cracks, how are you doing? I got you in a few places, but I feel like I would like those a little bit more blurrier, maybe in a few more places. The softness fate over here is actually working quite well. So I'm glad that didn't give me any problems. Our scent is looking good. Maybe our tiniest pebbles, we want to make them a little bit less strong in our height map. You know, FRs, we got some nice lighting going on, so FRs is actually starting to look really nice. So I will go ahead and do those last things. And then what I will do is I will do something is off camera. I will have a closer look, and I don't like to do this often, but at one point, you just need to really be able to sit down and just have a close look at your material. And I cannot really do that on the camera because then you would literally hear me say for 10 minutes just thinking out loud. So at this point, I was going to go ahead and I was going to see These stones, I'm just going to tone them down a little bit. Let's set these to 0.9. Actually, let's do 0.85. On all of them. So that will reduce the intensity a little bit so that they are a little bit less strong. We were going to go ahead and add a little bit more of those larger cracks that we have over here. So if we just tone up our pastes so that I can have a look and see where they are, I need to go in this mask over here. Where are you? Agtech pushes out a little bit more so that we have more of them like this. I want to blur them a little bit more so that they are a little bit softer in terms of how deep that they cut. Oh, sorry, that blur needs to happen over here. And let's go for 0.3. And once that is done, I can now go in and I can, tone down my opacity again so that they are not as intense anymore. There we go. Now we get these cuts a lot more and a lot stronger. That's good. So we've done that one. We've done the cuts. It's also fine. I can't remember I said something else, but I think at this point, what I should do is I should simply just like, maybe play around a bit more with the roughness, and then I will have look off camera and just make sure that everything is correct and else we will just close this chapf. So for example, over here, what I see over here is that we have almost no dark stone. So here, let's push the darkness of our stones a bit more to hopefully bring out a little bit more of those highlights. And maybe tone down our dirt a little bit. You'll see. So now we get a bit more of those highlights on our stones over here. So that's also looking quite nice. So yeah, I'm going to save my scene, and I will render out another picture, and I'm going to have a look. And in the next chapter, we should be able to finish finish this material off, and then we can move on to our next material, which will be a combination of Cebush and substance designer. So let's go ahead and continue with that. 21. 20 Final Polish And Optimization: Okay, so I had a quick look, and we are super close to the end. What I want to do is, first of all, I want to just go ahead and I want to add a little bit more contrast to my scene because I was looking at these images. So this is our current scene, and you can see that they just feel like a little bit more contrasty. I can see it even better on my four case screen, which I have to decide. You guys cannot see it. But based upon that, I can see that I want to just push my contras bit because it gives me more focus on the material. So 1.006 probably to get started with. Another thing that I wanted to do is, if we just go to this one. I want to see if we can maybe a little bit more difference in our sand, even if it's just like normal map difference, just like some bumpiness or anything like that. Okay, this is not the right one. Um, This is our current one over here. So any bumpiness. So here, I see, you can see the difference between the contrast. So also maybe something that I want to do is go into my fork and just, like, I really cannot say that word. I'm really bad at saying the word. I just call it mist. But yeah, basically, just make my background a little bit darker. So we get now this glow. But because I make my background darker, more of my eyes are being focused towards the material again. So for the sand, a few ways that we can try this out. The first way is that I want to see if I can really push it up against my stones. Now, I do not actually want to do this into my height map because I find that my height map is correct now and I do not want to risk breaking it or anything. Instead, we have this normal combine here. I can just add another normal combine on top, set this to be high quality. Then add a normal note and set this to open Gel. So remember how we created one of those, where are you? Here, I believe, the non uniform blur gray scales that we can see over here. So what we can do with this is we can go ahead and we can art and plant, plug in our non uniform blur gray scale, and then plug in the mask that we used on top and twin and set that mask to be multiply. So when we do that, we are masking out our stones and we are only leaving the actual sand in between left. So if I plug this in here, I have now this no map, and I have full control, so I can make this quite strong. I can make this five, for example. Now, seeing this, I actually feel like I'm scared to do this. But let's go in here and let's set our intensity to 1.2. Okay, 1.25. I need to be very careful because I always hate it at the very end that I accidentally mess up the height map just when I had it looking correct. So that should do the trick. So now we have this normal map sitting over here. And once we combine this normal map, we get this effect. Now, it looks like that I need to play around a little bit more with my masking in order to not get these edges around here. But here, I said it's like three. I guess you get the idea that we can make the send look in our norm map as if that's really pushing up against it. So if we go over here, I will go ahead and let's see what's the best thing I can do? I'm just having to think about how the best way for me to get rid of these edges over here or to basically level them out. That's basically what I'm thinking about. Now, I'm tempted to literally just add a color instead into our black pieces, but I wonder if that will look as good. So let's art a blend and just give the twi. Add a uniform color at the top, over here, and then add this mask over here at the bottom. Now if I just set this lighter and just invert my mask, so invert grayscale. I'm hoping that if I go in here and just like, use this plaque, if I give this, like, the tiniest bit of Don't worry, we are going to go in and play around with our mask. So if we can hopefully level this out, and then we have our invert gray scale over here, if I just temporarily place this here and add a levels because you are blurry. It's nice that it's blurry because it means that I can just play around with, for example, my middle slider, and I can push this to the left in order to see if I can mask out some more of these areas. Like this. It doesn't need to look perfect. It just needs to look decent. So before, after. Okay, I think we are getting close. So if I set this to five in my intensity here. So you can kind of see that now we don't have these rings around our edges, but if I go before, after, you can definitely see that there is something happening in here. So if I go over here, now, it might be a little bit difficult to see at first, but if we go close up, you can see that the non maps, kind of pushing up against it, which is quite good. So we got something like that going on. That's great. Now the next thing I want to do is I might want to just go in and see if I can get some actual height variation, but just in my sand. So if we go and we add the sand on top of here, but if we just do a pearling noise in between the black pieces over here, that might work. We need to grab this one and we need to add this only after this area. If we have this levels, let's add a blend on top. In this blend, I want to basically just get something that has a bit of height in it. So let's go for a clouds one that we blur, for example. Here we have a Clouds one. If we now go ahead and just add a levels to that, we can push it out so we get something like this. And I basically want to, let's say, for now, already start pushing this in here, and then we have these stones. Do I also have a stone mask sitting on top? I should have. Probably. There we go. Here's our stone mask. Throw that into the bottom, and there we go. Now we have these clouds below our stones. So if we set this at I believe it's a Max Lighten Min darken. No, Max lighten and then tone it way down. So that it's just like this very subtle effect. Let's have a look in my nome map. Now, this might completely break it, so we'll see how strong we can get here. But you can see that yeah, over there, it's like breaking it a little bit. So we might need to, like, play around with this mask a little bit more. But let's just actually see how it looks. I'm just curious to see if I just turn on and off my displacement. Here we go. And let's go to our free camera. Okay, so yeah, you can see like there's some height happening, but I feel like that it's pushing around my stones a little bit too much. Now, we should be able to just get rid of that with this very simple blur. And then this should be good. So if we just add a quick blur between my espresd that we docket. So if I go into my no maps so that I can see it here. So we can see these edges around here. So if I now oh, no, t, we cannot see the edges. Like this, we can see the edges. And now if I blur this carefully a little bit, it should give me a good effect, and if I then maybe even increase the intensity a little bit more, hopefully that will give me a nice height map effect. Here we go. We can turn our rate racing on and off. Okay, so I made a quick screenshot. So this was the first version, second version, third version, fourth version, and the current one. There we go. S. We're already starting to get there. So that is looking quite good. So we got that stuff going on. We got the cracks. We now here see our scent is now feeling a lot more organic and a lot more wobbly and everything. So that's looking quite good. Let's see. What else is there? Oh, sorry, I need to one thing I find in between here is I really like the occlusion in here, and I think we kind of lost some of that. So that's something that if we go into our render and maybe in here, push this occlusion strength back up and maybe also go into our occlusion here, and we actually want to increase that also. Here we go. Season now, we start to get a little bit more of that occlusion sitting in those areas. So that's looking pretty good. Yeah, the only thing is that around these areas, things are a little bit dark. I actually really like this little chunk over here. It feels very organic, that's quite cool. But I think for the rest, this is actually looking really nice. So I would say that at this point, I would now call the material done. If there happens to be another polishing stage after this chapter, then I change my mind. But for this point, I'm going to call this one done. And what I want to do now then is I want to move into, well, I will make one final screenshot over here. And then I will go ahead and I will move into doing the cleanup in our graphs. So let's go ahead and go in here. And at this point, I just want to go down. And yeah, so four K, that's fine. You can even go higher. But I'm not going to do that myself. I'm just going to render one last image. And here we go. So here is our final render. So here you can see that we have just add a little bit of that extra occlusion in here and that is all looking very nice. Yeah, I will later on render out an even sharper image. Now, this render looks even better on the fourcase screen. So if you're doing this on the Fourcase screen, it will look really nice. It's just because of the recording limitations, I need to be on a ten ATP screen. But hey, you just need to work with what you got. We have a clean tarmac base color. What I can do here is I can go ahead and I can select these ones. Actually, no, I probably want to add these also. I think we're just going to select this entire chunk over here. Let's get rid of this. I'm going to just add a nice little shelf or frame, I mean, shelf. That's Maya. Frame and just call this. Broken tarmac base color. Yeah, you can nicely organize this. This stuff can be broken tarmac roughness. And this one we'll call combo tarmac. There we go. Okay, so we got all of this stuff done. Now what I will do is I will show you some ways to clean this up with your graph. Now, I already showed you these ones here at the top. They are very basic, but they are very handy to just make your graph look cleaner, but it will not actually make your graph look more optimized. And that's what I'm going to focus on in this chapter. As you might have seen, every single node has a milliseconds attached to it. This means this millisecond is basically how long if we would change something, will it take for this node to regenerate to get to that level? Now, you can imagine that if we change something at the very beginning, you have probably already seen it, that it takes a while for it to update. Remember how we switched everything to, for example, four K and everything, I always takes a while to update everything. You can actually reduce some of these milliseconds in order to make them faster. Now, a few basic ways to do it. One is them to reuse mask. You have seen me trying to do it over here. With these kind of things, this is one time that I'm not doing it, but there is another technique. Let's say I have tried to reuse the mask. I probably can do even more, but I don't want to change my texture right now. Another thing is that not all of these notes need this resolution. The higher resolution, the higher your milliseconds. Now, this is a four K map for a plain color. That's not needed. So as long as the four K map that is a plain color is not in the background because it reads the resolution, it reads the resolution based upon the background, but it is in the foreground, you can reduce it. So what we can do with the plain colors, we can literally set this all the way to probably like 16 by 16. See? I'm just doing this in my base parameters, and now the milliseconds is a lot less. And setting this by 16 by 16 will make no difference because it gets dded on top of our texture, this will still be four K. If I would do it over here, if I would set this to 16 by 16, you can see that it literally lowers down everything, and that's not what we want. So we just want to Io that. So for these pieces over here, we can just go ahead and we can reduce those. Now, it is not very logical that it is giving me a higher millisecond. That is wrong. I think it's reading. It's wrong. So if I just delete actually, no, if I delete this note and take it back, see? That's more logical. So when you restart, it's just a little bug inside of substance designer. When you actually restart substance designer, you will understand that or you will see that it is at the right one. So I like to go for 16 by 16 for everything myself. So these ones can, for example, be all 16 by 16. So that already saves us a few milliseconds, which is nice. 16 by 16, stuff like that. Just keep an eye out for these textures that stay at four K. Okay, what is another thing that you can do? Ambienuclusion maps have GPU optimization. On top of that, they also have samples. The lower the samples, the quicker it will be. Once again, I probably need to delete it and redo it in order to redo it. But basically, a dirt node, it doesn't need as many samples in order to still be effective. So for that aminoclusion, we can simply go in here. Same here, and we can set the samples to four and turn on GPU optimization. That will clean that stuff up. Another thing, these masks, for example. Now, this one, I need to leave at four k because we are using this in colors and colors need to be very sharp. Because if we have a colors to be blurry, then our entire texture will look blurry. However, this one is a very sharp mask. Now, we throw it in here, which means that we most likely unfortunately need to leave this at four k. Although what we can technically do is we can technically set this down to let's say one k by one k, because it will not change much, and then in our blend, we can set our blend back to four k by four k by upscaling it's a bit more manual work, but what will happen here, you can see the difference. Actually, no, that's unfortunate. That is a way that you can do it. It looks like that in this specific technique, it probably would not be worth the risk of doing that. But there are pieces like over here, these kind of purlin noise, you can just go ahead and set them to one k by one K, for example, because they simply a slow blur gray scale because a purlin noise is already very blurry, it doesn't need that type of resolution. This one is going into No, this one, we need to keep it at four K because they are going into switches. These ones we need to keep sharp, pretty much, so that's also. We cannot really do much on that. Let's see. What do we have here? Also, a stone generator, we can probably do a little bit of cleanup, although I'm not sure if I even want to do that because I'm always a bit scared that it will break renting. So let's see what is it doing over here? Okay, so it's just adding a mask. Once again, like these type of things, I do not really want to change because we are often just already integrating them too much. Yeah, the most thing that I tend to do is I tend to go mostly for this kind of stuff. Where here we have the slope grayscale, and I can just like in a Pearlie reduce the. So I mostly go for those kind of maps. Now in the base colors, unfortunately, we cannot do too much. Like this one, we can probably get away which is also setting to one K by one K, see? So that one we can get away with. This one we probably cannot get away with. No, because this is an actual ground so that needs to stay sharp. This parlise we can probably get away with a one K by one K here, so that is also being reduced. This one adds slow blurs. Because it's a purlois we can probably get away with it. See? Yeah. Okay, so if it would be any other map, we cannot get away with it, but because the pearl noise is already blurry, we can. Like, for example, this moisture noise, we cannot lower it. If we lower this moisture noise, it will not work. These pearl noises, let's set those to one K, and the directional warps, we can also set to one K. So we can already produce quite a few things. Over here, we have white. This can just be 16 by 16 because it's like a uniform color. So we can fix that. And slowly like that, you can make your graph a lot faster while it should still look exactly the same. See here, it will still look exactly the same. So yeah, I would recommend just go over this. Sometimes, if you are making these graphs, for example, in a studio, you need to find ways to literally avoid entire maps. Like the dirt mask is very expensive. It's 280 milliseconds. That's more than most of all of these nodes combined. So it is very expensive, but in those kind of cases, you would then, for example, just try and find different ways to do this. Like this kind of dirt, technically, what you can also do is you can generate an ambient inclusion, invert it, throw on like a grunge map or something like that in order to create the same effect. That's something that you will learn when you are actually working inside a studio. Before that, I would say, get good first at making materials and while still keeping optimization, of course, in mind. But optimization is not your main focus when you're learning substance. It will be mostly actually understanding the program and everything. So that is pretty much it for optimization, and I will stop talking now. So that was our advanced substance material. Now what we will do in the next chapter or in the next part is we will go over on how to actually sculpt the material inside of sorry inside of sbh and then how to finalize it using substance designer. So substance designer is definitely a tool that keeps coming back nonstop. But this material, it might look like a lot, but I think we've done a really good job with it. And although we had some hiccups along the way, I think we end up with a really nice looking material. So let's go ahead and continue into our next part of this tutorial course. 22. 20 Zbrush Setup And Going Over Our Reference: Okay, welcome to the Z brush part of this tutorial course. So this will be the material that will be partly sculpted and partly using substance designer. So this is another technique that's often used within environment art. Now, it kind of depends on the company. Like some companies like the ones I worked for, we did a playground game so we did like 40% in Z brush in the rest in substance. And for example, on the division two at Ubisoft, we did like 95% in substance only. So but this technique is being used. There are companies that do this technique like 100% or not 100% of Z brush, but they do basically all the base sculpting inside of C brush, and not very often actually do the fill material inside of substance. So my audio might be slightly different because my microphone is slightly further away, but we are going to get started with this material. It's actually not going to be too difficult, so it's just a cobblestone material, fairly basic. So we are going to start by just like sculpting a few different cobblestones, and I'm going to show you how to place them in a tiable manner. And yeah, so it will be quite easy. Stuff like what I like to do is I like to do big shapes inside of Zebras. So what I'm talking about is I will do the sculpting for the stones. I will give them a little bit of noise, but I will not give them very detailed noise and everything. The reason for this is because I feel like I have a lot more control on that inside of substance designer, personally. Same for the ground. Like, I will do the ground, but I will not do the actual noise in the ground. This will also save me, with the rendering because you need much higher hi polis like to keep all the micronise intact. So that will also just save a little bit of memory space in my PC. And what I will also do is like a little extra is I will actually have some of these weeds that you can see here, like the little grass bits and everything. However, I will do those in a tree D modeling program. The technique is so absolutely basic. It's literally just placing, so it doesn't matter what program you use. I think I'm going to use Maya for this. But yeah, honestly, it doesn't matter. And we will be using I'll show you a few techniques. Like we will be using mega scans for this. However, I will also show you some techniques if you don't have mega scans. So that's the general plan of this. So what I want to do is I want to now, first of all, just go into ZRH and show you a few things. So here we are in ZBRH. What we will discuss in this chapter is simply the setup. So as you can see, I have a custom UI. I've had this UI for many years. I believe I don't think I've made most of it myself. I believe I got it somewhere online or something like that. It used to be even more in depth, but I honestly can't remember. What I will do is I will include this UI for you guys. You can find it in your SAS folder, Z brush material, and UY. And I'm going to you then just need to go into preferences and just press load UI and then you can load this basically. So this tutoral I think it can be used for both beginners all the way up to, like, well, advanced people will probably find the sculpting part a little bit boring inside of ZBrush because the sculpting is fairly easy for this. There's nothing special going on here. But yeah, so beginners should be able to follow this. So I will just keep it fairly basic, but still show you some key techniques that we need to do. So within this UI, a few important things that I have is, I have a few brushes over here. Now, what I'm going to do at this point is I'm already going to just create a very basic sphere. So I'm just going to click on the sphere. And once you click over here on the sphere, you can click and drag. To have it in. Once you drag in one, do not click again. First of all, press Edit up here. You always need to do this because else it will drag in multiple objects. The only reason I'm creating this sphere so that I can show you my actual UY. So I have a few brushes over here. You can also find these down here. Here you can find every single brush, of course. Now I will not go over the actual UY of C brush, so I do hope that you know the basics of that, and else just go to YouTube and find a very basic tutorial. So the brushes have over here for this I will most likely only use the trim dynamic, smooth move, and maybe clay build up. You can see most of them here. Clay buildup, you can see here, move, trim dynamic. The smooth brush is literally holding shift, and then it switches to smooth. So I will tell you this a few more times. So yeah, the clay, if I just go and press make Polmsh three E, I need to do that in order to unlock all the settings. And basically, if I go, let's go to geometry let's subdivide. You don't need to focus on this. I will show you later. So the clay buildup, you'll basically just add some extra clay or some extra geometry on top. The move just allows you to move based upon your brush. The trim dynamic allows you if I do like, if I do like this clay buildup, and I'm now going to switch over to my drawing tablet, the trim dynamic basically allows you to create these quite still soft but still flat areas around. So that's something that you also see me using. And for the rest, yeah, so the smooth, if you all shift, you can smooth out your mesh, and that is about it that I'm going to use. Now, one thing that I always also like to use is over here, you have your orientation. I have it in my UY, but you can find this in Oh, God. It's been a long time since it is up here. It is called orientation, but to be very honest, I just need to quickly check where this one is actually located. It is most likely located around, like your stroke or stencil, no texture, no transform. You would think that it would be in here. I'm just going to have a quick check where it was again. Okay, I found it. So it is in picker and orientation. So here you can see the same buttons. So yeah that's the annoying thing when you have your own UY. After a while you just forget where the other buttons are. So basically what orientation does. Count Auri just does the same behavior. Once Auri gives me a much sharper effect, as you can see over here. So it just change the orientation. And then you have this pencil, and this pencil basically allows you to set a angle. So what I can do is here, if I draw, I can literally set the angle from which I'm drawing even though I'm looking at one specific area. So that's basically the only ones that I use for that. Let's see. What else do we have? So yeah, I have some of these buttons up here. However, I have on my draw tablet. You can probably see the pop up. I have this little rotate button which I can use to scale my brush. So I will just be using my drawing tablet to scale my brush up and down. But you can also always just go to your brush size up here and just change it or you can right click, and in here, you can also change the draw size. So there are many ways to do this. I would say that that is about it. Now you can change your material, but I will show you all this stuff. So that is it for my UY. It has nothing special, has a few brushes, and now we are ready to get started with our actual texture. So we will get started by just creating two or three variations of our actual cobblestone. So let's go ahead and continue with that. 23. 21 Creating Our Single Cobblestone Part1: Okay, so we will now be sculpting our cobblestone. So a few take weights, if we look at our reference. One thing that we want to do is we want to make sure, so we are going to create probably three different variations. What I'm going to make is I'm going to make one that is very generic looking, one that is more rectangular looking. And one that is like, it's a little bit more beaten up, so there's like some interesting corners. A few things to keep in mind. You might be tempted with the trim dynamic to make your edges super smooth everywhere. But then you just end up with like a clump, and it's not very realistic. If you look at these bricks, the edges are actually often very sharp. The only places where they are very smooth is on the corners, as you can see over here. This is where they really start to smooth out. So keep that in mind that you do not go overboard. Also, do not make too many very specific details. These details, because we are going to reuse our cubes, reuse our stones over and over and over again to populate an entire area, you will be able to see those very specific details repeating. So instead, keep it very generic at first, and then what we're going to do is later on once we've placed all of our stones, then we will go in and in some stones, we will add some more specific details. So I would say, let's just dive right in, and we are just going to get started with our very first stone over here. So here we are inside of a clean version of Cebush again. Now, the first thing I need to do I need to set my document to be a square because remember, texts are square, and we are going to use that to our advantage inside of sebush. So we want to go to document, and then down here, you want to turn off P, and you want to set this to 2048. Oh, it's closed down 2048 by 2048. And then you just want to go ahead and you want to press resize. Now, this will make scene very large. This is because we are going for a larger resolution. The resolution itself doesn't really matter. It matters more that it's square. But what we need to do is we need to go back into Document, go down to Zoom and just zoom this out until we can see the entire square again. Once you're here, you can also go to this range button and just tone this down. This will basically just make sure that the gradient isn't as intense and then it's just a personal preference. So we have this square document, we are ready to go. Now what we need to do is we need to go into Tool and click on Cube three D. So when you click on that, you can now drag it in here. And then you can simply press edit. There we go. We have very simple cube. I'm just moving my mouse around like this. If you hold Shift, I'm using shift for the snapping and I'm basically just holding old and mouse clicked for the bending. That's about it. Don't worry. I will not go over the very basics. I just wanted to especially just tell you the snapping because we will use the snapping very often. If you hold Shift and click, you are able to snap to whatever angle is closest in that regard. So having our cube here, what I'm going to do is I'm going to make it a polymsh tues that I can properly edit my cube. And now that this is done, I'm going to go ahead and I'm probably going to get started by just adding some geometry. I like to always set my material to be the basic material, so that is gray. I prefer it that way. But right now, if you go to the ply frame over here, you can see that the Y frame is very messy. This is not going to work. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go into Jome tree, and I'm going to redo the entire wireframe using something called dynamsh. It's a very handy tool in order to basically, I'll show you go to dynamesh, and you want to go ahead and just press Dynamesh. So what you can see is what it did is it basically just remapped all of the jometr and made it all perfectly even quads. And that is very good. The higher resolution you set here, the higher density your geometry will be. So, the more polish you'll have. In the beginning, we are going to stick with a fairly low resolution, I would say. So we are now at 98,000. I am actually going to go up to around 400,000 simply by going into Jon tree and pressing divide. And basically, the goal is that if we click our trim dynamic and we scale up our brush a little bit, we should be able to make nice edges like this. See? I'm now doing this over the top. But basically, this is what we are going to use the trim dynamic for to basically make these edges very nice and smooth. So I'm going to Uo that. And I'm just going to get started with the base. What I mean with the vari base is I'm just going to get start by just breaking up all of these edges a little bit. Now, inside of Sebas, there will be some time consuming bits that I will just go ahead and, like, later on time labs. So I will do one brick completely in real time and the other two, because it's the exact same process, I will not do that, but I'm going to now get started by just basically drawing over my edges, and sometimes I go draw sideways and other times I go with the actual direction of the edge. So now I'm going with the direction of the edge, and then sometimes I like to go sideways. What this will do is it will just give us a very slight indentation over here. Don't do too over the top, because remember what I said, we cannot go for iconic details. And what I'm going to do is after this, I'm going to work on the corners to make them look a lot more interesting. But for now, it is very simple. We are just going to basically sculpt a cobblestone like this. And it's just going to still be like a very basic square that's no problem. The nice thing about stones that they are often manufactured, so they often have the same dimensions. And then later on we are going to just make this look a lot more interesting, of course. So we now have like here. We now have basically I think I've done all of them. Yeah. If you press F, you can zoom in because I feel like I think my pivot point is Oh, it is in center. So it just felt like the rotation in that it was rotating more on the corner than anything else. But okay, so we have these pieces. Now, remember how we are going to preview our texture from the top. So if, for example, click on this top and hold Shift and click, this is basically how you will see your brick. And now you can imagine, we are going to reuse this brick, but we have a lot of side. So we can use this side. We can use this side, we can use this side, this side, and then the two top side. So we immediately have six different bricks based upon this. So I'm going to get started. Let's say that we start for this side. What I want to do is I want to go ahead and make this corner quite a bit smoother. So I'm going to basically start from the top and I'm going to make this corner the way that I want it. And here, I said, I wanted to have this round. So I'm just basically drawing my cursor on top of this so that when I look at it from the top, Okay, so this is like the roundness I want. Once I've got the roundness I want, then of course, I do need to softly fade this out. So I'm basically going to nicely fade out this roundness to make it look more interesting. But what you can see is that I on purpose, am not going to give this roundness on here. This is all in terms of variation. If I make this roundness, I will have a cool side that looks like this. However, if I look from the other side, it will still be looking fairly square, and I can make it a little bit round because it makes sense to have it a little bit round. But it's nice that it doesn't have the same roundness. So this one is still quite intact, but this one is more damaged. Also remember that when you look from this side, you will have this softer side over here. So we have this roundness. Now, if I go ahead and look at my reference, most of these corners are actually quite a bit round. So I'm going to go for like a bit more roundness over here. See you like that. Let's leave this one. Quite intact. So just give like a tiny bit of roundness and then over here, I'm going to probably give this one like a little bit more like a sharp fall off, like you can see over here. So it is more like a bevel, rather than like a RC. So it's more like a bevel rather than a nice soft roundness, because I often see that also. I am looking at my reference, but it's really annoying when I'm working with my drawing tablet to needing to drag my reference over to this side because then I need to keep switching between my mouse and my drawing tablet. So just follow along and just keep looking at your reference how everything looks. So we will have this sharp bit over here. So this already looks quite nice. Now, of course, the corners over here are still quite boring, but that's something that we can also work on. Like, I can already give them, like, a little bit of, like, damage. And what I want to do is these rocks are quite soft on the top. What I mean, with that, they don't really have, like, a harsh transition angle, like you can sometimes see over here. Like, see, this transition angle when I look at my reference, it actually has a much softer fall off. So I just go over these transition angles and just make them a little bit softer to make sure that we are inside once we are going to bake this, it will look nice and soft. So that's basically the general idea. Now you just go over to different sides and you just like, give it some variation. So over here, I can say like, Okay, I want to have this one to be like a little bit softer, and then it just continues on into straight. We already have some straightness going on over here, and we already have some softness going on over here. Maybe give it a little bit of, like, a dent in this area, like you can see like that so that you can often see that it's on the edge. It's like this type of dents. But it's on the very edge of how far I want to go with my damage. And I also understand that when I look at this version, I know that I cannot use this version as much as that I could use this version, for example. Sorry. I forgot which one. There is a version here. So it's just something that we need to pay attention to. This one is very straight. I think that's actually quite nice. So we can have it like, Okay, some of the bricks are just not that worn down, maybe because people just haven't dwelled on them too often. So this one, I'm just going to fix those really sharp edges here at the side. Just by drying over them a little bit, you can see it like that. So let's say this side is fine. This side is so we got some roundness over there. Actually, I also want to continue this roundness a bit over here. I just feel like it makes sense if the roundness would come from different areas. Yeah. So we have the roundness over here, and then over here we have already some damage anyway. So what we can do is okay, so the roundness trying get rid of dose edges. So nice, and then it just starts to break. This one is just very damaged. This one has, like, a little bit of damage, and then it just kind of, like, falls off. Et's get rid of these sharp edges on these two. You can see over here. So we'll get rid of these sharp edges over here also. Just make this a little bit more softer. Hey, I really need to keep in mind because I'm the type of person that always accidentally arts too much damage. So I need to keep in mind that I need to keep this clean. So this is like almost a perfect version. This one is, like, worn off it. Whoa, worn off it, one side. This one it's fairly perfect, but it still has some damage going on. Here we go. That's looking good. And now the top side, I think, all we need to do is just, like, add some sharp edges or remove some sharp edges. So, actually, the sculpting of this stuff, it's super easy. It's like there's not much to it. It just takes a little bit of practice, but even for beginners inside of Cebush it's literally just moving your mouse around. So just have a play around with it and just be a little bit careful when you're doing the sculpting. Don't just go overboard. That's basically the general takeaway. So let's say we got something like this. Okay. Now, the next thing that I want to do is I just want to give, like, a little bit of using my move tool a little bit of variation. So I'm using my moveTol over here, and I'm just going to basically sometimes push some edges in to get started with. And this will just give our stone a little bit of like an organic feel because it feels less perfect. And what you can also do with this is you can move some edges around a bit to make it feel like the stone is not the same thickness on every single side. So it is because of all the cars that have driven over it, or people that have walked over it, the rain, the weathering, all that kind of stuff takes into account how perfect your stone would be. So I'm basically doing that. But this is going to be my most generic stone, so I want to be very careful not to overdo it, basically. I can overdo it later on once I've placed them. Then I'm going to make my move to a very large, and I'm going to basically go into the centers, and I'm going to try and, like, move this up to give me, like, the typical cobblestone look that you can see here, see. So you can see that these cobblestones, they always have a little bit of they're not perfectly flat. They always have a little bit of height to them, mostly in the center. So that's basically what I'm doing here. Maybe make my brise a little bit smaller, but you do need to look at it from a little bit of an angle in order to properly move it in the correct direction. But I'm basically just trying to, like, give it a little bit of, like, movement like this and maybe like a little bit like this over here. Okay, let's see. So if we go from this side, now what I do is I just look at the sides basically to make sure that everything looks interesting. Like, this side is still perfectly flat, so I probably forgot it. And also you move tool. You don't have to do it's always exactly in the center. You can always just move it a little bit to, like, the side. Yeah. So like this one, just, see this cob so now it doesn't feel as perfect. And that's great. That's exactly what I'm looking for. So we got this stuff over here, maybe a little bit more movement up here and maybe a bit more here the corner. But basically, we now got something that looks fairly interesting. So what I'm going to do now is I'm just going to add some very basic noise to this. And the way that we are going to do is we are going to use Alphas basically. Now, these Alphas, you can find a lot of free Alphas, but also Bt ones on Cg marketplaces. This can be flipnrmals.com. This can be ArtStation Marketplace Gum Road. There are a few more ones that are also in there. So basically, what I like to do is I just go to, like, for example, station because I happen to know that there is a free rock Alpha on here. Just go to Marketplace and just type in, like, I just tend to go for Alpha because rock Alpha is sometimes a bit too specific, and then just click on free. So the one we are going to use if we Wow. It doesn't happen often that tation is a bit slow. The one that we are going to use is there is something. There is a user in here, so I just tend to, scroll down and have a look. It's always nice to just discover new stuff like this. But yeah, there should be one over here, which is called Rock off or something like that. Here, you have some free crack Alphas also sitting in here. So there is some interesting stuff, and I realize that while I'm talking, I'm not actually paying that much attention to looking for my APAs. So basically the ones that we want to get, I'm just going to go up here and go to, like, my library. So because I already downloaded it, oh, I'm in the Wong account. Sorry. Okay, I found it. So if you simply go and I end up typing in oh, sorry, wrong one. I end up typing in Rock Alpha, and it's this one by Alpha House, and it's a 50 Rock Alpha. That's what it's called. So this one is quite nice. Now, I cannot include this into my joy, of course, because I didn't create this. But you can use it for both personal and commercial use, so that's very nice. Although if you want to support them, they are free alpha. So I would recommend just buying it. So I will do that, but I'm not going to give him my payment information during a tutorial. So for now, let's just artist to library, and you just basically artist to the library, and then it would just end up in here, and then you can just go ahead and press Download. So that's basically how it would work. I'm sure that many of you would know how it works. But basically, those are the alphas that I'm going to use. And if I just go ahead and go in here, I will just I will not have them in my project, but I will place them here, or well, I already have them placed here. And you just end up with basically these kind of Alphas. So these Alpha maps, they are quite popular inside of brush. They are basically height maps. If you follow the Z brush parts, they are just height maps, basically. And we can use them in our case, just for some generic noise. So if I go in here, I simply want to go, for example, to my clay brush, in this case, and the disappear. So here we have my clay brush. I then go to Alpha and press Import. When you do that, you can navigate to your folder and you can just grab the Alphas. Now, many of these will most likely be too noisy, but I know I'm looking for pieces with sharp details. You can just select everything and load it in and try it out, but I'm personally just to not make it as confusing. I'm going to only grab a few of them that have some nice sharp details in them. And you can see it based upon the height. You can see when there are some sharp details in here. Like this stuff, this is very sharp. So that's the kind of stuff that I want to try. I just hold Control and just add them in here, and then they will all be loaded in. So the way that this works in our case, is going to be that we need to go to the stroke and set a stroke from dots, which is normal drawing to drag rectangle. What Drag rectangle allows us to do is it allows you to grab, for example, Apha, set your intensity all the way up, for example, and then if you click and drag, it will basically drag in this Alpha, see, as you can see over here. Now, there's a few things we need to set up. Right now, if I, for example, Gina, what this one. That one might be a bit too strong. Let's say you just look and I will also do that, I will very quickly just check and see which one feels a little bit of nice. This one is quite nice. It just needs to be some generic details just to make it look a bit more interesting. We can, for example, swap between number 20, and what was it? Number 30 20 and 32 might be interesting. Actually, most of these actually are quite nice. I don't want stuff with too much noise, this stuff is not as useful for what I need or that one. So we are going to go for number 2032 and 16. So keep those in mind. Now, what happens now? When I drag, what you can see is that there is a problem because it is literally breaking my entire model. This is because we are dragging it so large that it will actually affect the rest of the model. In order to fix this, it's very easy. All you need to do is you need to go ahead and go to your brush. And then go down to outomsking and simply turn on back face mask. And what that does is now when you drag it in, it will just ignore the back. So knowing that, I'm going to how you another cool technique, and this technique it's called layers. It's a little bit more non destructive, basically. So almost like inside of substance that you can turn stuff on and off. So I just I don't need dynamis anymore, so I can turn it off. If I go and I want to go basically to my layers over here, now, when you press this big button, what it will do is basically as soon as you press it, it will record whatever function you do. So if I drag something in here like this, and I then go, for example, to this one or actually, let's say this one. And I can drag and I can rotate to make it look more interesting. I can then go, for example, okay, number 32. Let's d that one over here. I need to be a little bit careful because it looks like that it's Alright, okay, so it's affecting it a little bit, so we do need to keep that in mind, but don't worry. So sorry about that. Let's redo. There we go. So okay, let's not redo. So we got those. Try it out and just don't go too far with it. So we got, one over here. Maybe, have another one over here. And I just need to be careful that I don't go too overboard, basically. And then I'm going to go for, like, number 36 and give it a little bit more variation over here. Over here. So yeah, they will always like overlap even with our rectangle. So we now have this stone, and now it's like these interesting pieces. Now, what you can do is you can press this button over here for record and turn it off. So now you are no longer recording any settings. Now, if you want to drag something, it will say, Hey, you are not in a layer, you need to press record. But the cool thing is one, I can turn it on and off. But another thing is that I can actually use the slider to reduce the amounts. And that's very nice because I can just carefully choose how much of this I want to actually have in here. So I can say, like, Okay, I want to only have around 0.7, and that's already enough to make my stone look a bit more interesting. And this is just like the help substance later on for some of these more stronger bits. We are going to create micronoise inside of substance because yeah, with that, my PC personally isn't strong enough to by the time that I'm placing this, we will probably have like 50 million polis. If I had to have perfect micronise on top of this, I would be reaching 100 million or something like that. And in my case, it wouldn't really work, especially not for the baking technique that I want to use. So this is, like, better. So it is still, it is here. It is not the highest resolution, but it will work. So what I like to do then is I like to add another layer like this, so now it's recording another layer. And then I like to go to Trim dynamic. And in my Alpha, I like to set this Alpha to be a square this time. So the square alpha will basically give us a little bit of a sharp falloff. We didn't need it on a corners, but if we set this square Alpha, I can probably show you like here, you can see the squares, you can see that there's a little bit of a sharp falloff. Now, if you set your focus shift even sharper, the fff will be even more. You can see like now I have quite a sharp falloff. Once I've done that, I simply want to go in here, and I want to basically paint on top of my Alpha details that I have. And I basically just want to paint out some of this very soft noise and just try and capture some of the larger details so that we get something in this direction. See? So we keep those larger details in here. But I'm just like softening out some of this noise. This is just like a little preference. I'm used to doing this on rocks, and I consider this to be a little bit of rock. But as a bonus, over here where we had, like, some overlap, this overlap happens because we are drawing everything on a cube and not so much on a plane. We can actually just draw out that overlap, which will clean up our scene and make everything look a lot cleaner. So at this point, we can simply go in. Wow, my, my wedding sculpting for 25 minutes. You often lose track of time inside of Sabah. So I simply go in and, if I ever have these arrows, I just go and I just, like, clean them up and here I get, like, these nice interesting details sometimes. And those are the ones that I want to capture. So I'm just cleaning this up. Also, if you have the black pixels, sometimes just try and hold shift and soften it. The black pixels basically means that there's like geometry that is accidentally overlapping. So what I tend to do then is I tend to first of all, just like, clean up my area over here like this one is especially bad, and then just hold shift and then just very carefully just don't smooth it out too much, but just smooth out some of these edition that will get rid of those black pixels. Technically, those black pixels, once we're done with all of this, they do not make too big of a difference. So like, it won't break your texture, so don't worry if you like, miss a few. But it's still good to just do that. And also, keep in mind, like, try to keep your texture still sharp because this Alpha technique has probably made my corners, like, a little bit less sharp, but we will do, like, a check on it. This is why I'm using my layers that I can, like, turn it on and off and play around with things. But yeah, for now, I'm just focusing on like here, this is a great one. This is a great one where I can just, like, have some flat areas where I can just very quickly. I'm not putting a lot of tart into this. I'm just like very quickly. Whenever I see a flat area, I just try to, like, kind of flatten it out even more. You know, like, this one is a little bit more tricky, but that's fine. It just gives us more variation. And by the time that we have our base color and everything on it, these variations will be quite hard to even see. So I'm exaggerating them a little bit so that because I know that I will probably lose part of these variations again, especially once I need to optimize this even more in order to place it. So we are actually going to optimize this even more, but don't worry about that because we'll use something that's called dynamesh that will still keep all of these noises intact. Sorry, decimation master, it's called. So here, that kind of stuff is pretty good. Now we can look at it from the side and here you can see that this sites quite interesting. This site is quite interesting, but it can use a bit more. See here, it can use a little bit more noise, and also just double check your corners. This side is quite interesting. It just has a little bit more of that stuff going on. Over here, let's shift to soften this out. So if this chapter is a little bit long, but we're almost done with our first tone, and then in the next chapter, I can just kick in the time laps and I can just make two variations of this basically. So here we go. And yeah, the time lops, I will not narrate over it because it's too basic for that. But I will show you some techniques before we end this course that I might cover in those stones. But all the techniques are still the same. So now I'm just going to go in double check my corners to make sure that I do not accidentally have broken them too much. Sometimes it's better to just soften the corners instead of using your trim dynamic because trim dynamic will cut away from them a little bit. But there we go. So we now got this interesting looking cobblestone ready to go, and it just has some exaggerated details. At this point, you can, like, for example, turn this off, and here you can, again, see, I can just use my slider in order to make this more or less. So that's looking quite good. So at this point, I think it's good if I actually save my scene. So let's press Save as. And I want to go ahead and I want to save this in source file, save Cebush material, and I will just call this cobble Stone nscore single. So that is the one if you want to open it, how it will be called. Okay, so a few things before I leave that you will probably see me doing in the next chapter, you will most likely see me going into Subto pressing duplicate in order to duplicate my cobblestone, so I would most likely duplicate it, and then I can even move it. And it's just like a duplication, very basic. And what you will most likely see me doing is going into layers and press Big A. Once you press Big into your layers, you can no longer edit them. So the layers just collapse, but this is sometimes needed if you want to do specific functions or if you want to finalize your model. That's it. For us, all the techniques are the same. We are going to now create another variation that's going to be a little bit more damaged and a variation that's going to be a little bit more rectangular. So let's go ahead and continue with that in the next chapter. 24. 22 Creating Our Single Cobblestone Part2 Timelapse: And H. 25. 23 Placing Our Cobblestone Part1: Okay, so we got our stone variations. As you can see, our original. Now, this one, I just went for a more damaged version. But yeah, I did try to get rid of some of these really strong details because else we would be able to maybe recognize them. And I didn't we like that. Oh, I have no idea what that is. So a cool thing now that you have multiple pieces. If you go ahead and press Alt and click, you can select your mesh basically. Here, I have my cobblestones here. Yeah, here, Alt clicking means that you select them just to make it a bit easy. Another thing is, I also went for this one, and with this one, I did just duplicate it, but I just completely got rid of all of the details and then just redone those things just to make sure that they look nice. So we got something like this. This one we will not use that often, so I'm not too worried about that. So we got now these pieces. Now the next thing that I'm going to do, at this point, I will definitely just want to save it. See brush. Thank you. I definitely want to save it because we do need to do some optimizations at this point, because right now we are hitting around 400,000 polis per stone. But as I said before, those are going to become a lot of polis when we have 100 stones or 50 stones or something like that. So let's just go ahead and get start with this one. Basically, the way that I tend to optimize this is I tend to use something that is called decimation master. Now, if you go up here to C plugins and you can use this little round button to click and drag this over here, here we go, decimation master. If you just click on it, decimation master is actually really cool. So it will basically twine and optimize your geometry, but it will tie and keep all of these details still intact. And so we can actually optimize it quite a bit without actually seeing any of the details disappear. So what you want to do is you just want to go ahead and press preprocess current. And when you do that, it will just go ahead and it will go through the entire thing. There we go. And then down here, it will say how much you want to optimize. If you say 20%, it means that it will leave 20% left of the current geometry count. So I'm going to go for this because I need to be careful. Let's go, let's say 50%. I press decimate current, and now what you can see is almost nothing has changed. But if I go into my geometry, the geometry has become a lot more messy. Now we are now at 200,000. 200,000 I think I can live with. If I go anymore, I feel like I will lose the details that I want to keep. Now that I know that I can just go, for example, to this one, preprocess current. It will go through the cycle, and then we can just go ahead and press decimate curve at the same value. So now all of them will end up with around 200,000. And this is why I just wanted to go ahead and, like, save my scene before because we are going to split the scene into its own bit because just in case we break something, it's better to just split it up. I don't know why this one is taking so long for me to simply compute. That's a bit interesting. Here we go. I don't know why that took so long. It actually took about a minute. If you ever have that problem, you can also press Escape and escape will basically cancel the function, then you can try again or if you feel like something is wrong. So yeah, there we go. As you can see, now, you can see if you go very close, you can see some of these faces. So you can start to see the jom tree, but do not worry. Seabis does not show smoothing groups. However, when we start baking it, it will actually just show the smooth group. So this will all be shaded smooth. I hope you know what that means. It just means that right now the eggs are really harsh, but we will give them like a soft look. So don't worry about it. It will be fine. Even if it is a problem, we can always go into substance and add stuff to it. So we got these pieces down here ready. Let's go ahead and just hide my plugins. Let's do save as, and this time, we want to save this one as Cobblestone underscore setup. There we go. Okay, so we are now going to get started by actually placing my cobblestone, as you can see over here. So we'll just, like, give them an interesting placement. I actually really like this divider in here. Also, I can actually use this divider inside my scene to divide between tarmac and between the cobblestone, because often, you would have, like, a row of stones that would divide between the two. So it's like win win. So I'm also going to include this divider. In here, you can kind of see how it works. Now, they just use, like, oh, concrete divider. Can also be interesting. Anyway, I always I talk too much. So I need to go ahead and now I want to have a plane because we are, of course, wanting to map this all the plane, and the plane is going to be our ground. So it's just going to be the base ground. It's the same concept as in substance designer, but this time we do it in Tweed. We have a plane. We add the big shapes, and then we add like smaller shapes and stuff like that. So for the plane, what you can do is because there is already a default plane in here, you can go into Subtool and you can go ahead and if, for example, click on the first one, you can go into Insert and then you can press, where are you plan three D. Just click it and that should have Insert yet. Now, this plaint D I Oh, it's very, very small. It looks like here, you can see that it's very, very small and it's on this side. So that's no problem. We can go ahead and we can work with that. Now, this plane, I want to just press a little bottom because I always like to have my plane on the top, and I'm going to just press rename and call this ground. Okay, so because our plane is so small, all I need to do is just select my cobblestone. Then if I go down here and go to merge and just press merge down. This will just quickly combine them all into place so that I can very easily scale them all down like this. As you can see over here. Now we get them roughly into the scale over here because unfortunately, you cannot multi slack sub tools. I believe there is a tool for it, but anyway, this is just a technique that I use, but I don't know if it's an altcal technique. So if you know better one, please let me know. But basically, I just do this. I scale them down to roughly what I want. Then I go to split and I just press split the parts and that will just split them up into three again. Although this one. This one is black. I don't know why it did that. Just press switch color over here and that Hello. That is very strange. Why are you Black? Am I Okay. Turn off. For some reason, it made color black. Don't ask me why. Honestly, I wouldn't know. Basically, now that we have these pieces, now what I need to do is I need to figure out the correct scale. First of all, what I will do is I will just move these over here and let's move this one forward. I'm just going to move these onto the plane. Don't worry about the PIV point. I will also show you how to fix that. But first of all, let's start with this one. If you just hold I'll click and just go to this one, the PIV point looks fine. Basically, I need to go for an uneven number because what we have in our stones, sorry, I just need to set this. Here we go. What we have in our stones is we want to as I said before, we want to get this strip in between here. But for that, we need an uneven number because else we cannot have the strip exactly in the center. I also don't want to place too many stones. If I place too many stones, it will actually become quite a pain because it just takes very, very long. The more stones you place, the long grid will, of course, take to make your material. So I personally think I'm going to go for like a row of seven. That's often what I go for with things like bricks and cobblestone and everything. So in order to make sure that scale is crack, I'm going to use technique, although it's not the right technique that we will use, it's a quick technique to see if we have the right scaling. Because we have an uneven number, unfortunately, I cannot use my plane because my plane, if you go to the poli frame up here, it does actually have segments and we could split these segments up, although they are a bit difficult to see. But unfortunately, we have an uneven number, so I'm just going to eyeball it. I'm basically holding control, and I then this mess Oh, this measure is composed of multiple subdivisions. Okay, please ignore what I just said it for us because I accidentally crashed back then and I had to redo the optimization. That's something that you guys, of course, didn't see because I edited it out. So basically, I'm now holding Csvaol and then I'm just letting go once I'm in position. So I basically want to try and get seven. So I know that the scaling doesn't need to be too precise. Wow, are we de? One, two, three, four, five, Oh, wow, no, we are not. And if we say, like, Okay, so the scaling is not good, I just press CtraZ to Ido it. I just scale it down and I can just use these side angles. Now, go ahead, one, two, three. This one is looking better, four, five, six, and seven. Yes, this is looking good enough because I want my cobblestones to be very close together. And if I push these closer together, we would be able to go within this range. So I'm happy with this scale. I see, it's not too difficult. Like, you get used to kind of guessing. So we have this one. Now, all I need to do is go to, for example, these pieces over here, and I just hold Alt. And if you go ahead and press Alt again on your model, what it will do is it will just basically set your pivot point on the tip, because our pivot points were reset. If you want to customly set your Pivot point, you can always just press this little lock lock button, and that means that you can move only your pivot points, for example, like this. So once we have done those pieces, now what we're going to do is we are just going to go ahead and, like, place these pieces so that we can have everything nicely into order. But now that I have this, all I need to do is hold Alt and click on these, and I'm just going to move them over here, and I'm just going to basically make them roughly the same scaling. They don't need to be perfect. The reason for this is because we are actually going to change the scaling here and there for variation anyway. But I do need to make them fairly similar. Here. Let's say something like this. Okay. Awesome. So we have these tree stones over here. Now, remember that we are also having different sites. So what I'm going to do now with this is I'm going to grab the stone. I'm going to sort of, like, place it in the position in terms of, like, the height of it, like you can see over here. And what I'm going to do then is I'm going to start by duplicating it. Now, as you can see, the control, the reason why you don't want to do control shift is because it does duplicate, but it leaves it in the same subtol which makes it a pain for me to select it once we have 50 stones. But if I just press duplicate, it will just duplicate Subtool. I can then go like this. And let's say this one, I want to have the second side. So I hold shift, and I rotate. I press duplicate again, move it, hold shift, and I rotate. And I just keep doing this, duplicate, move, hold shift, and rotate. This all to speed up my selection process later on. I duplicate it this time, I want to rotate it hold shift because shift is just snap rotation and duplicate it once more. And this time, I want to go 180. You can see down here, you can see number. So we have now every single angle covered. And as you can see, it turned out exactly how I want it. I look at all these angles, but they do not all feel exactly like the same stone. They feel like different stones. They just happen to be similar size, but that's something we don't need to worry about. Now, another thing that I like to do is when I have these stones, I like to already give them like a tiny bit of rotation. This gives me this just saves me some time, basically. So I just go to, like, these pieces and I just click on basically this round bit over here, and I just give them a little bit of, like, a rotation to get started with. Because the stones in real life would also have some rotation, and I want to just have some of them sink in more than other ones in order to just create some very little bit of height difference. Because if you remember that if we are going to place this one, God knows so well, we have seven by seven. So if we are going to place these around 49 times, probably more because we have the thinner pieces, then you will notice that it will just give us, lots of variation. So we got these pieces ready. Now we just need to do the same over here. So this one is a little bit stronger. So what I'm going to do is I'm probably only going to duplicate this three times. So I'm going to go in here and I'm going, Oh, one button, hold Shift. Yeah, just do, like, a full on rotation. By the way, I also forgot that I need to move this properly back. So we have this one. Let's move this one properly back. Here we go. So these because they are much stronger in terms of how they look, that is the reason why I do not want to use as many of them so that I do not accidentally have a lot of stones that look very broken up because I want to actually have more variation in this. So we got these three, and I think that's looking fine. Yeah, that should work. And now, if we go for this one over here, this one we also will not use very often. So honestly, we only need to have one variation and then another one, and this one is just rotate at nine or 180 degrees. By the way, you cannot rotate when you click on your model. That's why you see me always clicking outside. So I just need to go ahead and move this in or I'll click, move this one in. Here we go. And now I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to also in here. Give it a little bit. Oh, I've got to do the rotation on the other ones for that. Sometimes if it out the saves, it will hide your model. Don't panic. It will you can just move it back. Yeah. So like this one, rotate it a bit. That's what I've got to do. Like, I only rotated them inwards. So that's something I will work on. Yeah. So for these pieces, yeah, I just can give them like small then sometimes like one straight and just give them some small. Rotations. And then we can later on, of course, just add more and more rotations if you want. Awesome. Okay. So we have our scene now correctly set up. If we zoom out, these are the stones that we are going to use to build our actual scene. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to once again save because at this point, we are starting to slowly work with more and more polis. So we now have 2 million. I think we will end up with around 15 to 20 million. It's not as much, but remember, if we would have 400,000/stone, this was going to be a lot higher. So the way to make this tlable normally Oh, that's weird. There's strange text here. I fixed test, the text just to avoid the confusion. So, to make this tilable, when I had the older Zebch I believe it was r4r8 and down, I always had this really cool tool that was made by Bradford Smith, who is an amazing naughty dog text sartist. Unfortunately, this tool doesn't work anymore in these versions, which are the 2021 versions. So I will have to do this manually. Thankfully, it's really easy to do with cobblestone. So all we need to do this plane over here, it is a square plane. As you can see, it also has even numbers, although we did not abide to these numbers. All that I care about is that the scale is square and it is always the same when we drag it in. Like I said, scale is a little bit relative. If I place my stone here and I say, this is going to be the very first stone. Now, in order to make this tilable, I would basically need to duplicate it. Duplicate it and have it on the exact same position. Sorry, I messed up on this side, then it would technically be tlilable because it would just move along. The way that we are going to do that is we are going to go ahead and we can actually just go into draw mode. 26. 24 Placing Our Cobblestone Part2: Okay. Sorry for that quick cut off. So let's continue. So we have our stone here at the top selected. Now what I'm going to do is I'm just going to press duplicate and I'm going to show you how we are going to make this style wall in the proper way, at least. So if you now go to deformation, now in the deformation, we have a lot of different tools, but the main tool that we are interested in is the offset. You can also do rotation everything. You can do everything with sliders. Now, because I know that my plane is 200 centimeters, what I can do is in my deformation is I can literally just have my stone on one end, and then I say, Okay, I simply want to move it 200 centimeters to the other end. As long as it is precisely 200 centimeters, it will basically just transition over perfectly. This basically how it looks like we have a offset. Down here, you can set your axis, for example, so we need to be on X axis. And then if we just set our offset and it looks like that we need to go into minus, sometimes it depends on your rotation. So go into your minus and then this is -100. Unfortunately, defamation always limits you to -100. But if I do this twice, you can see that now these are in the exact same angles. So cool trick that we will later on use if you go to Subto and you click basically on your plane, which I don't I thought I named your ground, and you press F and press F again. What it will do is it will basically focus the plane around your entire scene. Now, because this plane is square and our scene is square, this is where it comes in that we can just perfectly get this to work. So here you can see how things are going to become tilable. Now, I will show you like cord to very quickly test this later on, but first we would actually need some extra stones. So we have these pieces here. Good. Now we for example, click on, let's say, click on this stone. Now all we need to do is press duplicate again and this time, we need to have it in this corner. So we need to go around the clock, basically, but that's only for these corners. The other stones are going to be easier. Just the cornerstones are the most important in terms of tiling for this kind of thing. So if you go to defamation, we want to set the offset this time to be on the Y axis, looks like that I need to go into minus again, -100, -200. Great. I then go ahead and go into subtle duplicate it once more. Now if I go to defamation, I can go ahead and set my offset back to the X, and I need to go into the plus this time, plus 100 plus 100. There we go. So now I can be confident that this should all be perfectly tilable. Now that we have arrived at this point, what we can start doing is we can start by just selecting these stones, and you can pretty much place them anywhere you want. They are fairly like there is, like, a little bit of offset and there is going to be like some difference in scaling, but they are mostly going to be like straight. See? They are mostly placed fairly straight. So we can also just be confident that we do something like that. The only thing that I want to do is in order to make this even visible, we want to go ahead and give this like a different tiling that these stones over here are in a different tiling than these stones. So we need to play arms with it. First of all, we just need to have a row at the top, because we just need something in here. So let's go ahead and just play round with this. So we have these ones, and I'm just going to very simply place them together like this. Oh, I might have actually made them one, two, three, four, five, six. Oh, yeah, I might have actually made them here if we just grab the Oh, no, no, no, no, it fits. It fits. It felt like I had a lot of space left. So we can just zoom in. That's the nice thing about it like we just have the freedom to, for example, zoom in, make these at a slightly difference in height also in terms of how this looks, just because these stones have been laid down very quickly. They're a little bit messy, stuff like that. That's how you can think of it. Now, there is a reason, as I said before why I'm placing these on the corners. It is to make the transition look a lot nicer because if we have it around these corners, you can very obviously see a line going all the way around to texture where you tie it, and you do not want that. So we got this one. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, eight. No, I went for seven. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Yes, no. Wow, I have a brain freeze here. I know that I split these up in the corner over here, but I need to have, one of them here of this like the center. That is not correct. I need to have something in my center here. I split them one, two, three, four. I think because I split them up, I accidentally messed it up a little bit. Just a little bit. In that case, I'm going to cheat just a little bit in order to basically set my offset to be a little bit more to the side in order to get like this into the center. And this shouldn't matter, it will look strange inside of Sabush but it shouldn't matter anywhere else. So basically, the way that we do that is we have this one, and we basically, for example, sets like. Oh, sorry, you this one we need to set just on the corner, but, of course, we cannot actually use this one because this one needs to be, so let's delete this. It's basically going to look like this. You know, but let me just quickly move these out of the way. Sorry about this, people. But that's just me not thinking about my calculations. It basically looks like this. So we basically move this like this. And when we move it like this, now if we like, for example, start adding these extra stones back again. Hopefully, yeah, see? Yes, now we get one that is in the center. There we go. So same like this one. So now we have one that is actually in the center. And because we are still over the line, this should still look totally fine when we actually start tiling it because we are just tiling it like a slightly further distance apart. So if I grab this one, I just press duplicate, and I do the exact same thing. I just go to defamation I just set it to, like, -200. There you go. And now I can also see that I need to grab one of these and just throw them in here. There we go. Maybe you want to do want to make sure that they are not intersecting, per se. So I'm just going to go, zoom in a bit because we do have some of these rotations, which are great, but we still want to make sure that there isn't any intersecting. So it's not a lot of work to fix the problem, so I'll just leave it into the ttoil because it would be a lot of rework if I if I had to act as if this problem didn't exist, basically. But don't worry. I have not made any prompts or any thing so far. This was just like an accident. So now we will have a center bit that is totally fine. And because this is still on the corner over here, it will just transition just fine. So the only thing I would really need to do is I just need to redo this corner, and I need to redo this corner over here. But it's just a matter of selecting this one, pressing duplicate, going to a defamation and just set this to be like the X axis. One, two, and then we can just go ahead and we can once again, perhaps duplicate. Deformation set is on the X axis and this time in the plus 100 plus 200. Done as if nothing ever happened. Okay, so we now have this centre bit over here. That is totally fine. Now, we also need to do this on this side, and then we can start duplicating them over. So at this point, let's say, like I have this one, I'm going to have this one here. We just basically want to have these very close in order to keep it consistent. So another thing that we want to do later on is we do need to change the tiring for these ones. So we basically need to go ahead and change the tiing now, normally, I would just like set these to be a bit bigger, but maybe I can use this to my advantage. If I grab this one over here, just we need to keep it in mind, hold shift and rotate this 90 degrees. And if I then use like two or three of these, that should give me a size compensation. No, compensation. Sorry size compensation that will hopefully give me a different size. So if I now go to, for example, these, at this point, for now, we don't really need a defamation. We just want to pus duplicate. Place these ones, and then if I go, for example, this one, hold Shift and move this one in here. There we go. And then if I grab, for example, one of these stones, just press duplicate, move these ones in here. So having two of these stones will hopefully even this stuff out and else we just need to do some scaling. Yeah, here. So it looks like that we need to do a little bit of scaling, but that's no problem. That's actually good because we want to make sure that this looks correct. So here, I'm just scaling these up. They're cobblestone. They can be slightly different scales. I do not mind that. So I'm going to have like these ones down here. These ones down here. I just need to make sure that I'm going to keep that unevenness. Yeah, I should be able to get the unevenness. So if I go for this stuff, by the time that it arrives over there, we have done like all that little bit of extra stuff. And it can have a little bit more space. Maybe rotate this one so that a little bit more space for plants or something. I believe that now if I would also grab this one already, press duplicate and then go to your defamation set this on the Y axis. Ooh. Oh, God. I press PBR. That is Akath. Escape. Escape. Thank you. Wow, that was really mean. I went to offset and accidentally pressed PBR the white next it. So we got this one. So all I'm going to do now just because I want to make sure that this is white before I start duplicating the whole bunch, and then we will just have some fun placing everything. I'm going to place this one here. Okay, so far, it doesn't look very good, but let's see duplicate this. If we can, there we go. And then if we duplicate this, there we go. Come on. Okay. So now we are starting to create some unevenness. That is looking good. I probably want to actually have this unevenness already start a bit earlier. So if I go for this and then this. And then this one goes. Yeah, okay, so now we start to get that unevenness that I was looking for. So even I would say duplicate this one over here, and I duplicate. I actually want to have a bit more of the damage tones in between here. So I have this one over here, and now I'm just going to play out my scaling to just once again, create a little bit more unevenness. So we got this version. We got this version over here so we can play place around. This version over here, which we can just scale. There we go. And actually, at this point, it's already much fine. So, this one is even. This one starts to go uneven, uneven, even, and even again. I think I can live with that. I think that will not look too bad. We can always have a look and else we can change it up. So, okay, finally, we got these stones here. Now, for these stones, you know what to do. You're basically going to go ahead and press duplicate. And then we're just going to go to our defamation and actually set the offset. Oh, that's undo that. We want to set the offset on the Y axis. And you said it to be like -200. And we only need to do that, of course, for the outer side. Once we've done the outer side, then we can have free movement in between all of the stones like this. It's just the outer side. If we change one, I keep doing that, we need to change the other because else it's not tilable anymore. But here, this won't take very long. So if I just go ahead and do this, and I'm just going to probably kick in a time laps at this point and just do this exact same thing over and over and over again. And then once that is done, I will show you to make sure that everything is tilable. 27. 25 Placing Our Cobblestone Part3: Okay, so I finish the placement as you can see, and then I just select the plain and I just press F twice in order to get it to this stage. So what I want to do now is I just quickly want to make sure that the tiling is correct because over here you can see, we have very little stones, so I might want to push those out a little bit, but I first need to see if that is actually a problem. Now we will be baking from this exact perspective. What I can do is if I just go to architecture over here, I can press Grab Dog. What that will do is it will almost like do like a screen grab of this. I can then just go to Export and export this screen grab. And if I just go ahead and files images and just like other, it's here for testing, but I still need to place it somewhere. Yeah, let's just call it A. Yeah, and ploy. So all I'm focused about is if I quickly go to substance designer and you can do this EVLCy substance designer is the easiest way to probably do this. I'm just going to navigate to my images other, and I just quickly drag this in and just press input. The only reason I'm doing this is because I'm going to use substance functionality of pressing space. So here we have this if an opera space. Well, would you look at that, it is perfectly tilable. So this is how it will look over here. This stuff over here, um Yeah, actually, you should not be able to see that. Once we fill in all of the other spaces, you should not be able to see any of this. So we need to look at it like this texture. No, sorry. Like this we need to look at. So it might look a little bit strange right now, but it shouldn't be a problem. And yeah, this should be fine, as far as I know. So I can just get started with placing in all of these pieces. Then we will do another screen wrap, and then we'll see if it is wong and if it is wong, I will literally just delete this recording, and I will learn from my mistake and do it again. But let's hope that that's not the case. So if you hear this, then it was not the case. So, at this point, what we basically want to do is now we have freedom because we can place whatever we want in here. So we can just go in and we can just start selecting these pieces and adding extra variation we can do later on. For now, it is just a matter of, for example, randomly selecting some pieces, pressing duplicate, and just like, moving these all closer together. So, a just press duplicate again. Here we'll probably need to do some scaling, just to make this all fit. There we go. So just because we, of course, did some scaling on the side. Let's keep that in mind the side pieces sometimes have some scaling in there so that we put a preference towards these pieces over here. And you basically want to do this. And let's say these pieces we can still use because we can duplicate them and we can, like, rotate them and then kind of place them here. So they will just like some interesting looking variation on top of things. Because here it will create even more unevenness between all of these pieces. So let's see, let's duplicate this one. And this actually doesn't take too long. I will refine this, of course, later on, and I will make sure that this is all looking just very nice and perfect, basically. But for now, what I can do is I can just actually, this is what I mean with these pieces. They are very obvious, so I don't want to actually use those too often. So I go, let's say, duplicate this because I know that this one is a little bit bigger. So I can go in here and I can, try and fit this in here. And then hopefully in the end, we will land on our feet, and we will actually have just some nice pieces all sitting together. Now, this will most likely only take me about like a minute or three, four. So I will not time lapse that. I will just like places and just talk about things in the meantime. And just when saying that I have nothing to talk about. But yeah, basically, we are just going to go ahead and we are just going to go through the process of placing these. Once we've done that, we will do another test. Then what we will do is we will go ahead and we will um, add a lot more variation to them to make them look a lot more interesting because right now they feel very generic. So one thing that I feel now is when I look in these pictures, these ones feel forward. These ones feel sideways. But I think the only way that yeah, it's a bit tricky to convey that. But honestly, does it really matter because technically, right now, these ones feel sideways, and these ones feel forward. So in the end, I don't think it really matters. This just maybe I shouldn't have gone for like a cobblestone that I've never I have done cobblestone plenty of times before, but I've never done a cobblestone that has, like, this center separation. But hey, I wanted to give you guys something interesting, and just like, just a cobblestone can sometimes be a little bit boring, to be honest. And I felt like you guys deserve better. So I wanted to just go for, like, something a little bit more interesting. But this will this technique that the techniques that I will show you here, they can work for everything from bricks to tiles to roof tiles and stuff like that. So I'm not too worried about that we are lacking in techniques. Now, of course, there are many different ways to create different textures inside of Zbrush. There's something that's really cool, that's called nanomsh that you can also use, but that will be something maybe for in the future. And seeing as I'm not the absolute best Zbrush artist, that might be cool if I can get some ZebushGuru who has done Z brush for, like, for longer than I've been in the industry to just show you, like, all those little techniques. Like, I can do it, but because I had to do it on Force Horizon on that we I actually used Sebre mostly. But there's a big difference between knowing how to do something and teaching. Because I have very little room for arrow as you might have noticed when I'm actually teaching this life. But anyway, here, we are getting near 10 million. So if this was a YouTube channel, that would be really excited. But unfortunately, it's just some polygon count. So I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to, this one. Let's see. How can we like we just need to make everything fit, basically. The good thing is these stones they are in real life, really crammed together. So we can be like super sloppy about this and just try and fit it all together like this. And then we will just go ahead and have a quick look. I'm quite excited, actually, to look at and see how this one work. So if you look at it also from the side, you can see that it's starting to give us an interesting height difference already, and we will work upon that. We will have the scent higher in some places and, like, lower in others. And then we'll have in between those large areas, we will have some greens growing, and hopefully in the end, I'm pretty sure of it, it will look really nice. So I'm confident that we can do that without any issue. So here we go. Let's just scale this. This one is really close together to the rest, but that's totally fine. Yeah, you know what? I'm going to duplicate this. I'm going to here, I'm going to do something like this that there's all of a sudden, quite a big size difference. And if I now, see if I can, sort of like tie as if the stone tiler, he didn't have any more of these sized stones. So he just pushed this in here because later down the road, something was happening, and now he's just trying to, like, compensate for all that stuff. This one we have already used. Try not to have the same two bricks next to each other. Actually, not shy, don't have that because it can be very obvious, even though we are going to have different colors and everything on them. If you end up doing that and you really are not in the mood to change it, then in the later stages, I will show you how to add extra variation to this stuff. I'm going to duplicate this one down here. And the last one who's Lucky guy? This one over here. Let's go ahead and throw that in here. And here, I'm just going to give you a little bit of, like, a squashing. See let's make it then a little bit bigger. So we are later on going to look at it very up close, and we're just going to make it look interesting. For now, this is starting to look good. 12 million Polish is doable. I think we end up with 15 once our plane is also done. So if we go ahead, go into our ground, we can just do the same thing again where we just press F twice. Grab Dog export this. I just call this number B. I just pass a. And now I can just quickly go into substance, and I can just import it and just have a look and see how it actually looks. Give the secretary but what resolution now? Okay. Okay, so I think this will actually work because here you can see that there is some unevenness. We just need to give it inside of our base color, maybe some guidance, maybe a little bit more greens in here. Maybe I'm going to make these, as you can see, there's a lot more ground in between the two. So maybe I can make them a little bit smaller in order to give to convey that. But if you look at this, it's perfectly tlable here if we zoom in and out. So this actually you quite good. We got some interesting stones sitting in here. So that's quite nice. 28. 26 Placing Our Cobblestone Part4: Okay. So at this point, MPC is getting a little bit slow. I'm not sure why because we don't have that many polis. Maybe it might have something to do with the amount of subtols that we have over here. So that could very well be the case. So one thing I did off screen because it takes quite a while is the outer ring over here. I merge them together. So if I just go to solo, here you can see. So the reason why I did the outer ring is because I know that we will most likely not change the outer ring anymore. And this way, I can simply turn it off. And when I turn it off and go to something else, my scene will run quite a bit quicker. So it's strange that it has to do with the Blicon count. The way that you want to do this is very easy. You simply, for example, click, whatever you want to art. You then go to rename and you just give the random name. I just go for zero, zero, for example. And you do that with all of your outer stones, and then later on, all you need to do is just go to merge, and then you basically have, for example, zero, zero, you just press merge down on another 00. Let's say that this one is also 00. So all of these stones around here are named 00. You simply select the very top one. You then say, Okay, so the one directly below it is not 00. So I just press this arrow key to go down, and now I can just press like merge down, and then it would merge these two here on a weighted sun that is doing the merge down, you cannot undo it, so I'm not going to actually do it. But basically, just like that, you can just merge it down. So the goal is to just have this basically all merge together. But honestly, if you do not if your PC is faster, or I personally don't know why this is happening. But then I would just recommend not doing this technique. I just have to do it. I don't know. I don't know. Maybe my recording is slowing it down. I honestly wouldn't know. But anyway, at this case, these are the pieces that we can edit, and I just want to have a look, and I'm going to, for example, start by having a look from the sit a little bit. I want to see how I can make this a bit more interesting. I'm going to go in, and I'm just going to zoom in and I'm just going to, look at it up close and just make sure that everything still looks correct and that we have some interesting sizes going on. Maybe it would be cool to sometimes just quickly change some of the size a little bit, like these pieces, just give a little bit of like a scaling, just to make it feel a little bit more interesting. But I don't actually think I expected that we needed to do a lot more to this, but I don't think it's that much. So we got this stuff. Is this the center one, by the way? No, the center one is over here, so I believe go Yeah, so the center one is over here. So what I wanted to do for the center one is they are already a little bit bigger. I wanted to see if I can give them a little bit more space in between these sites. And the reason that I'm doing that is so that they stand out a little bit more as being the center line. So I like to, like, make the spacing between these quite obvious, while all the other stones are really crammed together. These ones, I just want to give them a little bit more space. And then what I will do later on is I will go ahead and I will add, like, a few more extra little plants and everything in between this stuff. And that will kind of give us the guidance over here. So you can see, like some more plants, and you can see that there's more space in between these stones. And what I will also do is also damage them a little bit more later on. This one needs to be scaled down in general. This one move it a little bit. So luckily with these because I don't need to worry about my edges, I can just do, free movements and sometimes I just want to, like, scale some stuff up and down and see how it goes. For the rest, I would say that. So we did it like on the here. So we already did some rotations. I'm not sure. You can, if you want to do some more drastic rotations in some of them, just to make it look a little bit more interesting. Maybe also change like just how far they are sticking out, but that kind of stuff, I'm personally not too worried about that because once we have the ground sitting on here that will fill things up a little bit, it will all come together quite quickly. Yeah. So like, yeah, no, I sometimes does the outer zooming. So let's see if we go for, like, I don't know, here. Yeah, this feels like a very uneven piece, basically. So yeah, yeah, I would say, this feels like quite an uneven piece, so this could actually work just fine. So, let's say that the movement or the placement is now done for our actual stones. Now what we're going to do is so we have these stones. We do not want to change the outer stones. However, for the indoor stones, we can, if we want, go in and out like a little bit of extra damage to some of them. And basically, what I would do is remember we did some optimization, so the geometry is not great, so we'll see how this will work. If I go to my trim dynamic and I'm just going to go ahead and hold, not hold alt. Basically, I'm just sometimes going to add some damage. If you do not get the right damage you want, if it looks really buggy or something and you cannot fix it with just some smoothing, I would recommend just doing a re dynami on this, and then you will have like this one, of course, with higher polygon counts, but it will not be as obvious. So I will see how it goes. So like this kind of stuff, because it's large damages, it looks like that I can get away with it. That doesn't happen often that you can get away with it, but I will show you. Let's say this one. What I can do is I can just go to JomTre dynamesh, press dynamesh, and it looks like we need to go much higher in resolution, 800 or 700. Maybe a little bit more 1,300. There we go, see? So it will make everything feel a little bit softer, but now this is all perfect geometry again. So now I can, like, really chip away in this if I want to, so I can, for example, make one of these like completely broken. And then for these ones, like if I have just like some smaller details I want art, I can just go ahead and I can just go in here and do that. Now, I'm not going to do too many of them. I would recommend you just, like, take your time for this. But yeah, I'm not going to spend too much because if I want, I can spend hours on this. But I still want to have it like adding some extra variations. That's when we look at it from the top, we just sometimes get this. See, sometimes you see that there's more variation going on in certain areas, and that is pretty much unique variation. You still do not want to go too over the top, because remember, we are tiiling this. So we are going to still keep the variations quite small, but they can be big enough for us to make an impact, like stuff like that. So I can just, like, add some very soft damages and everything. You can see over here. And especially like this is the center point. Maybe in center point, we can actually make them a little bit more broken up just to just like in real life, how that center point is like a little bit more broken up. So I'm just like, making this a little bit more intense and stuff like that. Here, maybe, like, play out at the corners. I only need to really look at it from, like, a side view. So I can just do that. Oh, over here, something goes a little bit wrong, so let's not touch that area because it's not really worth me needing to fix it. There we go. So here I'm just like adding bits and pieces to this. Just make it look a little bit more interesting. Like that. There we go. I guess you can sometimes use your orientation to give it try and give it an interesting cut. But orientation is always a bit tricky to get white in certain areas. Here, these kind of, like, little slopes or something like that you can do if you want. But I personally, I like to go for more of like my smooth stones just because it just feels like very cobbly if it is this smooth. So I'm just finishing this off. Don't worry won't spend too long on this. You can just fast forward if you want. I just want to, let's see. What else do I want to do? We got some of these corners over here. I feel like the damages are a little bit too rapid in transition, so I might want to go in and just make them a little bit softer like the transition pieces, a little bit softer like that, just to make sure that that doesn't look too obvious, that it is like I also don't want to have it feeling too typical Zbushy if that makes sense. Like, the trim dynamic is very common to use, but it also has it has a feel to it that many people will recognize. So I don't want to, like, go too over the top with that kind of stuff. You know, maybe, like, a chip has been chipped off, stuff like that, something something story telling. I don't know. I always try to keep storytelling in mind in this kind of stuff. But of course, also just look at your reference. Sometimes there's things I don't know about how they might happen, and then it's just good to have, like, a reference in order to fill in the blanks. Okay, so let's say we got something like this. If I now go down and I like, turn on my edges, and then if I go to the very top and press F. Okay, I'm just gonna have a close look at this. What do we have? I want to go, and I'm doing this at quite a large distance at this point, but that should be no problem. So like this one. Yeah, let's make that quite a bit softer. This one, let's just transition this into, like, a corner. This one, let's make this a little bit softer over here. This one. And this one. Okay, what else do I see here? What else do I see? Here, I'm on the art like a bit. I'm just basically having a look and see that when I look at my texture, I don't feel like I'm looking at the same bricks over and over and over again. That's basically what I'm looking at right now. So don't worry about the noise. This noise will be so it will be so difficult to even see that it's just like this little extra bit just to have here. Um, you know what, to be honest, like, okay, these two are quite obvious. So I can go in, change like a corner here and change light maybe like a corner over here, here, see, just to make that feel very different. Like that? Okay, what else? Is there anything else? So here we have a tilted one, but yeah, we have it here, but honestly, are they are difference in size. It will be quite difficult to even see if you want to get like change like one of these corners. Let's see. What else? What else? And don't spend, it needs to be something that happens sort of on first glance. Like if on first glance, you immediately see like, Oh, hey, I see the repeating very obviously, then you want to work on it. But because of course, if I really want to search, I can look for very specific areas and I can just try and find them, which this is a good sign that I cannot actually find this specific one. I think it's similar to this one, but let's see. So we got those. Oh, yeah, here, see, this kind of stuff. This detail is a little bit too strong, so I can just smooth it out so that it doesn't look as obvious to this one. This one over here, they look too similar. So let's just go ahead and break my edges a little bit. There we go, just make that feel a little bit different, see what else we got. These two are just below each other. So maybe, like, do that and maybe go to our scaling and just, like, scale this out a little bit because we can do that. And, yeah, yeah, let's just try and get rid of this. That's why I was talking about, don't go too specific your s because then you might run into trouble. And if you really want to, like, break it up, you can also hold shift, and you can, like, just quickly rotate this 180 and then move it back into place in order to so that it feels even different. So we got those. And I think let's move this one a little bit closer so that it feels like it's clipping. There we go. I think we are here. Yes, I think I got it. Okay, so now that I have this, this is all looking good. Also make sure to look at it from the site, and if it also looks interesting from the site, which it does, it does, just some differences. We definitely need to work on our ground in order to make it look more interesting. But I think for now, like, because I don't think there's much angling going on, is there? There's a little bit of angling going on. I will first do the ground, and then I will probably do another pass just in case I want to add some different angles to this. But basically, what we're going to do now is in the next chapter, we will go to our plane and we will start by just working on our grounds below it, which will actually add a lot to our materials. Let's go ahead and continue with that. 29. 27 Sculpting Our Ground: Okay, so we are now going to start focusing on line crowd. Now this is actually going to be very easy. So we have a ground over here, and all we will need to do is we just need to go ahead and if we go down, let's look at our geometry over here. So we are now at 1,000 polis. Let's crank that up. Let's go into geometry and just pass divide. And I'm just going to go up to, like, um Oh, 1 million might be a little bit much. Let's do something like this. I think that should work. So if I now go to my side view and just press F twice, let's have a look. So if I go to my clay buildup, that's what I tend to use for this at a very soft level, but I just need to. Okay, so see, we have enough geometry. So what I'm now doing is I'm just basically starting by just dragging in carefully in between my stones, and don't do it too much around the edges because else we might break the tiling. It's more like around here, just before the edges. Just like start by dragging this in in order to get Nice. I know there is a brush a way that you can continue the tiding, but it requires a setup, and it's not worth it because we only are going to do some very basic ground tiling over here. Even if it's not tiling, I can just make a tiling inside of substance. So here, basically, you can see me just carefully going around my corners, and I'm just looking at, like, how high my ground is being wasted. I don't want to go, like, cut off too many of the stones, but it is nice if it sometimes, cuts off a little bit of the corners of the stone see? Like you can see over there. So just do this. Hire everything a little bit more. Oh, Mong if I look at from the side, yeah, I can definitely see I felt like we moved everything closer. Maybe we actually want to just press move and just move this a little bit forward. Actually, let's see. Let's go up until this point. So let's move a little bit forward because I can't remember. Let's press F again. I can remember that we did, like, moved quite close to the stones, but maybe I'm mistaken. So yeah, over here, you can see, like it is starting to, like, go around on top of the stone, and you can just hold art in order to, like, reduce it again if you want. But yeah, in these areas, this is going to be all very simple. I'm not even going to add micronise to this, as I said before. It's just going to be for my height map to, like, have some variation in the height map on our ground here. So it's starting to get close to being done in these areas. It's a bit difficult to explain what I'm doing here. I just don't want to move it, like, too far along. And sometimes you around these stones like, Oh, don't do that. That was an accident. Like, yeah, you can have them, overlap the scent a little bit, be careful. Don't do it too much because that's not how the reference looks, also. Then around these areas, it seems like there's, like, a lot that everything needs to be quite a bit higher in order to work, but we'll see how it goes. And let's say something like this. Like, if I press solo down here, this is basically how it looks like. So it looks very basic, but it does work, and we only need to have whatever we can see. So at this point, what I like to do is, I like to go to brushes, and I was like, there is a brush. If you press C, it is called the crumble brush. And basically what this does, if I go to solo and I just rotate, you can see that it just kind of messes up my shapes a bit more, just to add some variation. So if I go outside of solo, I can just rotate around I'm making the infinity second or like an eight. So I'm just making eight, and I just move this around like this, just to make it feel a little bit more interesting. There we go. And then once I've done that, I can just go ahead and I can just hold Shift and I can just carefully soften everything out because these specific details I actually I am not interested in. I'm just interested in the height information. Something like this, Let's go in solar mode. See? So this is now how it looks like. Bit funny, but it's sufficient, so it does work. So we got that stuff. Now, yes, okay, around here, these corners, I need to pay attention to that. I should I should not matter. No, it should not matter because we have a stone there, but it does matter that when we go actually have our low poly plane, which will not be this plane, we need to, of course, make sure that the corners are correct because we use that plane for baking. So, let's say that now we have our sand. So now if you look at it from the side here, this already starts to feel a bit more logical. And this is why I wanted to wait with like a rotation because now when I'm at this point, I can, for example, go and I'm just going to kind of give the same angle as I can see on my reference, which is like this angle over here. There we go. Okay, and I'm going to have a look. I want to go ahead and I probably just want to give it a little bit more stronger rotations in certain locations and the rhymes. Let's see. So we have some straightness and then maybe rotate this one. There we go. See, just give something a little bit more interesting because I feel like it's lacking a little bit of those really sloppy and strong rotations that you sometimes see with the cobblestone because of the way that people welcome them and drive on them. Also, in some of these, I probably want to not go, like, as high in them. We'll see how it goes. Let's say, I think something like this seems quite interesting. So we got that stuff done. Maybe I also want to now start by just doing some randomized moving where sometimes I like to move my pieces a little bit closer to other pieces in terms of the corners in order to create some open spaces which will later contain foliage, but this will also just make everything feel even more sloppy because I do want to try and get this sloppy feeling to my cobbles. Let's see. Okay, so let's say, I think something like that should work pretty much. Okay, this one is a little bit too small. Let's move it, and let's move it down a little bit. There we go. I think that's starting to do the trick. This one, I'm just going to rotate the other way around and then just, like, carefully move it down a bit. There we go. Yeah, you know what? I think that does a trick. I think we have a decent looking cobblestone ready to go. Okay, so ground done. Cobblestone done. So those are now done. I believe that we are pretty much ready with our zebush work. And now what we're going to do is we are going to export this for baking, but we also need to export this so that we go into a tree mulling program, and I will show you how to do the foliage. So let's end this chapter with that. So this was a short chapter. For the exporting, what I'm going to do is very simple. I want to go ahead and yeah, 12 million polish that should be easy because we are going to bake this inside of Mum's a to Bag. Now, some people bake most of this inside of sebush. I personally prefer Tobag because I can generate more different maps. And it's just part of my workflow. So if we go ahead, all these subtols over here, it's quite annoying to export them because you would need to export them all in one go. What you can also do is if you just go to C plug in and go to decimation Master, you can just press Export All Subtools in here, and this tool will just export everything. So source files, let's go for exports. Cobblestone. And I will call this one. Cobblestone underscore HP. So high pool because we're going to our low poly just a plain, basically. So we have HP, and it is taking a second. I don't know. Is it done? No, it's not. So don't worry if it freezes. This is just because we have a lot of jumtry going on here. You can see that it will probably hear C. So it is slowly creating our texture file over here. I will just pause the video until this is done. Here we go. Okay, so that's now all exported, so that's good. So we've done that. And then what you can also do if you want is, you can just very quickly, we need to go in Let's go, for example, down here to our tool. Go to plane and just very quickly export this and just call this Cobblestone underscore LP because our plane is still the same size, this will just work. And a plane is one of the few things inside of C brush that as far as I know, it has a UV and else we will just need to create a UV, but it's literally square. Lastly, what I will do is I will press Import, and I'm going to actually import my cobblestone hypole because now all those subtols they are one tool. So it just saves me some time needing to merge everything down and do all that kind of stuff. Oh, by the way, before I do this, I need to quickly switch back to my cobblestone and actually press Save. So we got this one most likely. Don't you dare crash? Thank you. Okay, so I just need to go to this cobblestone over here, and I just need to very quickly save this because if I crash now, I will be very upset. So the cobblestone setup, yes, save. And we're in the clear. Okay, so here cobblestone HP we have. It takes a while to load. All we need to do for this one, we only need a general shape for this. Oh, looks like I'm missing 1 stone, so that's not good. That is, well, it doesn't really matter, actually, it does matter in this case. Let's go in here. It's this one. Let's go ahead and export this. Cobblestone, underscore leftover underscore HB. This is not sometimes dynamesh cannot see every single stone or it cannot see every single object, and sometimes it forgets it. It is often that it only forgets like one single piece, but it's still important for us to then go ahead and just fix it. So now we can just go to our Cobblestone import, import the leftovers, which in this case, just one piece. Where are you? Oh, it's Fine. I need to click on like an empty object. Click on Empty Object, Import, Import your cobblestone. Because I accidentally overwit. I I import a object on my actual object that I've just imported, it will override it. It's just a way that C brush works. By the tone of my voice, you can probably hear that it's not one of my favorite features, so to speak. But basically, when you have this one, now that we have this cobblestone leftover HP, we need to go in here and do it this way. So insert cobblestone leftover HP. And now we can go to the top Wow, that's really slow. We can go ahead and press merge down and press Okay. And now we have one big chunk. So as I was saying, we need to get this into Maya. My PC is not going to like 30 million polis inside of Maya. So all I need is I need a basic shape so that I know where the stones are and I know where the sand is. So, Wi, all I need to do is just go to my plug in and just go to the decimation master, and we are just going to preprocess and we are going to take this down to around 200,000 polis. Maybe 100,000 is probably also good. So just preprocess current, and let's wait a while. Okay, so that is done processing. Now, I showed you the percentage of decimation, but you can also actually set the exact polygon count that you want. So this is just a guessing game. I'm going to go for 100,000. So 100 K is 100,000, and I'm just going to press decimate current, and I will just see how that goes. If it completely destroys it or not or 100,000 should be easy to do for okay. Hello, C was. That didn't work. That is very strange. Let's set this to, like, 1% or 0.3% because we are in the right, there is only one subdu Please don't let me down now, see Raj. Decimate current. Thank you. That's all I wanted. 38,000 even. Okay, fair enough. I went lower than I expected, but this is still totally fine. I don't know why it didn't work the first time, but now we have this really low and it's finally fast again. We have this really low mesh. So this is as easily enough to work with I Maya. So I'm going to go ahead and export this and just call this Cobblestone underscore two for two Maya, or if you use three as MX two Max. So I'm just going to go ahead and save this, and this is where we've ended up. We have our high pool, along with that extra little stone. We have our low poly, which is just a very simple plane, and we have our cobblestone to M, which we go to Maya. We have done our sculpting over here. We've done our placement. We have done our ground. Next stop is we are only, the only thing we need to do before baking is we are going to go and add some extra foliage in between here. And once we've done that extra foliage, then we can finally go ahead and we can, um, Go bake everything down and then go into substance designer where we can turn this into a final material. I might also want to twin, do something with moss, but we'll see, and that will most likely be just inside of substance. So let's go ahead and continue with that in the next chapters. 30. 28 Placing Our Foliage: Okay, so here we are inside of Maya. Now, as I said before, all I'm going to do is placement. You can do this in any tren modeling program, and if you know the absolute bare basics on how to move, rotate and how to import something, then you know enough. So here we have Rs Now unfortunately it is rotated. It doesn't really matter, but it is something that I need to keep it at this orientation. I do not want to scale or move this because if I do that, I would need to correct that again once I get into Mamo set toolbag for the baking. I much rather just have it like this. So what will we be using? We will be using mega scans ourselves. Mega scans is owned by Unreal Engine. This means that it is free, sorry for that whistle. It is free for Unreal engine users. And we are going to I'm actually creating this material to have it inside of UnreLEngine. So I would say that I fall under this. Now, with this material, this is very handy. However, if you do not want to use mega scans, there is another one. Which is called texts.com. Now, the difference is that in Quicksle we would go to Tweety plants. So we already have plants that are already placed on planes. So they already have like a mesh. However, if you use texas.com or substanurce, substance source is owned by Adobe or by substance, I would say, and here they also have it. I will go over them. So latest texts in text.com, the only thing you need to know, I'm not going to use it, but just so you know, if you go to Tweety Scan Atlas, you can over here find like little leaves, but you should also be able to find like weeds. If you go down here, so you can find, little plants that you can often use. Now, these plants over here, they are not great. The stuff that you want to focus on is if I just, let me just go because these are all side views. You can do side views, but I was hoping that there's, like, something a little bit more of like a front view kind of something going on here. I can't remember there was, so I'm a bit surprised. Like here, we have some moss. So if you want to, like, play some moss, basically, the goal is to find something that's, like, at a front view or a top view, and you can then go ahead and you can, like, map this kind of stuff. So here, this kind of stuff, it has, like, a little top view, and all you would and this stuff, it also has a top view. I would basically do here, even more. These are great, is you would create a plane inside of Maya. You would then map this texture on it. So you would just use your just importing material and map it on it. So, but this tutorial is not about tree mulling, so I won't showcase that, but you can easily Google it. And then you would do the same thing as what we are going to do with mega scans. The same goes for substance in substance source. If you go down, you have atlases. And I think substance source is even better. If you have a substance license that's not a student license, anything else, you will get this, actually. So you can actually go to Atlas's and foliage. And in here, you can often find weeds so you can even type it in and here. So you can also find a lot of these Atlas textures that you can use. Now, to save time, I will be using quick on Mega scans. So in here, if you go, for example, you literally have weeds over here. And the one that I'm interested in, let's see. So we have curbside weeds or we have Oh, wait, actually, they're pretty much the same. These are actually full packs, so they are pretty perfect. So you got some grass in here. I don't really care about the grass. I think I'm going to go for this one. So you can just go ahead and sign in, and you can sign in with your Unreal engine profile, and you just want to go down here and I'm going to go only for like a well, yeah, okay, if you want, you can do four k resolution. It doesn't really matter. You can also go down here in the settings and you can say, like, Okay, what do you want? All we care about is LOD zero, so we can turn all of this stuff off. So we just want to go for LD zero. FBX is fine. And for the rest. So we have our albedo normal. I don't need a displacement. I don't need an embioclusion. I don't need a metalness, roughness. Yeah, okay, I can use that. I don't need fuzziness, I don't need translucency. I do need opacity and I don't need brush or transmission. So I only need to bare minimum, because I only care mostly about the albedo, normal and one LOD. So once we've done that, we can just go ahead and press download and that will now download for us. Here we go, and three, two, one and done. And why I will place it for you is I will place it into textures, S brush materials, other and mega scans. So in here, I will just go ahead and place this, and I'm just going to extract it here, and then what you will most likely get is this stuff. I didn't ask. Okay. Fair enough. So it still gave me LODs which I'm not really happy about. But that's no problem. Like, I can just go ahead and I can remove the rest. Here we go. So I got rid of everything else, because all I care about is I care about not about geometry, but just how it looks. So that's just a general idea. Now, all I need to do is I need to go into Maya, and I need to just start by importing these. So let's just go file import. And I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to copy my location, and I just want to I believe I cannot do multi select input. That is a little bit unfortunate. In that case, what I want to do is because yeah, I have this model viewer, but I don't think many people have it, actually. Oh, it actually wouldn't matter. I wanted to say, like, Oh, yeah, I have this model viewer, so I can use that in order to, like, I don't even know how to move in it, in order to see what I'm importing. But in that case, I will need to go a long way around, and I just need to start by importing this, and I will actually show you how to immediately set this up. Okay, so here we got some grass, so that could be useful. So we basically input it and whatever we can use, we will use. In order to add a material. So this is, of course, way too big, but that doesn't matter. In order to add a material inside of Maya, just right click on it with your model selected. Assign a favorite material and let's assign a Lambert. Then up here in our attribute editor, we can just go ahead and go to Lambert and just call this foliage. And all I care about is to go to color, then go ahead and go to File open this up, and I just want to open up my this one with the name. Don't go for billboard because billboards are just like top down views. So this one let's go ahead and press Open. And now what I can do is I can just go ahead and I can select my amt again. And I just need to get a transparency map over here, which is going to be our opacity map and open up and just open up your opacity. Now, if you cannot see your texture, it's because you need to go up here and just turn on textures, and there we go. So we got this one. This one, it needs to look good from a top side view. And I think this one is doable. I'm just going to now scale this down, and then I basically just import the next one. And here. So this one. Okay, so a few and then this one, you can assign existing material foliage strode in here, and I'm just going to scale this down again. I will fix all of that stuff later on the scaling. Let's not do that. I'm not going to have as many of them. No, that's too thin. So let's say two big pieces of grass. What does this look like? Yeah, I see, because it's way too flat from the top. That's why I don't want to use it. 17. Okay, this one looks like it has potential. Yeah. This one is great because it's just like top few of some weeds. So we did 17, but I believe that we skipped over 16. Yes, we did. So let's go ahead and add this one also. Scale this down, so we can use those. Let's see what else do we have? So 16 19, I think 19 is a little bit too big. Yeah, I feel like 19 would be too large. That's more something that you would have as actual geometry instead of, I think most of these will be the case. Variation one. Oh, yeah, that's that one. 18. No. Variation two. Um, okay, variation two can work because it's a little bit smaller. We can even, go and squash it down a little bit if we want. So variation two, what's variation three? Well, actually, variation two works then variation three will also work. Let's go ahead and scale this down for now. Let's see, four. Oh, four actually works quite well because it just has, like, a lot of leaves. So I'm only focusing on how it will look from the top view. I don't really care about how else it will look. Let's see. Foliage. It just keeps making more and more materials because we import this. Let's see, we're pretty much there. So let's do this one as a last one over here. There we go. So that should be more than enough because we're not going to place that much. So let's have a look. Now what I want to do is I just press F to zoom in and I'm just going to kind of, like, fix my scaling because I know that these will probably be very small. We don't need to have perfect scaling yet. I just need to have them all lined up with roughly the same scale so that I can then work on it. And for these ones, um I don't know. No, I'm not going to use these. I don't like this one. This one. Let's do it. Let's just have these two and then just call it done. Then I think we have enough. So let's move this one and scale it down and this one, scale it down. There we go. So we got something like this. Now, let's keep an eye out on just how much stuff there is in here. Like, there's a lot of moss in here. We can go ahead and we can do that inside of substance, just like procedurally dd moss that's actually more logical to do that inside of substance. I can even have variations of it. But showing that, what I will do now is I will just go Oops, I will just go ahead and select all of these foliage bits. Go to rotate and hold J because inside of Maya inside of Max's Control and inside of Blender, I believe, also. But inside of Maya, for some reason, it's J to snap rotate using Control. And now I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to, like, scaling these things down even more. Even more. They're going to be like really small bits. So let's say we have this stuff. Now, let's just get started by just like placing some of the first ones. So this kind of stuff, if they are sticking out too much, you can try some scaling, but else, just have them kind floating on top. That should not be a problem because we are going to bake these separately. So logically, we can just adjust our height map in order to not have them in a very strange position. Sometimes you see also just like scaling things down. For example, what I can also do is I can clone this by holding shift, and I can place like multiple of these because the grass, it would be nice to just have the grass sometimes in a few more areas. So over here, I can just go ahead and do the same. I can move my grass over here, maybe scale it in to have it not sticking out as much. And then I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to, like, rotate this. This one can go over here. You want to just have areas where you are placing these. Then the more sent you basically have, the more you can get away with some of the bigger plans over here. Okay, so two more that we just want to place, I'm going to place this one up here and this one up here. And once you've done that, we can just start by doing the whole copy based party. Yeah. So this one. We moved forward a bit because I do not want to have it cutting off. Like you can get away with cutting off sometimes in tweet, but when we turn this into a texture, we will be so hyper focused on how everything looks that we cannot really I don't want to deal with those kind of errors. So then I much rather just move this forward. Or what I even like to do is I like to just go ahead, right click and go to face and just double click on the leaf that's cutting and just delete it by pressing delete. Okay, so let's see what we have here. I'm going to grab some grass, throw it in here. And I'm now just holding shift in order to clone. Grab some grass. I don't want to have it everywhere. Like, sometimes, let's just leave some space for the moss or something like that. So the grass, we can have a little bit more here and there just to make it look a little bit more interesting. But like these kind of bits, actually, is already this one already feels a bit out of place. So let's just go and move it around here. Let's move it forward. And then this one, I don't want to have these plants very often, actually. I think that will look well, first of all, we will be able to recognize them if we have them very often. So sometimes it's fine to, like, clip actual plants a little bit into each other. That could work. But honestly, we'll see how it all goes. Yeah, the grass, that one, sometimes you just want to add a little bit more grass because it's a bit more difficult to actually see it. So let's start with like some big plans. So we've got some plants over there. If I also go for, like, a plant over here and then maybe have this one, which is like a different one also in here. And if I then go for this one up here, or here. Do here. So that's when I look at it from the top, we will have moss and green and everything around the plants, so that's no problem. Let's have this one up here and let's then have some grass, kind of like stretching along in order to fill up these spaces. Like this. Yeah, just like over here, you can see, it's not everywhere. It's just in some locations. I will also do some scaling later on. For now, that's not the most important thing. So here you can see me sometimes duplicating my grass, placing it in certain locations. Yeah, I feel like that space was just way too open. So if I just use some grass, then we should be able to get away with that. So we got some stuff like this. I'm just going to go mostly probably just, like, use my grass in order to, you know, place some grass here. I can go ahead and I can move it like this. Right now I'm moving every grass bit individually. This because I can go to tool settings that I can over here. Set the two, I believe. Oh sorry, not the tool settings, I mean, like combine them. But I don't want to basically go into Maya functions. That's why I'm just avoiding it, and I'm trying to use the most basic stuff. We have a Mya, even though it takes maybe a little bit longer. Okay, so let's go for a little bit more grass in this area. So we got a bit there, a little bit here. Maybe I'll go for, like, a little bit more grass sitting next to this plant. And I'm just trying to feel get a feeling for areas that can use some foliage, but that it will not look too tolable when we actually start repeating this texture. And the foliage, what we can also do is we can turn it on and off later on. You can even have more variations if you want. Like this stuff like here, I can just do some moss. So this stuff over here is fine. Maybe I'll have a little bit more grass sitting over here. And I want to have, um I think I want to have one of these sitting down there along with a little bit of grass to fill up the space. I hope that the grass will look good. It might be that our resolution wise, that it might not look as nice as I'm hoping to, but there's only one way to find out because I've not used this grass before, so it's always a little bit of a gamble doing this inside of a tutil, but it should look fine. Here we go. Okay, so we got that stuff. Now, all I need to do is sometimes I just want to scale some of these pieces down so that they feel a little bit different. I'm not sure if I want that one. I think that one it's not in, like, a good location. So Yeah, You know what? I'm just going to place it here. Let's place it here. Maybe throw in a little bit of grass in between, something like this. Skirt this one down a little bit. There we go. See? So we just get some random different bits of weeds and grass. Okay, perfect. So that was it for our grass placement. We can go ahead and just save sin I can just go in and I will save this in your As folder, sea brush material. Foliage setup. And then what you would often do is in your presentation scene, you would just enhance this foliage with actual geometry grass in the engine, and that's basically how it works. So at this point, to Export, I'm just going to press height. So press H on my cobblestone, and I'm just going to grab these pieces, file Expot selection, make sure that you do selection. And then we want to go ahead and just go to Exports cobblestone. And in here, I want to export this as an FBX and just call it foliage. And just pass Export. Okay, so that's now all exported. What we'll do in the next chapter is we will start by actually setting this up inside of marmoset, and we will start baking it. It's an exciting chapter. It's also a scary chapter because if we made a mistake along the way that I did not realize about yet, then I will have to, like, fix it. So let's go ahead and continue, but I'm sure it will be fine. So let's go ahead. 31. 29 Baking Our Material: Okay, so here we are inside of Momset. Now, in case you might not have known, Momset actually has baking functionality, and I actually use it for any type of baking that I do. I know that Substance Painter also has it. I believe even substance designer has it and like normal and a bunch more tools. But personally, I prefer Momo set. I feel like it's the fastest, best quality, and easiest to set up. So all we need to do is we need to go into just a brand new scene. I don't care about rendering renting. I simply want to go up here to my little bred icon, and this bread icon just means a new bake project. And now what it will do is it'll ask you for a high and a low poly. First things first, press the low poly and in outer bake, turn this to none. Else it will try to bake when we are not yet even ready to set up. Now we can just go into our cobblestone. So what do we have? We have a cobblestone, high poly and actually, we also have a foliage over here. Let's drag these three in here. Now, this one will probably take the longest to load in because it's still 12 million polis. But I believe I've been going up to 40 million inside of Mamoset something in that area. So it should be Mom set should be able to handle it even on slightly lower high NPCs. It just takes a while to actually load it in. So Okay, I'll pass the video. Here we go. So this is what we got right now. It even already imported some of the textures for the foliage. So this is our high Polia you can see over here. Yeah, looks pretty decent. Nothing too special. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to drag all of these into our high, just by clicking and wagging. Now, the high is always automatically turned off, so you can just turn it on. And one thing I am going to do is for our foliage that we have over here. I don't like this material. I'm just going to go ahead and delete it because it is the Wong setup. And then I just press new material. It's called this foliage because we can actually also bake our base colors when we have them. And in this case, we actually have base colors for our foliage. So I'm just going to go ahead and well, actually, before leaving this, also just import your cobblestone lowly, which is just like a very basic plane. Oh, it looks like that the plane needs to be rotated 180 degrees. So if we just go ahead and go up here to transform and clicking the plane, set us do 180 in Y because it's a plane that should still be in the exact same location. I just want to make sure. So this plane, that's interesting. Okay, so we have the plane now. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to just set up my foliage material. So if we go to this folder, so much navigating. Others, there we go. Okay, so we have a base color, and you all already know how to use Momset if you follow the Z brush parts, we have a normal map. We have a roughness map, and our obaSit map, if you go to transparency and set is to be cut out, this is basically your OBST map. And then what you want to do is you want to set the channel to be an R because it's a JPEG. We don't have an Alpha channel. Then all you need to do is just drag this foliage onto your foliage, and there you go. So now this is the actual foliage that is from, um mega scans. So what are we going to do now? Now we need to decide our cage. A cage is basically a hull that will show us how far we want to have the baking. If we click on Low, you can see this green cage. But right now, it basically needs to cover everything. Right now it's not doing that. Right now, it's only covering like a tiny bit, which means that it would actually miss out on everything it's not covering, including all of our foliage. So we simply want to go on Low and go to Max offset and just set this up. Like this. And once you've done that, you just want to have this just above all of your foliage. Don't go too far out, but just above it, like this. This is why it was also important to have a perfect plane because here you can see how our plane will bake. It will basically straight down from here onto our plane. Now, I hope that the plane had UVs. I cannot actually check that until well, technically, I can just throw on the foliage material, and then I can see. Yeah, you see, it's a perfect square because else it wouldn't be able to show this. But anyway, we have a high, we have a low. Let's go ahead and let's get started. So if we go into our bake project, what I want to do is I want to bake most likely my some of these pieces separately. So let's have it thing. The foliage needs to be separate so that I can add it on top because it has a base color. The ground needs to be most likely also separate just so that I can mask out my stones because we are also going to create masks. However, what we can also do with the ground is we can also just go ahead and add the new material and call this, for example, red, so then we don't need to separate them and a new material that we call blue. Now in these materials, if you just said this one to be a blue color in your albedo and this one to be like a red color. And yeah, just like, turn off your roughness. What we can do is we can say, Okay, just go ahead and drag blue on everything except for foliage and then just drag red on only your back. Because these are separate subtols, it will still mask out. So this will basically be our mask. I don't know what it's doing there. There we go. So basically, this is going to be our mask. We will be able inside of substance to mask out per color. So the only thing I want to do for now is I'm just going to leave the foliage and I'm just going to place this here in our scenes that it's not included in our bake project and turn it off. So that we only need to focus on this. I think we're ready. So let's go into our bake project. Now, first of all, it will ask us for, like, a location. So if we just make a folder that I call bakes, I can go in here. I can set this to be like our location that we have and just call this cobblestone. And then I will call the other one foliage. So there we go. Samples you can leave to four. So the higher samples, the longer it will take the bake, but the more crisp you texture it, but we don't need a lot. Let's start with two case that we can actually preview our scene. And for the rest, I'm just going to go ahead and so what do we need? If you go to your maps, you can choose which maps you want. We want to have a normal map. We don't need a normal object space map, I believe, and else we can just bake it. We want to have a height map. This map often needs some tweaking. A position map would be handy probably. A curvature map we do not need because I can just generate this inside of an ambienoclusion map. I also do not need, because I can just generate these inside of substance, and the material ID map is basically the map that you see here. So we have material D, but if we go for bido, it will behave the same way because we have over here the colors. So it will bake a normal height position in albedo. Close this down. And the first thing I always like to do is, I like to just go for a normal map. So I just press bake on the normal map. And the first time baking, it will be a little bit slower, but that's because it needs loading your hypol so it takes a while. After that, it will go much faster than you are able to bake within seconds. So it is done. Here you can see cobblestone normal. Now, if you just turn off your hypol, you can actually go ahead and you can press the preview button. What that will do is it will just quickly preview the map that you just baked. So if I press preview, Sorry, because it accidentally picked a red channel. Let's make a new folder. Let's call this preview. I will just do it manually. So just drag in this material and just throw on your normal. Here we go. So now you can see that it has baked our no map. And yeah, the reason we need to do this is because we need to be able to see if everything works. So this is the normal. Luckily, we have a Oh, thank God. So we have a subdivided plane. Also, I would need to subdivide it for displacement. So the normal is looking pretty good. If we go to our texture, we can set this to tiling of two. Uh oh. That is long and very strange. That is very strange. Why does it do that on that location? H I'm curious about that because that doesn't make too much sense. So that's our first problem that we need to fix. Although, to be honest, I didn't expect any problems. Now, that is fine, is our cage. No, here see, so that is very peculiar why it is doing that. So if I have a look in Photoshop, what I think is happening is I think that the UVs are wong after all. I think it doesn't have the correct UVs. So if we just very quickly import this plain inside of Here cobblestone opo I just import it inside of Maya, I can just go ahead and it can press isolate here so that I can just focus on this. And yeah, so it's the most basic UV, but you can basically just select it. Here, see, our UVs are incorrect. It is for some reason doing the UVs not perfectly. So in this case, the way that it would work in Maya inside inside of three Max, use the UVW map, and that we already do the twig and send it to box. Side of Blender, just do an automatic unwrap and that will do the tick. And inside of Maya, just go to UV and go to planar and set the plane. Okay. Let's just go to UV automatic. That's also fine UV automatic, and that will do the twig for this one. So I hope that makes sense. Now I can just go ahead and export this. I'm just going to export this as an OBJ because I'm just going to overwrite this. Object, low ply. Yes, override it. And now, if I hear it will have automatically loaded in. So you can see it because it has imported some random materials. If we now go for a preview and if we then go ahead and just rebake this There we go. See now the bacon is a lot faster. There we go. So now we have a perfectly tiling texture. Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, luckily, it wasn't anything that has to do with me messing up the tiling or something. So that's looking pretty good. We got a nice norm map. It feels very good. Yeah, we got the center views over here, so I'm quite up with that, although we would probably, like, showcase them as something like this or something. We'll see what we'll do. It should end up nicely, and else, yeah, it should just be fine. So let's go ahead and let's go to our bake. And now that we have done our non map, the next one will be our height. So our height is that's what tends to always need a little bit of tweaking. So let's just press bake on our height. And first of all, we just want to go into cobblestone in our low poly. Throw on the subdivide and just give it like a bunch of subdivisions. So I don't need to go the highest quality. I just need to sort of see that it's working. So height. You already know how to set up. Just go into displacement. Throw on a height. And here this one I mean. So if you preview it, the height is almost never strong enough. The way that you can fix this is you can go into your bake project and just press the little settings bar. And in here, what I tend to do is I tend to often set my outer distance higher. So let's start like five. If you press bake again, I just need to see which direction you need to go. Okay, so right now it is getting darker. Now I just need to balance out my inner distance. I believe if I set this to like zero that often did a twig, Okay, another thing that I need to do is, I just want to bake this in 16 bits. So go from eight bits to 16 bits. Remember how we also did that inside of substance. So, that's not yet. That is interesting that it doesn't. So it's starting to should look better than this. Let's go height. Let's set my outer distance, like a little bit in, this feels like a pretty decent height. It might be like, oh, let's set our center scale to zero. There we go. So it's just for previewing purposes. We will balance this out later on. So let's see what do we have here? I think this height is working. So it is just showcasing our height now. It might need to be a little bit stronger, but we can easily balance this out inside of designer to make it perfect. So there we go. So now we can see our height, and this is why we did all that rotations and all the differences in scaling. So that's looking pretty good. So yeah, I'm happy with that. Yeah, I would say, yeah. Let's go like one subdivision higher just for fun, just to preview. Yeah, here, so that should be totally fine. Okay, good. So we got that stuff done. I'm just going to turn off subdivide and turn off my height. Now, let's go ahead and position position maps always need to be at 16 bits also, because they just need that amount of bit rate. That's just how it is. But that's one I'm already confident that it works because we need to rebake this all at four k. So I'm just going to go to my albedo and bake because that's the last one I just want to double check. And if I throw this in here, preview it. See here, perfect mask. So of course, it's not black and white, but it's still a perfect mask. So I'm confident that all of that will work. Once I'm confident, I can, first of all, we are now at 16 bits. So just bake the height and position at four K resolution up here. So set to four K, and just go ahead and press bake. Might take a bit longer, but it should still be very fast. Now bake your normal and albedo map. But let's go back to eight bits over here and press bake again. And there we go. So our bakes are done. Good. Nice. So we now have these school four K maps sitting over here. This should all work totally fine. So what we're going to do now is we're just going to go ahead and we can bake our actual foliage next. Yeah, see? Yeah, that's fine. Okay, for our foliage, what I'm going to do is I'm actually just going to go ahead and I'm going to go in my bake project, and I'm just going to duplicate it. Now, this might take a second because I am duplicating also my hypolcbble stone, which is a lot, so I just need to wait with it. Here we go. So that's also nice inside of Mom set. You can have multiple bake projects. So turn off the first one, and in your hi, just delete your cobblestone. Because all I care about is that we grab our foliage and we are going to bake that one. And I'm just going to have a default plane on here. Turn on my foliage. There we go. See? So this is basically how this will bake. Now, for this one, because this one has a base color and everything, we want to go ahead and go into configure and we want to bake Probably not a height map, do we? Yeah, I can bake a height map, but I probably won't use it. So normal height. I don't care about position map in this case. I care about the bido, the roughness, and the Oh, yeah, we have a normal map, but it will most likely be caught up into this one. That should be fine. I can actually never remember that Oh, and transparency. I can actually never remember that I've baked a normal map inside of here, but we'll see. So let's go ahead and we have these pieces. Let's set them at two K and for now, let's just go ahead and press bake to get started with because it shouldn't take too long to bake something like this. And I just need to see if this works exactly the way I want it to. So I did mess up a little bit. I need to actually call this foliage because else it will override it. That's my fault. Call this foliage and let's turn over height first and now let's try again. Press bake. Now just quickly set this format to 16 bits. Press bake again. Okay, let's have a look at this. I'm just going to create a brand new material. Just delete that new material, call this foliage. I just want to see how it behaves. So let's drag this onto our plane, and let's just whatever we have just imported. So we have baked a normal map. We've baked a roughness map. We've baked a albino map. So that one came out correctly. And then the one that I'm mostly interested about is if we go into transparency, cut out, please work, cuto map and set this to R Dang. So that did not work the way that I wanted to. So in that case, what we need to do is we just need to go to configure, and what we want to do is we actually want to use our shape as a cuto if that makes sense. So let's go for Alpha mask instead of transparency. And if we then go ahead and press bake again, oh, yeah, it doesn't really matter that I still had the other one on. Let's call Alpha mask. There we go. So that fix it. See, so it's just a flat plane, but it has baked everything from the top down. And the height map, as I said before, I'm not too worried about that. So we got these pieces. We can, of course, now get rid of the Alpha. So we got the foliage. We can also go ahead and get rid of the roughness in our S, you know, all my cobblestones, I'm just going to delete it. And I just need to rebake this, but I will do this off camera. So what we'll do in the next chapter is we will just go ahead and we will start by importing this all inside of substance designer and setting it up. Don't worry. I did not forget about that I need to also up the resolution of my foliage, but I will do this off camera. You now know how to bake it. Here, we got all of this stuff now baked. Now all we need to do is just set this back to 16 samples and rebake that. And in our foliage, just like boost this up to four k, and let's bake this. And set this back to eight bits and just bake the rest. And there we go. Everything is now done. Let's go ahead and let's jump into substance Ziner, set it up and see if everything works the way that we want it to. So let's continue with that in the next chapter. 32. 30 Setting Up Substance Designer: Okay, so we are now going to go ahead and set up everything inside of substance signer. Unfortunately, one thing that I noticed is that it still has this tiniest bit of space in between. If you go to UV and go to automatic and just select a little box next to it, in your settings, just make sure that your percentage space is set to zero and then press apply because it was trying to leave a little bit of space, which is great for normal met baking, but not when we have a table texture. So that's it. So now I just want to go ahead and very quickly, re export this. And then what we can do is I will just go ahead and off camera, I will do the re baaking because we already went over it plenty of times by this point. So let's go ahead and rebake. Okay. So I finished the baking and I already imported them inside of substance designer into a scene that I called cobblestone. I end up not needing the position of the cobblestone and the foliage height and roughness because it turns out they just didn't add anything. So we can just go ahead and delete them and save some space because these things are like 50 MBs per file. So if we go ahead and go in here, this is our height map. I can turn this to Grayscale. This is our mask. I can go ahead and turn that one to gray scale, and then we have our foliage, and over here we have our actual cobblestone. Let's get started with our no map. So here we have our cobblestone. Now, double clicking on this map is often very slow, and in order to load it, however, as soon as you add a blend on top, for example, or anything else, like a levels, it will become very quick to load. And we need this blend anyway. So we are going to blend our norm map with the normal of our foliage over here. And we are going to do that using our mask over foliage, like this. So that we end up with just our foliage nicely. And here, it looks like that it has card up on that nor map. Remember, I was a little bit worried if it did that or not. So it looks like it has done that and it has created our foliage. Only over here, I'm a little bit worried that it is not able to properly, generate a mask, but we will pass a bridge once we get there. So that is our norm map. If we can also go here, and we can just plug this into our normal. The next one would be our height map. Height map very easy, art in outer levels in order to push them into the correct levels. Because remember how I was talking about, it was not as intense, that is where the outer levels come in. So we have a height map. If we press space, this is looking very nice. It's a nice looking height map. We can go ahead and plug this into our hight channel. We can get rid of our metallic. What we can do is we can already art Ambienclusion node. And plug this also into our height, and see, this is why I wasn't going to bother. Here, I can set the story like 60 samples. This is why I wasn't going to bother with baking it inside of Mom's head when I can just do this, and it will pretty much look the same. So ambienoclusion done, height done, non map done. Of course, we do not yet have an actual albedo and everything. What we can do is I can show you how to generate masks. So we have these two colors. There is a note and it's literally called color to mask. So color to mask over here. And with this note, what I can do is I can say, Okay, I want to turn the color blue. And then if I just set my mask screens all the way up, and the mask softens all the way up, and I want to simply turn the color blue into a mask. And I can duplicate this and I can say, Okay, for this one, I want to turn the color red into a mask. There we go. It's that simple. We now have two masks also here. Okay, I'm going to end this chapter off. This was a short chapter, but I'm going to just end it off by exporting this to a preview scene. So let's go ahead and export this stuff. Textis, let's make a folly called final. I don't know why that took so long. And let's go ahead and already start turning on automatic export. And let's go ahead and export this. Now, what I did is inside of Marmoset I did a saves on our Taric material. So just file save CNS and just save it into its own folder. At that point, what I can do is I can go in here and I can press the X button on this material over here. So, Oh, God, I need to do this without turning rate racing on because for some reason, rate racing is just really slow with this stuff. Turn off our roughness, and now if we just go into our brush material, final, we can start by already importing a few of these. So we have our height map, which is our displacement. We have our normal map. Look at that and we have our AO map. Okay, at this point, let's go into our free cam. So we already used to this scene, which is always nice. Here we go. And I can just go into my height on my displacement. And I can see how far I want to push this. Something like this. I think that will look nice. If I go to free camera, see? And there we go. We have got some cobblestone ready to go. Textutiling is set to t. Maybe we want to go for like two. You know, to be honest, we might actually also want to go for three. DexieF normally I'm always in the two range, but for some reason this time it looks cool on three. So we just give it the displacement that we want. And yeah, for our foliage, that one is a bit tricky. What you can do for now is you get like a blend and have a uniform color that is just slightly grayish over here in the background, and then have like our foliage color into the foreground and then just use the same mask like this because I'm just curious how the grass will actually work. So throw that into your base color. And throw this one in here. Yeah, I feel like I feel like the grass is not going well, maybe. We will see like this kind of stuff feels really strange, doesn't look very good. But I'm not sure. I'm honestly not sure. The cool thing is, though, that it really feels like that this foliage is just sitting on top, while it is not. Like, if you look at it close, it's just like, plain and flat. So although we will improve that a little bit. But okay, so here you can see we have this. Let's finalize it by just turning on our rate raising, and then we can have a look at our hard work that we did today with all of our sculpting and everything. Look at that. Tara. Okay. I like this. We got lots of variation going on. I'm quite relieved that it is looking good. That's the thing with sculpting. I cannot just change the slider in order to make it look better, but what we'll do in the next few chapters is focus on, like, a ground, focus on the actual like details in our stones and everything. We'll work on the foliage and just get this whole thing come together and it will look even better. So let's go ahead and continue with that in the next chapter. 33. 31 Working On Our Ground Details: Okay, so let's get started. Now, one of our problems that we had was that the mask over here wasn't so good. So I did some experimenting off camera. If you set your samples to 16 bits and set your padding to none, it used to be moderate. So if you set it to none, and then just bake your Alpha mask, then it seems like that it is able to catch up with the grass. So I believe that the padding was basically causing some errors which caused it to not really work. So I just did that. I just said to these settings and I only baked mask. That's all I did. So that is by itself just like very basic. What I want to do is I want to move back into substance Ziner and I have actually my advanced tomach open. This is because we happen to already have some ground materials inside of our advanced tomach that we can use to our advantage. So if we just go in here, here, I believe this is the ground that we make, I'm just going to copy it because why would we make something when we've already done it? We can even later on maybe use something like stones in between here, but I'm not yet sure. I think that might be a bit too overwhelming. So at this point, just let's go back to our cobblestone. And now we can really get started with creating our material. So that should be the last baking error. Let's start by just pressing Contrave in order to paste our ground. And if we just go ahead and have a look over here, this one, we most likely just need to re import. Yeah, I think I just need to go ahead and, like, because you right click reload resources doesn't often work. So let's just re import this as a new one. Here we go. Turn this the gray scale, hold shift, and swap this around. And there we go. So yeah, now that you already are advanced in subsigner this kind of stuff should be a lot easier. So we now have those little bits all ready to go, so that's quite nice. If you just go to go ahead and go to the brush material render over here, we can go ahead and load it up. Here we go. Okay, let's go to our free gam and let's have an extra look to make sure that everything is now correct. Looks like it is. Perfect. Okay, great. So that stuff is now also done. Ooh, let's not go to our main camera. So that is one last thing to worry about. Next stop is going to be that we were going to create some ground. Just like in Atomic, we will do this only inside of the normal map. Like we will have in the height map, like our actual stone damages, but for the ground, I'm just going to go ahead and add a normal combined note. And I simply want to have this norm map over here. Let's add a blend. And we are simply going to blend over here. This norm map along with a normal color node like this, and we now need to use our first mask, which is going to be I believe it's this one. Let's move our masks over here. It's probably this one, actually. I was wrong. It's this one. There we go. So that we only have it in our norm map. We then go ahead and combine this stuff together, like you can see over here. Set this to high quality, and then a few things that we need to do. First of all, let's set our normal intensity down quite a bit so that it is not as strong. The next one is, I almost feel like here. Let's go into a B&W spot and set the scale a little bit bigger. There we go. Now we can set this actually a little bit stronger, and we need to just mask out our foliage. So if we just go ahead and add a quick blend after this color mask, we can now go ahead and grab this foliage mask over here and simply add this to a blend. I need to set this to be Art. Yes. Let's set this to art so that it will ignore that foliage, and there we go. So that's a very easy one. Just like some ground bits ready to go. So let's go ahead and save Rasin. I'm just going to have a quick look. Let's have it run rout. I feel like we can probably make this a little bit stronger if I go over here. Yeah, here, let's make this no map a little bit stronger. So let's go into our nomap and let's set this to like five. There we go. So it's just going to be like this nice strong ground because over here, it's also quite strong. Now that we have done that, I think that I actually want to keep working first, mostly on my ground, just completing that. And then what I want to do is then I will move over to the stones. Okay, so what would be the next thing for a ground? There are small specs in here. I can do those, but I can do a simplified version. It would basically look something like this. So if we add a normal combine after our normal Sorry, I didn't mean to do that. Make sure to set it to high quality because that's what I always do. And let's go ahead and grab like a dirt one. Yeah, that should do the trick. And add a normal to this at, like, a strong level. And then for this dirt one, I just like to always go in and I like to add a blur, high quality first at a very, very low level so that it makes it easier for me to then use the levels in order to get rid of some of the amount of specs. So if I add the levels, I can go in my normal map and here. If I just move my black slider, I can just, like, reduce the amount of specks until we get something that looks a bit more interesting. Let's set my blur amount to 0.05. You see how that looks. Yeah, so that is still very noticeable. Yeah, see here, that is quite notable if I go to Camera one. Now, of course, because I decide to go in, like, a resolution for three, it's fine to actually work like this because often these kind of textures are tiling. But then, of course, if you would go, for example, for a tiling of two, and while that is loading, I can just, like, go in here because I forgot that rate raising is on, so it always takes a second. So here we got a right click art frame, ground underscore normal. And then the next thing that we would do is we would work probably on the moss, here see. I quite like having this moss that we can see over here. It's going to be a bit interesting how I'm going to do that, but I have a good idea. So first of all, let's just swap back. Here, see. So like this, you can see a lot better. But often even if you go this close, you would, you would still not see this strong inside of the engine. So if I look at this, I would say like term of rate raising, I'm going to make probably these bits a little bit less strong. So if I go in here, I'm going to make these probably to like around one and that should. Yeah, here, actually let's do 1.5. And if I happen to see that inside of unreelEngine, it is looking too strong. I can always go back and just change it. So that's a nice thing. But often if it looks good, the Mm said it will also look good inside of unwelEengine. So we got this stuff. And yes, so now let's go ahead and start working on our moss. So for our moss, you can see, we have these really small strains over here, and I am going to kind of, like, try and mimic that. And I probably want to include my height map in this kind of stuff. Now I think of it. So it's been a while since I've done this, so please bear with me. What you want to do is you want to go ahead and go into patterns. And first of all, you want to have a single like a single strain, like a single hair you want to create, basically. The way that I tend to do that is I literally just grab it very because this is going to be so small, I don't need anything very specific. I'm just going to grab a square, and I'm going to turn this into a disc and just lower down the scale. I then add a blend and I add a transform that will go into the shape like this. Once I've done that, I can just go ahead and I can set to subtract. And then if I just simply move the shape and maybe hold contra shift and make it a bit bigger, you basically want to just get something and only focus up until this point. Here, you get a single hair. Why I say only focus up until that point, that is because I'm going to add the transform after this. And in this transform, I'm going to set my tiling mode absolute. Remember this so that it doesn't tile. Then it's just a matter of scaling this up a bit and placing this halfway like this. Scale this up a bit, maybe rotate it a bit. And it might look silly, but this will work. So we just got something like this. Finally, in order to make it look like this is going into the ground, we are just going to add a very basic blend because remember, this is going to be a height map. So we add a very basic blend, and then we add the very basic gradient on top of it and set this to be a multiply. See? So it just goes from big to small. If you want, you can even go into your gradient and you can add the transform in order to push this gradient down a little bit to make it really go from black to white like this. But again, it's very basic to just create like a single little hair. Now, once you've done that, there's a few things that we need. We need a shape splatter or a tile sampler. Let's see. Um, Yeah, I think they can boat work. If they can boat work, I would probably go for a tile sampler, and this is because a shape platter is often double as expensive as a tile sampler. So in terms of the slowness. So we get this tile sampler. We basically plug it into our pattern input. And down here in Patron, we just say pattern input. So now we have these hairs. We set like a ridiculous number like 512 by 512. So that it becomes like, really, really, willy small. We then set our scaling probably up a little bit. And now comes the magic. So I'm want to have this look like hairs, and the way that I'm going to do that is I want to grab a purlin noise. Over here, and basically just set scale bit higher and basically just turn this into normal map. This is because we are going to fake creating a vector map. So if you set this to a really strong map like ten, 20 maybe. The normal information can actually be read by the vector map input. What is a vector map input if you input it in here and go in here to our tile sampler Inside of rotation. We will have a vector map multiplier, and it will basically ty and warp around your shape. So set this to 256 by 256 because it's a little bit 256 by 256. He see, so it will basically twi and warp around. Now, if on top of this, we set some scale randoms. Push our scale up a little bit that it is overlapping. We want to go ahead and set a position random. And once you set your position random, it will really start to work because it will keep the position random, but it will try and keep warping around your shapes. If you do a rotation random. Okay, so a rotation random will actually break it, but you can give it a little bit of a rotation random. And at this point, here, if I set my pearl noise a bit, let's see. I want to basically with your purlins, you can basically control how much of this random warping you want. So let's say something like this. Now, I'm going to add a very quick blurch high quality gray scale to my shape in order to make it a little bit softer like this. Which will just make it look even softer in here. So basically get this effect. Having this effect, now, it is not filling up too much of the space. Two ways you can do this, or you can just set your scale way higher until you get something like this, and then scale it down or you can duplicate it. I'm going to go for this way, and then I will just show you a little trick. So if we go for this, and if you go in here, you can see that well, actually, there are spaces in between here. I will still show you the trick just in case you just basically do this. You basically add a blend into the foreground. And you add a blend with like a transform into the background, and you move the transform around. I think I've already showed you this, and you just set this to be Max Lighten. And that will basically here. So you can just move this below it and that will fill it up. And if you want, you can even use a mask in order to mask out so that only the top layer will exist and only the bottom layer will stay. Let's actually see if this works. So we got this piece. It's way too big right now, but all we need to do is just add a simple transform and simply press minus two. And then it becomes like these really small strains. So if I would add a norm map to this, like I said, it's the open GL, and I can see starts with just like quite a soft angle. So let's start with 0.35. And at this point, I'm going to start, for example, with my blur high quality. Let's increase the intensity of that to make it a bit softer. I can go into my tile sampler and I can scroll all the way down and just add some color random which will just give us some randomized intensities, like you can see, you can see over here. So it will give us a lot more depth to our meshes, which means at this point, you can also make this stronger. And we can just give this a go. So basically what I will first do is I first need to generate a mask for actual moss, although that is not too difficult. And this mask will also include some height, and then we will just make these on top of it. So for that, let's go ahead and actually start by working on a height for this. We need to have there are many ways you can do this. There is something and it's called a height blend node over here, which might actually be interesting. If we have the height blend node, we can have the it. These pieces at the bottom are actual cobblestone at the bottom. At the top, we need to have just something that has some difference in height in it. Let's go. Could a pearling noise work? I don't think it will work as nicely, but we can see. So we have this pearl noise. Strow this into the top. And the nice thing about it is that you can set the height offset, we can basically say, like, Okay, I want to blend this in here. So my pearlis smaller, then it will very nicely just blend in these extra bits. Here, see, so I can just blent this in certain areas. And the cool thing is it will also give me like a mask. So, like this, I can very quickly just like art or remove moss. And now, I am a little bit worried about how the height will behave. But that seems fine, actually. I was even thinking like I would need to have a mask to break it up. But honestly, when I look at this, that might actually already be fine, so it might have already given us both a blend and a height. So if we have the stuff, I think I actually do not need to have this in my actual height. I think I actually want to do that probably only my normal map. But what I can do at this point is I can just set this height blend in here. I have this nom map over here, and I can say normal combine, I want to have a normal blend node because normal blend node is just like the blend node. Plug this on top and plug in my blend height mask at the bottom, right? So this mask will go up here. There we go, see. So that will now replace that with moss. And on top of that, I also want to do a normal combine on high quality, and I want to set a high quality greyscale, along with a normal in open GL and also plug in my mask in here. This will basically give us a little bit of an actual bump in it. See? So it will just give us this bump. And I should be able. So is it overlaying? Oh, it's overlaying on my bricks. So in that case, just like a blend. Steal your normal color and steal this mask over here. There we go see so now just masks out the bricks. And then what we can do is we can simply play around with this normal in order to also give the effect as if that moss below here is actually a lot stronger. Okay, I'm curious if this worked exactly how I wanted it to be. So if I just go ahead and turn on and off my displacement. Okay. I can see it happening a little bit. Let's go. Into my free cam and just have a look. Here it's happening, but I don't know if I want to have, like, more of it or not. I think I want to have my no map a little bit stronger and I want to have slightly more of it. So if we go in here and I just like to look at my mask for this, let's set the height offset a little bit higher. So we basically are a little bit more of that height map strength. And I want to go in here and I want to just set my normal map to be also a little bit stronger in order to really give me a push in the bump. And for the rest, I think I would need to rely mostly on my actual texture map for this. So okay, so yeah, the moss was a little afterthought, but I'm happy that we are going to include that. I think it will actually look very cool. So else, yeah, you could have done this in Zebra but Andre that I would need to go over on how to create fibers and everything, and that is quite a bit more complicated. And then it's not really a beginners tutorial anymore. So we got our moss sitting in here. We got our other stuff going on. I feel like we might want to do something with my foliage, but I'm not sure. So if we add a blend, we can grab the mask of our actual foliage and just like art is on top, and set this to be a MAX light and at a low level. I feel like this won't I just feel like it won't look good, but I just want to give it a ty to make sure. So this should be, that's all exporting correctly. So if we go in here, I basically just turn off my displacement and turn it on again. Here. So now you can see the height happening a little bit on our leaves. Feels like we don't really have the resolution for it, however. But if we go from a distance, how does that look? Yeah, okay, I think we can just leave a little bit of height in here. What I would recommend is that we like yeah leave it around this string, but I would go in and just add like a very quick blur, high quality gray scale. And just give it like here. If we go to our blur, just give it like a very soft blur so that it's not as strong and just also plug this into your Ab inclusion so that it will just support in the AO a little bit more. Okay, so I think this is a good point to stop this chapter. So we've pretty much done the ground, at least done the basis. So in the next chapter, what we will do is we will start focusing on the actual stone and just include another layer on top of this just to make it look extra interesting. So let's save our scene, and let's continue with that. 34. 32 Creating Our Stone Micro Noise: Okay, so we are now going to work on our stone and just the rest of our height map and norm map. Now, when you look at this, there is detail in here, yes, and we are going to create that. However, I would also argue that like many of these details, they are more like in the base color. It's actually, we have a really interesting base col, so yeah, you can see, this one is a lot more interesting. I am going to go for something like this and not so much this, even though this would be easier to make. But okay, let's just have a close look what kind of stuff that we want to do here. You have some generic micro noise, but we don't want to just go for a soft dotted noise. We want to go for something a bit sharp. As I said, here it's really difficult to even see. Here you can see, these things we actually did using Alpha. Oh, here we go. Here we can see what it looks like. This, but then of course, it will probably be a little bit less rough. Let's make something up basically so that we can get it in that direction. So let me just grab the correct reference on my onscreen. Okay, so let's have a look at all of this stuff. This right click t frame moss I just need to make this a little bit nicer, at least. I put height. And here we have a mask. Normal. There we go. I'll clean up later on. I rather do that at the end. So, we probably want to go ahead and start working on this on the height. So having like a sharp looking normal, basically, I have this technique that we can use. We basically need something like an ambient occlusion, for example, I just need something to generate some details in here. If I go, I only care about the stones, so I can just ignore the back, so I can set this really high. Basically needs very strong details on my AO or on my stones. So here we can see like this is how they would really look if we really push the Amin inclusion. So that's already quite interesting. Then I need to have a edge detect. Oh, no, sorry, not edge detect. I need to have a It's difficult quantize grayscale node. Basically what this does is it basically divides your grayscale into layers. Here, it's now a tree, but you can see the more layers I add the more it arts here. So it's quite handy, actually, often. So basically what to set it to a few layers. So let's say like eight, for example. And then what you want to do is you want to go ahead and now art and edge detect. And my hope is that the edgtect will give me something that, here, I basically just need to generate some really weird looking noise on top that I can use as like a very base. So we have like edge tact, playout with your quantize note. It's a bit tricky because the stones are flat. So this kind of stuff works better when it's actual rock because you have a lot more variation in it. But I think something like this could work, and if not, I will find a different way. So basically, once you've done that, you want to add a bevel. So now we're going to soften all of this out. So I'm going to add a bevel Let's see. Is this going to work? That's I was expecting a lot more white, but maybe maybe it will work. Let's see. Our djitect probably doesn't allow me to do much more. No. Okay, so yeah, maybe this can work. So basically just add the bevel like this. So now we have these interesting looking shapes and everything. And now what we do is we will break up the shapes, and by the time that we're done with the breakup and adding a slope blur, it should look like a little bit of, like, sharp chips, but the chips are reacting to the actual height map that we have. So because we are using this height map, they will actually react to already these stones, and that's the important thing for this that they fell into place and not like they feel like they are just slapped on top of it. So that's what's basing my goal. So if I add a two directional warps, for example, I can go ahead and I want to probably grab like a Cloud two for this. So Cloud two in a direction warp is a little bit sharper. And then maybe also grab a clouds two. Actually, we don't need to duplicate it. We can just use a transform. And this Cloud two is like minus two, so it's smaller and just like somewhere off to the side. So this one set my warp angle. Okay, so I need to actually probably need to make this smaller already the first time. So let's set the scale to two. There we go. So we are warping it, and then this direction, I'm going to actually going in the opposite direction in the hope that I can kind of push it back again. Here, so don't worry that it looks really strange because we're just completely breaking this up. The only thing that I'm a little bit worried about is that we have all this white in between, and I'm not sure if I actually want to use that, but we'll see. Now, we can also try out like a multi directional warp grayscale with the same stuff going on just to see if if we can make it a little bit C. Sharper, so let's at the direction. Four direction is fine. Let's set the motor probably minimum. So it tries to cut out because chain actually, you know what I think I'm going to go for chain again. So that's set to chain. So there we go. Cuts it out and stuff like that. And once we've done that, now all I need to do is I just need to add a very quick slope blur gray scale and the slopbl grayscale. We've already used it before using a moisture noise to make it look a lot sharper. So in the slope bl gray scale, set the samples all the way up, intensity all the way down, and then mode to minimum. And now we can just, like, set scaling to, like 0.05 I think that might work. So, okay, so we got this kind of stuff. Now, the only thing that I find a bit of a shame is that over here, I add my embroclusion, but then it in between those darker bits, right now, what I'm worried about is because we are moving this stuff around, is that it will basically overshoot around these bits, and it will be very obvious. One thing I can very quickly try to do in order to kind of, like, counter that is the arte blend. And in this blend, I'm just going to blend my I'm just going to blend where my mask. I'm looking for this one. Yes, I'm looking for this one, I believe. Yeah. So just this mask, I'm going to throw this into the top. And then I just want to get a noise that I will throw. So for example, cloud two noise with a different random seat. Throw this into the bottom. I knew it. I knew I had to use this one. There we go. So we have a random clouds too. And then if we just go ahead and like a blur to this mask so that we can try and blur the stuff in. And hopefully, what this will do is it will give me enough information in here. See, this is what I mean, that it will give me enough information to basically start overlapping in our quantize node, which hopefully in the ache tag means that we get more stuff there. We start beveling it, directional warping it, and now if it overlaps, it should not be as bad. This multi direction warp is now a little bit strong. Tone it down. And maybe what I also want to do is I might want to scale up my moisture noise, but we'll see. So we now got this really interesting, but also a little bit strange looking shape. However, this shape if we go into a non map, this is what it will look like. So it will just give us these here. Then a low level, it will give us this. You need to, of course, look at this one on a low level. So it will give us these sharp little bits that are warping around everywhere, and that's basically what I want to get. Let's see. So I'm pushing this out. Maybe, what if I just use my multidirectional war Okay, so the multi direction rope, no, that wouldn't work as well. Okay, let's just see how it looks, shall we? So, we got this stuff. I actually want to artists to my blend, and I want to artist where am I going to add this exactly? Okay, so that's my height mask. I need to add it separately on both my norm map and my height map and my norm map because, of course, this time we are not diverting our norm map from our height map. So I plug this on here, and I'm just using probably the same mask like we got over here. Let's actually There we go. I'm just going to invert, gray scale. I'm not going to grab the mask. Just invert, gray scale. There we go. Okay. And now I need to go ahead and set this to be Max ten or not, multiply. I think you multiply like a very, very low level. No, wait. Let's see because I do want to capture mostly of the white stuff. So tsubtract yes, I guess At subtract does work. Multiply. I was hoping for Max Lighten, but it looks like that we need to make it very light. Okay, fair enough. Let's try multiply and we'll see if it breaks our height map if it still looks fine. So give that at a very low level. And then if we go over here to our normal combine, we want to go ahead and so this is our ground Oh, no, sorry, this our moss. Ground at this point. So at this point, I can just add a normal combine. And then what I can be confident with is that we are then just cutting out the ground. So I don't need to worry about needing to mask everything out. So I can just throw the normal in here, move it all the way over here, OpenGL, throw this in here, and then, yeah, throw in here. Setting density quite low. I think this could work. Yeah, I think maybe maybe some of these edges are a little bit too strong, but what we can do is we can go in here in our moisture noise and add a blur, high quality gray scale, leave the intensity off and then just basically have a look at your normal zoom in somewhere and then carefully just move your blur, see? And that will just kind of soften things out a little bit. So let's say 0.3. So we got that stuff ready to go. Now all I want to do is I want to just actually preview this. Okay, this is starting to look interesting. I have a feeling like I need to just refresh my displacement map. Told you I had to refresh my displacement map. Because what I can see now is that it's way too strong in my displacement. It's great in my normal map. I just need to go ahead and really tone it down into my I just need to have this very, very subtle. You can pretty much not see it in here, but it will be happening in here. Turn it off again and on again. There we go. So that's a lot more subtle, so we still have it. But now you can see that now we have a lot more interesting shapes going on our rocks. If we go up close, here, see. So that already feels a lot nicer and rougher. So I'm quite happy with that. And it does also, it does give us a little bit of height, which is also extra nice. So that's looking quite good. I'm happy with that. So that was actually quite spot on. I expected that we need to do, like, a bunch of balancing, but that's nice. So let's go ahead and add a frame. I will call you Stone underscore noise. Okay, so we've done that stuff. I think we are ready to move on to our base color already. That's the thing with this, there isn't much because we've done most of it inside of seabush there isn't that much that we actually need to do. So we got our sand, we got our moss ready to go. All we need to do is a base color for that and we got our stones and those also have some micronise. It is starting to look really nice and interesting. Actually, it almost feels a little bit tropical with this lighting setup for some reason, so that's quite cool. I'm quite happy with that. At the frame here and just call this masks. So what I will do is we will now go ahead and we will move over to our base color, but we'll do that in the next chapter. So we just need to grab some masks from here, set them up, and this is actually going to be a very interesting shape to create in our base color. So we need to have different masks for different stones. And then once we have done that, some of these stones need to have overlaying colors. But most of this, if you will look at it, it might look difficult, but most of it is just crunches, as you can see. So let's go ahead and continue with that in next chapter. 35. 33 Creating Our Base Color Part1: Okay, so base color. A few things you take away. We are going to create a base color, yes. However, these intense ones that you see over here, we cannot really do those because then it looks too obvious in our tiling. So the base colors, they will basically have a monotone look like this, but they will have this interesting, almost like marble, sort of like look or granite like look like you can see over here because this feels way more interesting to me. So I think what we first need to do is we just need to start by creating masks. So I'm just moving all of this up. And I just need to create so we have these masks over here. That's totally fine, but I need to go in and throw those into a flood fill over here so that I can now generate my own masks for it. So then flood fill, we go like flood fill to random grayscale. And this is why I wanted to make so sure that they are not touching each other. Like this is very close, but that should be doable. So flood fill to random gray scale, and now we can say, like I I'll just make a couple of variations. So then histogram select on top of this I'm not going to press space anymore. I'm going to go contrast range like this. And now it is just a matter of me duplicating this HGRm scan like a few times, and this will just be used for overlaying different colors. So I just basically set my position differently on all of them. So just give it like something that's a little bit interesting. There we go. So now we just have different positions in stone. And on top of that, of course, also just have a very base stone. So that's number one. I will go ahead and get started with actually setting my stone ready to go for this kind of stuff. So if we go ahead and actually, we also have, you know, if we go to Advanced tarmac, we can actually probably steal our sand just like we've done with the normal. So if we go over here for the sand, I think it's over here. Yeah, so we got this send over here, and why not? We can just as steal this? Because why would I make it all over again if it's the exact same technique? So just go ahead and Contra Z, and then we can just, like, adjust it a bit. Go to our cobblestone and Contra V. Here we go. So, oh, well, I am missing something here, but doesn't Oh, it's the white stuff. Uniform color and just make it like a bit white, yellowish. There we go. That was what it was. Okay, so this sand, it is a lot darker, but it is also wet because the picture has just been taken after it's waned. So I need to keep that in mind. So I do want to actually go for a darker like this. And I want, instead of having, like, orange, I want to probably, like, go for, like, even darker spots in between here. And maybe have the white, like, a little bit less strong. Something like this, maybe in our color range, we want to go more for more like like a black dirt instead of, like, a brown dirt. Here we go, same over here. See? So it's just going to be more of like this more blackish dirt, but something like this should be like a solid base. So we got this. What do we have over here? We have a blend and we're just blending our foliage on top. That's fine. I don't care about that. I want to go in here, and I want to start by adding my first blend. So this blend will have our send over here, and then it will have our stones sitting at top at the top. So let's just already plug this in. And we can get rid of this. So for our stones, we got some marks over here. I'm going to go ahead and I will use the gradient map method. I'm going to start with creating a very base. So if we do gradient map, we can just grab our flood filter random gray scale. Plug this in here. This week can turn into, like, a base. So if we go for gradient editor, and let's see. I think our base stone would be like something, something in this direction would be like our base stone. So if we go pick gradient, let's see how far we can get. So first of all, let's just do like oh, I cannot text C. Okay, so that stuff works well. Now I just want to see if I can already get some of those interesting colors in here. Oh, that's a bit strong. Okay. Okay. So we can get probably already some of the interesting colors in here that saves us some masking. Yeah. So if we do that, it's too strong. But if we go I think something like this could work. I don't know, it might be a little bit too colorful. So I might actually just want to go in here and Wow, okay, that's not working very well. I'm just playing around basically, just seeing Yeah, something like this would work. So I think I'm going to go for something like this to get started with, and then we'll just build upon this. So if we have a look, let's say that we got some very basic stones over here, stroll those into the top. Now all we need is we need to have probably like this mask over here. You didn't see that, that I did the wong mask again. So we will have our mask over here. We have a ground below it, and then later on, what we would also have is we'd have, like, a blend. And this blend just has a little bit of dirt. So if I just go for add this brownish dirt here at the top, I then just add a dirt note down here. And it will ask me for an ambi inclusion. I'm actually going to grab this one because it's easier for me to just tone down my dirt than to add more of it. And I'm also going to get a curvature. And I'm just going to steal my my stone over here. There we go. Open GL curve just same thing as before. And if we just set our dirt level like way down, I mostly just want to have this on our stones. So play around a little bit more with your grunge amount. Actually, you know what the curvature. I will set it before we add our micro noise to it, and play around a bit more with your dirt level. So here. So let's say something like this. And then in your mask, you just simply want to grab probably like this one. Here we go and that will just cut out our actual sand and having this, we just plug it in here into our pasty and we just give this much lower level. Here we go. That will just already bring out some of the shapes, stuff like that, and then we will add our foliage to this. This is the absolute most basic thing that we have now, but now we can start building upon it. If we're just going to go ahead and oh, I already had my base color ready to go. This is what it looks right now. It still feels very, the colors now feel a little bit cartoon. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and go into our grading map and add a little HSL note behind it. And it's just to tone down the saturation a bit to make them a little bit more monodoneF now, like this, see? So now they're a little bit more mon tone, but the colors are still there. The dirt in between is pretty close, actually, so that's good. Now what I'm going to do is now, I'm just going to start by layering on top basically different colors. So we have all these colors over here, what I'm going to do is basically this. I'm going to actually start by counting. So we have white, one, two, let's see, one, two, probably like a lighter color, like three, maybe darker Let's say four different colors to get started with. So I'm going to grab a gung map like something that has slightly large shapes in it. Clouds one, maybe. And then just throw in a gradient editor. You can also do this with just the clouds if you want to get some generic colors in here. We then go ahead and we just throw this on here, and we can just start grabbing some of the colors that we want. So we go gradient editor, big gradient and grab, for example, in here, and then you will get these type of colors. I don't know why it moved all the way over there. Whoa, that's a bug. That's probably because I'm looking at it so up close. So we just have these gradient editors. Yeah, see here, that's definitely a bug. But don't worry. That's just because of my wird view setup. So if we go to number two, gradient editor, big gradients. Let's go for, like, some of the why don't go for, like, the gum, you know, let's actually go probably like here. There we go. So that's some white. Then if we go for, like, maybe, like, Oh, why is MBC so slow all of a sudden. Then we go for, like, a more brownish. Yeah, something like that could work. And then maybe, like, a more yellowish white. Okay, that's just like a bit strong. No. If this does work, I'll do it manually. Come on, you can do it. Just give me, yeah, you know what that could work. Okay, so we got those pieces in here. That's all looking good. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to here combine them. So we got this stuff, great. Now all we need to do is we just need to create some masks. So most of these seem like they are quite they are grunge maps. They have some direction to them and some specs. So the red one looks like it has mostly. It's a combination of some direction and having some extra patches in here. That's no problem. The white seems like it is more patchy. So let's get started with those, actually. So let's go for, like, the red one because it's the most prominent one. So it has both patches, and it has both patches, and it has both direction. Now I know of a grunge map which is called Grunge map 002, or grunge map 003 depends on how soft you want your directions to be. I think I'm going to go for 003. And this one, here, if you tone down the balance, it has, like, this directional stuff going on. Actually, it's tone down the contrast, not so much the balance. And if you like play around with our random seats, we can, like here, we can find already some direction. Now, if we would combine this using a blend and then find something that's a little bit more in direction of patches, maybe like clouds, too, I like a different seed because by this point, we've used it a lot. Maybe set the scale a little bit lower and then add like a levels. Sorry if I go a little bit quick, but at this point, we've covered this so many times, it's just just this quite basic thing. Sets the Max lighting. Maybe also push your white slider up a little bit. So here. So now we have patches along with these stripes. So at this point, you would say, like, Okay, so probably I'd like a transform because we want to say minus two to make it a lot smaller. But we can use this as a very generic mask. So let's see. We have our HSL note. Now I can add a blend note. What I can say to this blend is okay, this one is going to have my orange, but I do not want to have my orange bits everywhere. Let's go to our first his Crum scan. I actually want to have it in a few more so I'm going to set my range up a bit that we have it still in a few more stones then we simply blend our mask over here along with the stones and set this to be multiply. There we go. And then we throw this in here. There we go. So we get already some patches in here. So that's pretty good. Yeah. So we probably what play around a little bit more like the intensity, but it's just like it's a base to get started with. The stripiness over here might be a little bit too soft, actually. So we might want to go in and let's see, play around a little bit more with my balance. And I'll see if I need to blur it. But let's first of all, just get the very bases in here. I feel like I don't have enough space, so let me just move all of this over here. So those are the patches. Now the next one that I would do is I would say, Okay, so let's add a blend, and this one is going to be some whiter colors. And the whiter colors, they are a balance of having these patches and sometimes just having something a little bit bigger. And I have a good feeling if we would use DRT one for this. And set the levels a little bit lower so that we mask out some of the more smaller bits. Also, we've used dirt one before. So let's just randomize a seat in order to get it's a little bit more interesting. And if we then blend this dirt one and blend it with, like, maybe like a clouds one and like levels on the clouds one and just set this to be only some very small patches like this, maybe make it a little bit lighter. Throw this into our blend and set this to be art and throw this into here. So this will just like some white patches, and these white patches, I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to You know what, I'm probably going to delete these hecrum scans. I'm going to blend this and I want to just go ahead and just duplicate this histogram scan and just change my position so that we still have as many, actually, probably even more of them, but they will not be overlapping with the old one. So if I set this to be multiply, here, you see, so now some of them don't have it, but then other ones do still have it, and they also have two colors in here. So we got that stuff done. Okay, what's the next one? Maybe like some darker patches. The darker patches, we can probably do all over the place. So let's go for a blend. And these darker patches, they look fairly generic. So I have this mask which I would like to use for fairly generic stuff, and we've used it before. It's called the Grunge map 013 mask over here. And this mask, if I just go ahead and, like, the first seat I never like, I always need to, like, play around my seat. But then if I play out my contrast and balance a bit, here, this could work, and all over the place white. Yes. So I might want to just add the transform and scale it twice to make it smaller and then throw our darker patches on the top. Here we go. So we just get all of these kind of dark patches sitting on there. So that's fine. And the next one here, this is how it will look now. So by this point, we get like this stuff. So let's see. So we still are very monotone. Everything in here. I think maybe we want to go for like we need something like white specks probably, something to make this feel a lot more interesting. So let's start with, like, some white specks. Let's start by a blend. And these white specks, if we add the white pieces over here, What I'm going to do is I'm going to probably let's see. Let's go into our mesh adaptive in library and mask generators. And let's see. Is there anything in here that I might be able to use? Mm. I'm not sure there is, actually. So I might just want to make these specs manually. And if I would do this manually, I would go into noises. I would grab, let's say, like a dt one and blend it together. And just splend this scatter to something even more intense dirt four over here, for example, and sets to be like Max Lighten. Here we go. So we get, like, a lot of dirt and everything going on. Here we go. So that will just give me some generic noise. Now, I'm not sure if I might want to like art to sharpen to my dirt four, just to make it very, very sharp in the details. Here see the taxi does work. So let's set our sharp into round one for our dirt four. Here we go. So here we just keep layering on top pieces until we get exactly what we want. So we got those colos. We got the dark colos, although they might be I might want a bit more, so let's add our contrast and balance up a little bit. Yeah, dark colors, we got that stuff. We got our specs. What was this one? This one was like a more orange color. We can throw that one on top everywhere, probably because everywhere it does have some orange. Maybe I will go for some I don't know, maybe I'll do, like, some orange teaks because we do have, like, some streakiness going on over here, but it's not as interesting. So let's go ahead and leave at this point, before we add our generic dirt. Let's add a blend. And in here, let's throw our gradient map in the top. Let's move our masks so that we have, like, a bit more space. Okay, kind of what kind of noise shall we do here? It's tricky. I know of one grunge map, which is like this leaks thing. Here, grunge map 006. And when you tone that one down, it shows these kind of leaks that we have over here. If you like play around with the contrast a little bit. Now, if we would add a transform to this and then blend them together, Let's blend them using a Max Lighten. Maybe move it around a bit, so we get something like this. I should still be tilable. And if we now blend this once more, and this time, I want to blend it using a histogram scan over here so that we don't have this everywhere. So let's say range down and position, just give it like a random different position. Sets to multiply, same thing over and over and over again just in slightly different variants. So, okay, that is working, but what I do not like is how this looks very much like water, basically. So I do need to go for, like, a better variant. So we want something that has, like, the tiniest bit of red in it, but for the rest. Yeah, I think I use this one. So grant editor. Mm. And there is something that slows down my computer a lot when I do this. It's interesting. To dark. To bright. Come on, give me something that I like. Okay, I think something like this could do the trick. Let me just quickly reset my scenes that my PC is not slow anymore. So we got this stuff. Now, let's go in here and let's just quickly delete some of the more darker notes. Here we go. See. So now, that's the one I wanted. So now it's a lot softer. So it gives me some streaks. These streaks do feel very well, streaky. So I'm just going to go ahead and like a very quick slope blur, and I'm just going to break them up a little bit and just need something like I don't know, maybe like a pearl noise to break them up. Samples all the way up, intensity down here see. And if we go, we probably don't even need to go for minimum. We just want to go for, like, blur and just set the intensity very low, like 0.03. And play out with our scale for, I want to say it a bit stronger, 0.06. Here we go. And I'm just hoping that I can get a little bit more softness going on. And then by the point that we are here, it will be very hard to see. But we are slowly starting to get, like, more and more interesting details in here. Once we've actually added our dirt, we can also do that technique where we are a blend and a curvature, so we can go like curvature gradient map. Actually, we already have a curvature here. Yeah, you know what? I'm just going to redo it because I want to have this curvature at probably a different strength like this. Plus D on the gradient map to dock it because we don't need it. Set is to be art subtract and just tone it way down to around 0.00 0.2. Okay. Wow, we've done a lot in a very short time, all of a sudden. Let's have an actual look at it. Okay, okay, it's starting to get there. We want to make the transition between our noises quite a bit like smoother. I'm also going to go ahead and I'm going to go in my camera one and probably just, like, boost up my sharpen a little bit. Here we go. Okay, so next chapter, make the color transitions better. I can now see some of these damages which are actually too strong, but that is just like our dirt that we need to reduce. So we're going to work on that. Let's also create like a base roughness because this is very difficult to properly preview without just having a little bit of roughness going on. So let's go ahead and continue with that in the next chapter. 36. 34 Creating Our Base Color Part2: Okay, so let's continue with our base color. So I was going to go in and just quickly reduce my dirt amount a little bit over here. And then I wanted to make my masks basically sharper. So for example, when we have these masks, just basically boost up your contrast quite a bit more to make the transitions and also for these ones, just do the same to make the transitions a lot sharper. And I think that will kind of take care of that. I don't know what this. Like a little bit of low resolution feel. So we got this one. These ones are over here, which this one is quite sharp. This one is not, so let's go ahead. Clam this down to make it really sharp. Let's see. So this one, this one. Yeah, that looks pretty sharp. These ones are over here, which look not sharp at all. So let's set the contras way. And maybe like set our balance up to kind of compensate for it. Let's see, so we add this stuff, which is very sharp now. But now that we have increased our contrast, is also very obvious. So let's just tone down our opacity a little bit. Then we add this one and this one is a crunch map, and it can also use quite a bit more contrast. Like this. So let's see this. This stuff, once again, contrast means that it also becomes a lot stronger, so we probably need to do some balancing out after this. But it's starting to get there. So we're starting to get strong results. So we have a sharpen here and a sharp and here. T that might work. So let's have a look. Yeah, see here. So that already feels like quite a bit sharper. Let's see. I would say that our t is a little bit strong. So let's go in here and just like tone down the epic of our t. This kind of stuff that we have over here, what am I using for this? You know what? This one could actually have a bit more white in it. So let's go into our gradients editor. Let's just fight. I think it's this one over here that needs to have There we go, see? Let's make that quite a bit whiter. I think that will actually do us good. Yeah, see. Okay, the red can be now a little bit darker again. I feel like now that I made this whiter, I do need to go in, maybe tone it down. So over here, we can just reduce the intensity. This one, we can probably leave it because then we add this dirt on top. Yeah, it's this one over here. I'm going to go ahead and just add the levels behind it, and I'm just going to push my black slider down a little bit to give it a little bit more spacing in between because else, it feels a little bit too overwhelming. Let's go for something like this. Here, this is starting to kind of feel like what we have over here. So, okay, so we got those colors sitting over there. Yeah, that's looking pretty interesting. I think what I want to do at this point is, I just want to create a very base roughness because I always find it difficult to really judge my colors without having some roughness in it. So for our roughness, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and are levels. And I will actually just use this map over here, the output from our flood fill. Because if I clam this down, I can actually give it very slight roughness variations. So it's stone. So we do need to make this all quite light. Let's push this up a little bit. And then push up let's see our black slider like this. Here see? So we just get slightly different variations in roughness on our overall stones. We then throw on a blend and we say, Okay, I now want to have over here for my dirt, I want to go for a gray scale conversion, and I just want to grab my dirt color over here. And then I want to add a levels on top of it and just pushes all the way up so that it becomes very light. And yes, I know I once again have mistaken myself in the mask. There we go. So that's our dirt. Then what we can do is we can say, Okay, I want to give a little bit of variation using some of the masks that we have. So we have, for example, like over here. So we can use this mask, which mask is also interesting. You can probably use this mask. And let's also add another blend and just use this mask over here, which is our white mask. And then we can say, like, Okay, so this one, I want to go ahead and I want to set this to be probably subtrack just make it like that's just going to give it a little bit more shine. This one I probably want to set like art. And this one I probably want to go for also subtract to give it a little bit more like those specs. And let's just see how that looks. Be, at this point, this dirt actually doesn't do too much. Yeah, I might maybe I actually do want to increase it again, but we'll see. So we got this stuff. Let's throw it into our roughness. Oh, one thing. Let's add a blend. Let's add a gray scale conversion and just quickly throw in our over here, throw in our foliage and add like a level. So I do add the levels, but this actually looks quite spot on. So just throw this in here and just add our mask over here. I'm just holding control and just duplicating it. There we go. Just to throw in some foliage. Yeah, okay, I need to push it, make it a little bit lighter. Like that. Okay, foliage done. That is ready to go. So let's have a look. So let's drag in our roughness. Here we go. Okay, what do I see? I feel like I want to make my base stones a little bit more shiny. So if we go in these levels, let's just tone it down a little bit more, so it makes it a little bit darker. So our sand our sand can actually be duller. So let's push our sand up more towards the white stuff. Like this. And then we add this on top. So let's make this a little bit stronger to make it stand out a bit more, and then we make this one a bit stronger, see if that works. Yeah, see, so now you start to get a lot more interesting roughness variation in here, which is what I wanted. So, okay, that's pretty good. So we got that stuff ready to go. Now, I think what I want to do is I just want to very quickly take a first screenshot. I also do this just because it's nice to keep track of things. So if I go for like 2560 by 2560, I'm sure that it's still in the images. I will organize this, but I like to keep a history of my materials so that I can see. It's called this cobble and render. That's done. Let's have a look. Okay, so this is actually looking really cool. I just having a look on my other screen, which is four k just because then I can have a much better look. Okay, so this is looking really cool. We got some really nice roughness for spans going on, and we can see some of the damages in our stone. I would say, let's reduce the strength of our normal map on this a little bit. Let's try and get a little bit more color in between here. And then, yeah, we still need to do the moss, but I'm first also focusing on this stone. So if I look at this stone, is this sharp enough? Maybe I will make it a little bit sharper in our mask. We can simply do that just by throwing on, like, a sharpen note. But for the rest, so, yeah, we like my roughness. That's looking nice. I would say that for the rest, so we got, like, some of these streaks going on. That is all looking cool. I think I want to actually get a little bit more color variation in my overall bricks or in my overall stone. So let's go ahead and start with that stuff. So first of all, I wanted to go ahead and I wanted to reduce my normal map, which is this one over here. Yeah. So let's just tone it down a little bit more. So it's very subtle because it's a little bit too strong. Now I just want to go in here. So this one, let's just go in and make it even sharper. So if we go here, let's just boost up my contrast even more. Same over here. So it just needs to have very sharp transitions. These ones already have pretty sharp transitions. These ones are fine. The black ones, I actually I am going to probably go in and just boost up my balance to have, like, a little bit more of it. And then we have the white specs, okay? So we got that stuff. Okay, so now the colors. If we go ahead and go in here, Yes, I can probably try first to set my saturation to like 0.5, like this, just make sure. But I think this will just boost up the overall color and wouldn't really do exactly what I wanted. So let's reduce that. I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to duplicate my gradi map. And sometimes if I'm not sure about exactly what color I want, I just boost up like a bunch of gradi maps, and then I just try them out basically. So here I just open them up and I just go, let's say, pick gradient over here. Open them up. Big gradients over here. Even though the colors are very different. The goal is for me to decide if I want to do some other type of gradients. So I can do that. And now what I can do is I can just go in, like, Okay, let's use this. And I keep my image over here. I keep my image on the site so that I can see and just see the difference. Okay, so, I already like that color more, but let's just keep going. This one it's more let's go and set our HSL a little bit higher. So let's set to like 0.49. It's actually a re check. Mm. Okay. And let's go for, like, the last one. I think I'm going to go for the last one actually. I think the last one or not. So I'm a bit indecisive. It's very subtle. Let's boost up my Let's boost this up even more. I'm going to go really strong just to make sure that Okay, so it is working. Okay, so this one versus Oh, so it wasn't yet done reloading. This one. Okay, let's go for the last one over here so we can delete these. And now, of course, we do need to push this back in. So let's say it to 0.5. And I think by this point, because it is a four K, and we start to get quite a large craft, I just need to give it a second to actually update over here. But that is looking good. So yes. Okay. So we got that stuff that's looking interesting. Now, another thing that I wanted to do is, I need to convey that everything a lot is a bit sharper because right now, this feels very sharp, but here the surface feels very smooth. We have the actual normal map sharpness in here, yes. But there's something else that we need to do on the actual shape. So we're going to just work on that a little bit more. First of all, though, what I was going to do is I was going to go in my ground, and I was going to, like, for example, play around with the difference in color. Maybe something like this. I do need to make sure that where my dirt over here is still the same. Oh, sorry, here it is. Yeah, now the dirt is not as visible because I made it lighter, so I just need to push this up a little bit. So let's do that. There we go, so hopefully that will add a little bit more. Okay, so for this sharpness, a few things that we can try to do. If I have a think at this, we can do a slope gradient basically and just chip chip off some of the edges that we have. That could be a good way of trying to just get some sharpness in. So let's go ahead and start with that. Let's add a slope blur gray scale, just like an empty space. And I want to get started by just adding my height map, this one over here. And then for our slope, I don't know, or pearl noise or probably a moist noise. Although, let's also try a cloud two over here. Let's give all of them a go. So let's see how they behave. So if we go for samples, tone the intensity way down, It's blur to like minimum. Okay, so we got this one. We got the Perlin noise, which we would need to very small in order to get more of the sharpness effect. And we have our clouds. Okay, definitely our clouds too now does a better job because it is not all over the place, and that's what I wanted. So it's like at 0.0 806 maybe. Now, I just want to check if I throw this or if I turn this into a normal map, and I set it to like six. It will probably give me a worse result than this normal. Yeah, here see. I need to start by just overlaying those on top. The tricky thing is overlaying them. Because of the way that this slow blur works. Adding these details on top, it will just, like, increase the strength of my norm map. So I need to do a little balancing game. So if we go over here, so we have this th these stronger details over here. First thing I'm going to do is I'm just going to add a very quick blur, high quality Criscal I'm just going to give it if we're going to a norm map a little bit of like a smooth. Here, see. So just to soften it out a little bit. What we later on probably also want to do is we do not want to have these details on the very centers. We just want to have them around the edges, but we can play around with that. Now that we have this, I can go ahead and I do not want artists to my curvature. I want the artist only to my normal combine. Oh, I'm adding a blend. I need to add a normal combine over here. Sets to be high quality. Throw this in here. But now what you can see is what will happen is here. It will try to overlay these two, and it will just make them way too strong. So at this point, first of all, let's set this normal as low as we can without losing those details. So here we go. And now what we need to do is we just need to on the input of our blend map, add a very quick blend. I can remember we had a normal color over here. So plug in this normal color into our blend and then just play around with your paste. So we look at our normal combine, and the higher we set this up until we are balancing things out a little bit like this. So now they are balanced out, but we still get some of these stronger details in here. So I can start by just doing this. So yes, so I will start by doing that. And I also probably want to make my wife's specs more obvious and more stronger while I'm here. So these ones, let's go ahead and add an HSL note to them to the actual color of my white specs and just push up my lightness a little bit. And if we just go ahead and are levels and just make these, try and clamp these down a little bit more, hopefully, at this point, give me a much stronger result. So if I now go in here, that gives me much stronger result. And if I now go in and just tone it down a little bit more, something like this, Okay, let's see how that looks. It starts to feel a lot sharper also around the edges, and we are running out of time for this chapter, so I will end it off. We're just going and generating another image. Okay, so here we go. So this was before, this is what we got now. So it's starting to look pretty good. So we have much more interesting colors going on. Our white specs and everything are now also a lot stronger, which brings everything out. I still need to work a little bit more like the harshness. Like it is starting to work a bit better, but I still want to make everything a little bit sharper. To get that feel, and we definitely need to work a lot more on the ground. But let's also start implanting our moss. So in next chapter, work a little bit more on the sharpness of our stones. Then we can start by just implanting our moss to see because it will probably make a big color difference, and we can basically take it from there. But this is starting to look quite good. So let's go ahead and continue. 37. 35 Creating Our Base Color Part3: Okay, so let's go ahead and continue. We got a pretty strong looking texture here, although some of the colors are still a little bit off you can see the blue over here, which literally only now that I'm saying it, I notice it. Yeah, that might be a little bit too intense. But we will go over that later on. First, I want to focus a little bit more on the ground. First of all, I want to make my ground a little bit lighter because I made it too much in this direction, but this is wet. And once I've done the ground, I want to put my focus on the moss, because I think that will actually make quite a big difference. So if we go here, we can just go ahead and go to this uniform color and just set it to be a little bit lighter. A bit more. Yes, I think maybe just a little bit more. It can also go in like to replace color. And in here, I can also just set this to be like, a little bit lighter like this. There we go. See? And I'm mostly looking just like how it looks like inside of the sun. So that's pretty good, okay? We've done that. Now, I guess I could just, like, very quickly go in here, and, oh, God, I can't. There are so many stones. Let's go into our HSL note and just set this to like 0.49. What I want to do is I want to literally just go into the grading map and just select a few stones and then change the texture, but we have weigh many nodes 0.48. Here, because look at that. So yeah, that's the annoying thing when doing this kind of stuff. So you'll see it's mostly these ones. The other ones are all totally fine. It's just these ones over here that are being a problem. Now, I can, like, try and look. So the gradient editor, you can actually scale the window out like this. But honestly, the chance that I find the stuff. If I would do that, I would literally just select rose and press delete and then see if it changes stuff. So I just delete here, see. I can see that it's in here. So if I delete this one. Okay, so it looks like it. So that's my technique of how I would get rid of this. So I just delete and let's say now I want to focus on this. I only will need to do this, of course, in areas that are very blue. I think it's around here. Yeah, it's around here. I think it's this one. There we go. That was the one. So let's see. Did that fix it? Yeah, I think that fixed it enough that it doesn't look as intense. And else we'll fix it later on even more. So count. Yes. We were going to go ahead and work on the ground. Now, for the ground, we have the moss. But what I need to make sure is the moss, it can very well be that the moss is actually overlaying slightly on top of our stones. When this is the case, I don't think I want to actually add this to our ground texture that we have over here, but after it, and this is just because else we risk that we are cutting off our moss. So here we have our ground texture. So if we go ahead and add a blend after this, now, first things first is, let's go ahead and have a look. So, it's just moss, little bit yellow greenish. I would say that if I go for a gradient map, and where is my moss. Here we go. We have this one. We might be able to actually use this and just simply drag it into our granit map. And if we then go ahead and just, like, grab the gradient. So gradient editor. Big gradient. Let's see. If I go for something like this, Ooh, this one I like. Let's go for something in this direction. Only the very dark one over here, maybe make it a little bit lighter and maybe a little bit more yellowish. There we go. We just have a very basic color. So if we just plug this in here. Now, for our mask, I believe that we can just use this mask over here. I think we can simply grab this, throw it on here. Here we go. So now we get some of that moss sitting in there. How does that look once we get at this point? Oh, I don't like the black edges. The black edge shall most, here, the black edge shall case by the curvature. I do not like that. I'm not a big fan of that. There is another curvature, but this one often gives me not as nice of an effect. It's called a curvature smooth. And if you just go ahead and copy it here, it's like a very smooth curvature. Oh, wow. Even this one is giving me black lines, although they are not as strong, so we could, like, have a look and see before. Oh. Definitely. I definitely want to have this curvature. In that case, what I'm going to do is, well, I can probably just literally use the levels and as long as I push the black slider up, No, that is not doing what I want. This does off the work because it just these black lines are then, so strong that they map out. I can also just turn this into a mask if I want. Here, I can do this. I just have this mask. And then what I could do is I could go for a blend between my curvature and a uniform color and just make the uniform color like gray. Throw this in here and throw this into the mask. Oh, sorry, we need to invert this mask, but just by going into our levels, there we go, see. And that got rid of it. I know it's a bit of a workound, but we can just dock this and we can dock this and before you know it, it feels like nothing has happened. Okay, I keep getting distracted. I was going to go in and we have this stuff over here, so that is good. Now, I can already just have a look, but I first of all, also want the artist to my roughness. So if I go up here, I can add like a blend. And I probably want to just add a gray scale conversion, just to still give it a little bit of, like, difference. And then add like a levels. And this one, it's just going to be slightly darker than the rest. So in my levels, I just push it up and I just go for this height mask that we have over here. You see? So it's just a little bit shinier. And let's actually see how that works. Okay, so there's very little of it. It's also it's way too shiny where I have it. So let's start with that. Let's just push up our levels to make that less. And for the rest, I actually expected to see it much more obvious. Yeah, like over here, I can see it. But that is in my free came, and right now I'm more focused on getting this to work unlike my beauty render. So it is nice that we can see this. So the colors, they do work, although I think the colors are a little bit monotone. So two things. One, let's go over here into our colors, and let's just go in here and maybe just add an extra button and then just scale this down. I'm basically just trying to see exactly where my gradients hit, see, like this. That will just give me hopefully a bit of extra interest in between here. Now, I could probably also fake this by adding a blend and an ambient occlusion, just to fake the depth a little bit. And we can just copy our height map that we had already created. So let's set this very low turn on GPU optimization and just throw this in light to the top and then select the line and all the gradient map in order to convert it from gray scale to color, and set this to multiply. Here or see? Because I think that in this case, that adds a lot. And finally, if you want, you can add a very quick HSL and just push up your lightness a bit to make it. Stand out more. So now I can just very easily change the color based upon my lightness. There we go. Okay, so we got that. The next thing that we need to do is we just needed to increase this. Even though there's quite a bit here, I will just go ahead and where are you? Here you are. I will increase it a little bit, not too much because I don't want to go on top of my stones. So increase it a little bit, and then go in my pearling noise, and maybe if I set like a random seat that it is in more interesting locations. Well, I'm really surprised that I can Is it maybe my Ambien inclusion if I tone that down? Let's just go outside of rate race mode because this is a bit too slow for me to play around with. Yeah, so amble inclusion does like a little bit, but not as much. So maybe I just need to make everything a little bit brighter in order to make it stand out. I'll say this ambu inclusion over here. In our random settings, yeah, it's like, I can see it. It's definitely there. I think we just need to make it a little bit brighter. So let's turn on tracing. Let's go back into substance, and I think we just need to push the brightness. Oh, let's going here out a little bit. I can remember that happen that happens more often with my moss. Whenever I make moss whatever feels very bright, it happens with more things. Whatever feels very bright inside of substance might not actually look that bright inside of your actual material. Here, see so now I can start just seeing it, seeing the moss over here. So that's pretty good. The mosh height map. Yeah, the moss is having height map detail. It's also good and it's spreading across here and there. I think that's pretty good. Maybe I will add a little bit more, or maybe I can just change the variation to get it exactly where I want it to be. Just as a little bit of random balancing, because if you look in our mask, that is a lot of moss that we have actually. Yeah. I'm quite surprised that we have this much and that's still so hard to see. Let's play around without disorder. It might just be it just has to do with the height, because it's a high blend, it will just like ty and blend based upon the height we have given it, but that might not always work. So here, if we change the pearlis scale, you can see our graph starting to slow down a bit. Yeah, let's set our Pelinis scale probably like a bit larger, probably like 23. And else, I'm not too worried about that. Like, it is definitely showing up, so we can see it in between here. So it's not like I'm too worried about not having the moss. I can go ahead and I actually feel like when it's in the light, I feel like it can be a little bit darker, but I know that if I do that, we will not be able to see it anywhere else. So maybe this is actually fine. Like maybe we are at the right area. I think all I want to do is just maybe increase my no map strength a little bit, which is going to be this one over here. That is the two, just to really blow it out and really make it very strong and obvious. Yeah. Okay, there we go. I can live with that. I think that looks fine. It's like this extra bit of color, especially over here, I will like it. And over here, it's just like nice and subtle. So that's quite good. We were also going to work on the edges, but I still need to do something on my colors because I'm not very happy with it. So if we go over here, see, here, let's go into our finals that I can see. Yeah, here, it's really like these stones up here, still that are causing problems. So let me just drag out migrate in cecal. So it's these ones most likely. Let's make this a bit lighter. There we go, see. So it's mostly just all of those dark ones. And now let's have a look. Okay, so we only have, like, one left that is way too strong and that one. Oh, that's a little bit green. See, we just need to make sure that we don't go too dark with our colors. Think it's this one. Ah, see? White. Got it white first time. So, let's push this one out. Is there anything else that is very Over here, I can see one. I don't know. That one is a bit difficult. This? Yeah, there we go. So it's in this area. Then I'm betting that it's this one, the darkest one. Yeah, see. So let's go ahead and just push that one out just to balance it out to make sure that it's not as strong. Now we are very slowly. If you look at it, it is starting to look the same. So that's what I was going for. Now, of course, this looks quite a bit sharper, and I still want to see if I can capture that sharpness, both in our base color, but also in the rest. Now, the first thing I want to try just for fun is I want to add a sharpen note after we've just done our base colors, see how that behaves. And just set a low value because you would be amazed that sometimes if you do it before you start adding these kind of details before you start splitting things up, that it could actually often give us a good result. So we wanted to do that, and we were going to add a bit more sharpening over here. So I was going to set this probably to like 2.5 and let's see, normal design. I don't think that's too strong yet. No, I think that should be doable. Let's have look. Here, see, everything does feel quite a bit sharper. So that's good that we did that. So now, also the sharpening that we have around our stones. Yeah, here, it's starting to pick up, so that's quite good. I feel like that maybe my displacement is just like the tiniest bit too strong. So let's say this to 0.018. There we go. And I'm doing that on purpose with rate racing turned off while I'm here, is there anything else that I need to change? I don't think so. I think what we can do is we can make another screenshot, especially when here, see? Now I'm starting to see it a lot more. Maybe it was that, here, see. It is the displacement that hides it a little bit. But what we can do at this point, I'm going to load up my images because I just want to see if there's something that I needed to do about the lighting. So before, after this lighting is good. I actually want to I want to have this lighting brighter, but I want to have more of an intersection that is a little bit darker, maybe. So if we go for our first light, let's set this to around eight. Whoa, that's a big difference. 7.1, maybe 7.2. So let's just do, 7.2 and then just go to our rotate tool up here and just like rotate it a little bit so that it's a little bit further down like this. There we go. So just a little bit stronger. And then this one over here, I'm going to go for actually, I'm going to leave it at seven, but I probably just want to, like, push it back a little bit. There we go. Something like that should look a bit more interesting. Okay, so we got that stuff done. Yeah, the only thing that I now want to work on is mostly the sharpness. But for the rest, I think it's starting to look really good. So yeah, let's make a quick render of this just to make sure that I'm looking at the final image. Okay, so that's done rendering. So this is the final render. I need to zoom in in order to actually see it properly on my 1080 P screen. This is why it's so handy too if you have different resolution screens or well, go for a four case screen and just downscale it. But that could very well be the problem in my case that because I'm downscaling it, it always gives me this little blurry haze if I look right now I'm looking on my forke screen and on my fork screen, it's looking awesome. It's very nice and crisp and sharp, but here I only get that when I really zoom in. So having a look at this, I'm not happy yet with the moss. I think I want to do is I think I am actually going to reduce the intensity of my normal map for that back. My dirt, I will maybe reduce the intensity like a tiny bit. For the rest, these pieces are looking nice and sharp. That's quite good. And I'm not, I don't think the colors are too bad right now, so they are very colorful, but I think it just gives an interest. It's going to be slightly stylized vibe. That's what I'm getting from it. Our foliage is doing really well, although the grass is getting kind of hidden at some places, but especially like these pieces, they are doing great. Although it looks like there are some masking problems. For the rest, I think we get something really good. I almost feel like adding some more foliage to this, so I might actually do that, but I will do that as like a bonus. I had this idea where I will create the material, but there are sometimes so many things that we've already covered, but they're very fiddly. So it's literally me going back and forth like 50 times, and I'm just going to add it as like a bonus chapter. And this kind of stuff might be part of that. So I will leave that foliage as part of that because it's not very interesting for the tutorial, but I will record it. So I'm going to go ahead and Here, set this back to one. I'm also going to go ahead and wear my dirt over here, set this back to three. So that will reduce those things. That is fine. Yeah, the colors, I was happy with the colors. I'm just going to take the risk that they will just stay looking cool like this. I'm going to maybe make my moss Here let's get rid of this one. Maybe make my moms a little bit more in the direction of yellow. So if we go to the U, you can go in a minus, here we go. 0.49 to make it a little bit more yellow and maybe set the lightness to 0.57. Here we go. So we just make this a little bit more yellow. So that's fine. That's kind of like it goes together with our foliage over here, that's good. So we got that kind of stuff. I'm really forgetful about this stuff. Oh, yeah, I wanted to fix the roughness because there's next to stuff that I'm saying, I'm just thinking about so many different things at the same time. So here we go. If I just go ahead and, like, play around with this to basically give these strains a little bit more like an interesting vibe to them. I can do that. Let's see. Also, maybe a cool thing that I wanted to do just so that I can balance it out is we can actually just add a little bit more angling to our stones inside of substance if we want, because we have the mask. So what I can do is I can have this mask over here. I can add a blend, and then all I need to do is just add a flood fill. Actually, I don't even need to do that. I just need to flood fill to gradient. That's color. Flood fill to gradient because as far as I know, we've already done the flood fill before if I can find it. There you go. They are flat filled. So throw that in here, flat fill the random gradients, throw on your angle variation. Just make sure that it's tilable. Yes, it is tilable. And now I'm just going to add a big blur, so high blur, high quality grayscale, just give quite a bit of blurring. Throw this on our blend at a blending mode that is set to multiply, see? And now I can just very easily. And maybe I will only do this here if we grab the mask, maybe I will only do these to the stones. So if I just mask this out, I think I need to blur this. Oh, no, sorry, I think I need to actually blur the mask to blur high quality gray skull on our mask. And this is more for fun. I think at this point, it can't hurt fast just like play around to things, see how they look so here. If I make this a lot stronger, I'm just curious if that will since we are going for slightly slightly stylized, I would say, it might be cool for me to just do this, and then I just need to turn my displacement on and off. Here we go, see. So that does a little bit of extra angling, which might be interesting. I'm going to make it a little bit less strong, so I'm going to go for 0.25, and then we do need to compensate a little bit by just setting our here, we just set our rundown. I set us back to 0.22 to basically push it out because we are multiplying it on top, so we need to balance it back out the stuff that we lost. And while that is loading, I can just as well go in here and start doing some cleanup. So frame Roughness. Wow. Okay. So this is going to be dirt cool. I'm going to split it up like this. So mask creation. Let's grab all of these and just like set them straight. Moss. I will also clean this up even more off camera most likely. Ah, the frame, paste, color, combo. Stone collars. Here we goes a little why it starts look. A bit better. And the frame calls like base color on the score extras. Here we go. Okay, so that will make it look a little bit cleaner. Also, some cool stuff that you can do if you need to, you can click on online, and if you right click and press art a dot Node, it is basically like a guidance note, which will make it handy for you if you want to play stuff a little bit more to the site. I rarely use it. I'm just not used to using it. But I would only use it when I do like studio work. And you can also, select these bits to actually I thought you can. Ah. Oh, no, sorry. There is a way that you can, set the angle, but I forgot. As I said before, I don't use those often. So if I need to set an angle, I literally do it like this. And I would only do this for lights that are very annoying basically. So don't worry. I won't bother you with that. Here you go see so that you can make it look a little bit cleaner if you want to. So yeah, same optimization path, I will do that stuff off camera, most likely, just because we've already went over it quite a few times. It is just me lowering the solid colors and wherever I can, I will also, lower my masks and stuff like that. So it's not going to be anything interesting. So I would say that at this point, yeah, I think at this point that we are pretty much ready to go. Here, you see, so this was the first iteration that we had. Second one, third one. Oh, yeah, that's what I did. But I would say that there is already a very nice difference between these few bits over here. I'm actually going to make my light a little bit bigger, and then I'm going to Oh, wow, I'm way over time. Then I'm going to go ahead and call this chapter done. Go so let's do that. Then there will be a chapter after this, but this chapter is like a bonus chapter. Your texture you can pretty much consider done now. If you want to stick along with the bonus chapter, which is just me making very small tweaks, adding some extra foliage and I will just have an extra look. I will just be narrating over it. But the reason why it's a bonus chapter is because it's a lot less organized because it's just me jumping all over the place and trying stuff out. In the real tutorial, I would only twice stuff out if I'm pretty sure that they will work. In the bonus chapters, I just literally try stuff out for the hell of it, for the fun of it because I like doing that kind of stuff. But anyway, I would say that this one is now pretty much ready to go. Yeah, you have a cool turntable, although the turn table doesn't render with rate racing until you actually render it out in the video. But rendering it out in the video, you can, of course, do this. Simply instead of image, you go to video and it will automatically play your timeline. So I'm going to save my scene. And for the people that I don't see anymore, I hope to see you in the photogram try chapter, which will be our last chapter. And if not, I hope that you enjoyed the tutorial course so far. So let's go ahead and continue with the Bonus chapter, and then we're going to do photogram try. And then you know how to do environment texturing for games. 38. 36 Explaning How To Capture A Material: Welcome to the photogramtry material part of this tutorial course. This material is going to be a little bit different. This is because with this part, we will actually go outdoor and I will show you how to scan two different types of materials. However, because my audio quality would be very bad outdoor, I first want to give you a quick explanation on what we will be doing, and after that, I will show you the footage. I created outdoor and narrate over it. Photochrom tre texts are created by taking many pictures of a surface and then converting those pictures into a tree mesh using a specific program. The program that we will be using is called Reality Capture. I will personally be using a Nikon D 500 for the scanning. This is a DSLR camera. Now, scanning is very forgiving, meaning that you can even scan with a phone if you really want to. But if you want to get proper quality, I do recommend a DSLR camera or any other type of higher end camera. They do not have to be the absolute highest quality of DSLR cameras. Just a basic DSLR camera with a pretty decent lens will get you very far. And speaking of lenses, I will be using a 17 to 70 millimeter lens. All true fixed lenses that only have one focal size, for example, only 70 millimeter do give out a better image quality. Often the quality difference is so little that it will be very hard to notice by the time that we get our texture to game engine. And since I only have zoom lenses, I will have to work with what I got. Now there are a few key points that we want to keep in mind when scanning photogramry textures outdoor. The first one is that we cannot have strong lighting. With this, I basically mean that we do not want to have any shadows on our surface when we are scanning. So in a nutshell, do not scan a surface when there is a sun on it. The reason for this is because those shadows will else show up in our actual texture and they will be very hard to remove. This in turn will give our material incorrect lighting. I personally think that scanning while there is overcast to be best. However, you can also scan when there is just a complete shadow covering the entire surface. For the materials that we are going to scan, we are actually going to use the shadow method because the weather has been bad for weeks and this end up being the best opportunity for me to actually scan. The next thing that I want to talk about is camera settings. This one is a bit tricky because there is a balance you need to try and capture that can change due to many factors like weather, lighting, and gear. So on your camera, there are three points of focus the ISO, the shutter speed, and the aperture. The goal is to get sharp images that have good and plain lighting with as little noise as possible. So let's address the ISO first. Setting your ISO higher will be great if you want to lighten up your images. However, the higher you set your ISO, the more noise it will introduce. This is why I always try to keep my ISO as low as possible. I rarely go above 200, and I often just keep it at 100. Your shutter speed can make your images brighter when the shutter speed is low. However, the lower you go, the steadier your camera needs to be because it takes quite a while for the lens to capture all the light to make your images brighter. This is why when I'm using my camera handhold, which I often do, for example, for brick walls, I try to stay above 150 to 200. But when I use my tripod, I try to set it as low as possible as I can. Again, depending on the factors, how much time I have to wait and how low I actually need to go to get a clear bright image. Finally, we have the aperture. This is a tricky one. The higher the temperature, the sharper your image will be, specifically around the edges of your image that often look blurred. But depending on your lighting situation, the higher you go, the longer that it will take to actually capture because you need to compensate this amperture with your shutter speed. This is because the amperture lets in less light, which means that for the shutter time, it takes in longer to just get in more and more light in order to get the image that you want. Now, this was a very basic explanation of the three. I'm not a professional photographer, so I hope I said everything correctly. I do know, of course, how to actually use it. So personally, I like to keep my temperature around five for handheld, and I try to go higher, sometimes up to ten or even 16 when using a tripod, if I have the time to wait and the area of scanning is not too dark. Now, this is a lot of information, and many people will tell you that you always will need perfect most ideal settings for every situation. But this is not always possible. What I would say is that, yes, it is important to try and get the best settings that you can. But remember that by the time you turn this into a final game texture and it is in engine, some of that quality will be lost anyway. So just keep that into the back of your mind. For example, if that last final percent of quality makes your life insanely hard and it just takes triple or quadruple the time, then from my experience, I find that it often doesn't make too much of a difference. Also, as for the file format, we will always be shooting in raw because this will give us the most control over our image, and it is a general industry standard when it comes to photogramtry, and I believe even photography itself. Now, finally, I want to talk about color balancing. I am using something called a color checker passport. This is a card that is full of colors. The brand that I am using is called XRt. With this passport, it allows us to get the accurate colors on our final images using color balancing tools that we have on our computer. This is because when taking pictures, there are always external factors that get picked up, things like the blue in the sky getting reflected into your lens, which will then be converted onto your image. Using this passport, we can make sure that we have the aqud colors that we need that were also there in real life when we were capturing our surface. Now, I will let you know what settings I will be using in the next chapter when we are scanning our services. And next to this, I will also give you more information like what patterns that you need to follow when scanning, and just in general, I will narrate over everything that I'm doing so that you have a full understanding on how to scan textures. So let's continue to the next chapter, and we will dive in by doing some actual scanning. 39. 37 Scanning Our Materials Outdoor: Okay, so let's get started with recording outside. Now, this is the first time I'm recording outside, so I hope that the video quality is good enough for you. What I'm doing here is I just have this little tape measurer, and I'm just using that to make sure that I'm scanning a large enough area. So it's just basically for me to just see that I'm having a square area that I can then measure out. Now what you see me doing is I am following a specific pattern going up to down. And basically the goal for this is that your images are overlapping by 50%. This is very important. Every image needs to be overlapping by around 50% based upon the last image. And that's basically what I'm doing here. Now, I have sped up this footage, so that's why it feels like I'm going quite quickly. Also, this wall is in shadow. You can see that it is only barely in shadow, but it was good enough for my purposes. I just wasn't very lucky with how the sun was located, and this was my only time I could scan this. So getting near the bottom, I'm just switching to my life view. I will, of course, give you all the settings that I have used in my camera. They will be on my screen here and also the pattern that I'm using with the capturing will also just be displayed on the screen here. So yeah, I'm basically just capturing these images. And now what I'm doing is I'm just taking a few close up images. I often do this because it tends to improve the quality a little bit more when we turn this into a three D mesh. So over here, I'm just basically creating a few more close up images. And then in the end, we end up with I don't know, like 50 to 70 images, maybe 100. I'm not sure. So it is very straightforward on how to scan. Most of the details I've already explained to you in the last chapter, and the rest of the details will be displayed on screen here. So that was about it. Let's now go ahead and continue to our ground material. So now we're going to get started by scanning our actual ground material. So over here, what I just want to show you is a tripod that I have. So for the ground, I have a tripod that can go 90 degrees. These are actually very cheap. You can actually find them on AliExpress, which is a Chinese wholesaler, and there you can find them for 60 or $100. While if you would buy it on Amazon in the US or in Europe, it will quickly go around 150, something like that. So basically, I'm just setting up my tripod and I'm making sure that the legs are not visible. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to use my color passport, which I actually forgot to show you the footage of that in our actual wall scanning, but here you will see me doing it here. I'm just making a quick picture of my color passport to use for later on. And that's basically it. So I'm just taking quick picture, and then that is already done. And now what we can do is now we can go ahead and we can move over to actually measuring out area that we want to capture. So I'm once again using my measuring tape, and I'm just placing two small stones on the corners, and this is just for me to give a little bit of an indication how far I need to scan. So this is all just for me. Now, you want to start by scanning from the bottom to the top. The reason that you want to do this is if you go the other way around, so you go backwards, you will actually see the footprints of your tripod inside of the sand and you don't want that. Now, this sand is very forgiving. So, I can get away with quite a bit because it's quite a hard bunch of sand. So even if you walk over it, it doesn't move too much, so it's quite flexible, I would say. Also another thing that you can see over here is that I'm going a lot slower than with my wall. And this is because, of course, now this time, I have my camera settings a little bit higher, so to get a little bit sharper images. But intern, it does mean that I need to wait longer. And that's what I was talking about in the first chapter that you kind of need to decide if you have the time. So here, I am waiting a little bit longer. Now, I am actually going to after this off camera, do another pass because I felt like I didn't make too many pictures. Like I felt like I didn't make enough. But yeah, the general rule is have a 50% overlap on your pictures, also for the ground. And if you want, you can also create some close ups, although if you have very, very sharp pictures, they are not always needed. And that's it. 40. 38 Color Grading Our Images: Okay, so now that we are done with our scanning, now we can actually start by doing the color grading on our images, which will be the first step towards turning our images into Tweed. So what I've done is in our source files into the image folder, I found that that was a good location. We have a photogramry material. Now, in here, I have the wall material which has all of these raw images of our wall, and I have the ground material over here, which has all the raw images of our ground. So quite a lot of images. It's quite a lot of data. I'll try to supply you guys only like the necessary to keep it down. So what do we have here? We have over here these images that are the color grading images. This one over here actually isn't needed because I did like two of them, to be sure. So we got that one, and we got one in the ground. Now, first things first is that these images, they are that NEF file. However, our color grading program, which I will show you later on, only allows for DNG files. So we need to convert the NEF file to a DNG file. I will be doing that using lightroom. Here I have Lightroom and I have my two images loaded in here. All I need to do is I just need to load them in, don't change anything, just load them in and once you've done that, all you can do is you can select the two. Right click, go to Export and then simply export them. Then we get this over here. First of all, the folder. I have created a folder that's called DNG and Re let's get rid of that. That's an old thing. I have created a folder that's called DNG. And for RS, I need to do is drop down and here, I need to set my file settings to DNG. That's it. Just press Export, and that should now appear in here. There we go. Dot dng dot DNG. That's all we need to do. Perfect. Okay, now for the color grading, I have this plugin. So every color passport that you use often has a plugin, they need to have it because else, how would you get that? You can use this plugin to basically generate profiles, and those are, I forgot IPS. I think it's called IPS profiles that you can use inside of light room or other programs in order to balance out the colors automatically. Now, this is the one that is owned by Xt. So when you go to, for example, you get an X Rt passport, you will get information on this. However, you can always go to Google and just type in X Right color grading software, something like that. So the way that this works is you grab whatever program you use and you simply drag in your DNG file. It will then load in the image, and what it will do is it will automatically detect all the colors. See here, it says load in the image and it only cares about these colors, and it has automatically detected these colors. Once it has detected those, you want to go ahead and press Create Profile. Now what this will do is it will automatically open up in a folder that is often already the folder that you need to place your profiles. This folder that I have, it is called an app data roaming, Adobe Camera ra and camera profiles. So you can take notes if you want of the location. It's in your app data folder. However, I will show you also a way that you can just manually select them. So if you want, you can save it anywhere you want, basically. Now, I already created this profile because I just want to test out. So I just called the Tutorial nscore while the score scan, and then you just basically you name it, and then you press Save. Oh, a DCP profile. That's what it. I don't know how I got IPS. So DCP profile, it's called. So you basically save it, and now it will save. Now, this can actually take a while. This could take up to a minute or two even. So I will pass the video until this is done. Here we go. So it took about 2 minutes. Profile has been created successfully. And yeah, if you have light room or anything that you want to use running, you will most likely need to restart it. Then you can just drag in the next image, which is going to be RSND. It will to detect, and as long as you have a good image, here we go, see, it will just automatically detect this. Create profile, and I will call this tutorial underscore Sand underscore scan. And let's go ahead and save this also. Okay, so we have created our profiles and I have now already went into Lightroom, which I restarted and I've inputted in all of my textures, which you can see over here. These are just the wall ones. Now, what I want to do is the way that I tend to do it, there is an automated way, but I tend to just click on the first one. And then if you go down here, it's a profile, you can go to Browse, and in here, you can find your profiles. So automatically it will have these profiles in here that we have placed. However, you should be able to also go. There was a plus, and here you can import profiles if you have done a different location, for example. But in our case, it's already here. So this is Tutor your while. You just double click on it, and it will slightly change over here the settings. Now, this is very subtle here, see? I know that there is a way that you can turn it on off, but I rarely even use light room to be very honest. So it is very subtle, but the change is there. I think in the ground, it will be much more obvious. So what do you do now? You just basically right click, you go develop settings, and you go copy settings. And once you've done that, just go ahead and press Copy. And then I'm just going to press Contra A to select every single image, hold Contra and deselect that first image, and I'll right click Develop Settings and paste settings. There you go. Give that second, and what it will do is it will basically just paste this on every single one. Here, see. There we go. You can see by the icon. And I'm just always like to double check just to make sure. But now these are all properly color graded. So that stuff is done. Now, the only thing that we need to do is we need to select everything again. And we need to export it. So I'm going to export it. What I will do is I will go into my wall and I will create a folder. So these are walls, create a folder that I'll call color, unco graded. Now, these images you will not get because that would be way too much data. Every image is thirtyMB, so it will just be a lot of data for me to send to you guys. But having this done, we can right click and we can go ahead and we can go to Export, Export. And now I'm just going to copy my location over here, color graded, select folder, and FR, let's see, so that's all fine. DNG, or you can go for original. There isn't really much of a difference, as far as I know, because they both supply camera raw. I'm just going to go for DNG, and FRs yeah, everything is just all default. Like we don't need to do anything because we just need to export this with our settings. I'm going to go ahead and press Export, and it might take quite a while, but it will now export, once we've done that, I will do the exact same thing also to my Sand which I don't really feel like I would need to record. But here, you can see them coming in already. Let's go ahead and continue. In the next chapter, what we'll do is I will show you how to use reality capture in order to turn these images into a TD mesh. 41. 39 Turning Our Pictures Into A 3D Mesh: Okay, so I have now color graded all of my images and exported them, and I did the same for our ground, as you can see over here. So that's all looking fine. So we have done that part. That was probably the boring part. So with our color grading images, we are now going to go to Realty capture. Now, Realty capture is actually owned by Epic games. It's a really powerful tool to basically do photogramry and convert our images into three D. Now, licensing wise, it works a little bit different because the licensing works in terms of credits. Reality Capture, it used to cost like four or $5,000 just to get a license. Nowadays, you just buy credit. So for example, I bought 3,500 credits for around $10, and I know from experience that one of these materials takes 500-1 thousand credits in order to capture it. So we can easily do that. So yeah, you will need to pay a little bit if you want to use Reality Capture. I believe there are free programs out there, but I don't have the experience with them simply. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to select all of my images. And then I'm simply going to drag those in here and give that a second to load in, as you can see over here. So those are now all loaded in. Now, reality capture, another powerful thing is that it's easy. It is so easy to use. Basically what we need to do and your PC will run very slow after you've done that. So I want to already go to File and do a saves. There we go. I just quickly saved it. And now over here, this is basically a tab that we need. We first need to go ahead and press align images, then we need to calculate our model and then we need to colorize it, and then it's done. This process takes long. The align image is quite quickly. It will only take a few minutes, but calculating the model can take depending on the strength of your PC, it can take from a few minutes to a few hours. So I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to press align images. And then what you will see is, you will see this happening. Now, by the magic of editing, we will get back to this when the images are done with aligning. Okay, so reality capture is done by placing my images. So as you can see here, the system is really good with just picking it out themselves and just understanding where every image is located. Now, what you will see here is that you will just have dots. This is just because it's just a preview. If you zoom out, it might look like a mesh, but we are going to create mesh next. Now before we do that, there's a few things that we can also do. Basically, as you can see here, we have this box. I always go for a larger area when scanning, but I don't need as large of an area. So there's a few things that I want to do. First of all, I like to always have the rotation of my box is same. This sometimes happens that it just gives me a bit of an off rotation, but it shouldn't matter too much. And then what you can do is we can already turn this into pretty much like a square. Now, I'm not going to go for a full square. The reason I do not do this is because I do not know how the final mesh will look, and I want to still have space to play around with things, basically. So I'm going to go more something like this. So the really drastic areas, which you can see are just completely going off the map over here, that those are not included. The main reason I do this is because it says polygon count, basically. So it will make my PC run a little bit quicker, but the rest we can do later on. So we got this stuff done. I like to save at every stage because MPC sometimes tends to crash on these type of things. So now that we have saved it and everything is ready to go, yeah, it is. Now what we can do is we can go ahead and calculate the model. Now I would not just press calculate model. I would also always go down here and go for normal quality. The difference between normal and high quality is so minimal that I personally go for normal just because high quality, it are so many polies that MPC just has a really difficult time to even handle it. So I'm going to go for normal quality, and this is just our mesh, by the way. This is not our actual color that we have. The collar is the one that we do need to have at high quality. So this will once again take quite a while. So I will pass the video until this is done. Okay, we are back again. And it only took me around I think it was like 20 minutes, 15 to 20 minutes to fix this. So here is our actual mesh, as you can see. So that's looking pretty good. Nice. Okay, so our mesh is done, and as you can see now we have done those nice little cuts over here. I'm just going to save my scene once again. At this point, that might actually take a while, so I'll just pass the video. Here we go. So my scene is saved, and we are ready to go for our last step, which is going to be the color rice. So what the color rice will do is it will basically add vertex colors to our mesh. Now, because our mesh is so incredibly dense, those vertex colors will just basically result in the actual colors of our mesh. So we go to colo rice and we go to normal quality over here. I'm not sure this doesn't take that long normally, but I'm honestly not sure how long it will take. So I will pass the video once more, and after that, our model is finally done, and then we can continue into exporting it. Okay, here we go. So here is our mesh, as you can see, very nice and high quality and a nice high resolution. You can just zoom in very high before it starts to go a little bit blurry. Let's have a look. I like that, the cracks and everything. And I cannot see any holes. Like this kind of stuff we need to avoid because you can see that here, it starts to struggle just because it's so going deep in there. But for the rest, everything looks totally fine. I don't see any holes here, maybe. Yeah, okay. So here, this one we need to avoid. But now after that, I'm really happy with this, so this looks really good. Okay, awesome. So we got this mesh. I'm just going to go ahead and do one final save. And now we get to the point where you would need to start by paying. So if you go ahead and go over here to Export, you can export your model. The first time you press Export, what it will show you is it will just show you like, Okay, if you don't have any credits for, you don't have any credits, please buy some credit. It's a very straightforward process. But once you've done that, you can go ahead and we have photogram try material over here and Wall in my Export folder, I made this folder for you. I'm just going to call this WAL Underscore capture. Underscore HP. Here we go. And then I'm just going to press Save. Just make sure that it is a PLI. So you press Save. Here see now, it will say, like, Okay, so I'm working. Let me just 1 second. Sorry about that. I just had to log in. So of course, you need to log in in order to get this. So once you have actually logged in, you will get this window. So we have over here, the only thing that I need to check is that export vertex colors is turned on. So you need to make sure that that is on, and that's it. So for the rest, everything else, it's just default. You can just go ahead and press. Okay. And it will start exporting. That's it. We will end up with a nice PLI mesh, which is pretty much the same as like an OBJ or FBX. It just is able to handle really high polygon counts with vertex colors. So what we're going to do in the next chapter is we are going to go ahead and we are going to jump inside of MamsetTolbg where I will show you how we are going to bake down this texture. 42. 40 Baking Our Wall Texture And Balancing Them: Okay, so we're going to get started by baking our mesh inside of Momsatolbg. For this, however, we need a low ply. So with a low poly, I literally mean we need a plane. It doesn't really matter which twin program you use for this. All you need is just like a basic plane. Even scaling it up or down, it doesn't really matter. So I'm just going to have this plane, and the plane will automatically have an unwrap. So I just have this plane, and I will just go ahead and I will export this. And export file, you can go FBX, you can OBJ, it doesn't really matter. I'm just going to go for FBX, and I'm just going to call this plane underscore LP. I can actually use this for every material that I have. I only need to export this once. Okay. Perfect. So let's get started. So here we have Mamaset. Yeah, I didn't went over this. So Momset has a very powerful baking functionality, basically. And that's what we are going to use just because it's very easy. Momoset can actually handle a lot of polygon. So I'm just going to import, first of all, my low polyplne just to see where it is. Here it is. Let's go into my sky, and I'm just going to make my, let's go for, like, a simple color. Just make it like a dark color. This is just all so that I can see everything a little bit better. Okay, perfect. So we have our plane. The next one that we need is we need a high poly. Now, importing this, it might take a while because these would most likely still be around 30 or 40 million polis. Don't know, how much is it? 28 million, 28 million Poli. So it is definitely like a high resolution mesh, as you can see over here. So this is the mesh that we have. It's a little bit tilted, but it doesn't matter. All we need to do later on is just make sure that the plane fits within this space. Now, first of all, I want to actually display my textures of my hypole. The way that I do this is I create a new material, and I'll just call it HB and let's just drag that onto my hypole. Now, luckily, Marmoset actually has a functionality to showcase vertex colors. So if we go ahead and go into the Albedo tab, we can go down to vertex color. Boom, that's it. You can just turn your roughness off to just make it a bit easier. But here you go. Here's your mesh with the vertex colors turned on. Now what we need to do is we need to place our plane. So for our plane, we need to make sure to make our life a lot easier that we place it in the correct location. Now, if I look at this, what might be easy is if I actually grab my wall and I actually try to rotate it a tiny bit so that it is more of like a straight wall. And at this point, we can just go ahead and we can grab our plane. And I'm going to use W and E. I believe that we've already went over this to rotate my plane. Here we go. And I just need to start by let's give it a rough rotation. Rotation can be a little bit sensitive. But yeah, just using the tools here at the top. Okay, so let's go ahead. First of all, let's decide how large we want this to be. Oh, I think I need to move this a little bit forward because this will save you a lot of time. If you do this well now, it will save you a lot of time. I think if we stop over here and over here, that should be best. When you see a rotation is very sensitive. I believe if you try to rotate it a bit further away from the center, that it's a little bit slower. Now, the nice thing is so the plane, the image of the plane will stay square even when we scale it. So what I can do is I can get away with very small bits of scaling, like you can see over here to make sure that everything just, like, fits correctly. So if I have this, I feel like I need to rotate my plane a tiny bit. Like that here. So at this point, it should be fine because the plane is basically covering most of the grout. But then here at the top, it's definitely not fine because it is missing in bits of pieces. And I rather have it that I need to paint out stones than that I need to paint them in because painting them in later on to make them tilable is a little bit more annoying. So I believe this is pretty good. So here you can see that here, the plane pretty much covers everything as far as I can see. Maybe I'll oops. That's a bit too far. Maybe I'll move it out a little bit more. And yeah, just take your time because Wi it all this saves a lot more time just to make sure that this is correct, then doing things later on. Now, the next thing that I want to do is I want to go ahead and I also want to decide like, Okay, whereabouts do I want to tie this? So that is a tricky one because this wall is quite sloppy. Normally, you would want to basically set your plane on an empty space. So it would be like empty, tile, empty tile, empty tile. We cannot do that here because they're just all over the place. So what I'm instead going to do is, I'm just going to take my best guess. And if I take my best guess, I would say that probably around here should be fine because we have something some empty spaces here, here, here, and here at the top, it's like, very close, but I believe that this should most likely be yeah, that should be the best solution. We can always change it later on if needed, but I think I'm quite happy with this. So I have this stuff done. The rotation needs to be the same as our al so that it is very close to our Val. With that, I mean, for example, if I need to rotate it this way, sorry, other way. That it's needed. So then here, just slowly move this back and then you can see that when your rotation is correct. See? There we go. That is what I mean. So that it is very straight along your wall. And now the last thing that you need to do is you simply need to grab your plane, and you need to push it all the way back until you can no longer see it. But you don't want to push it too far back so that you can actually go through the other end because then we will cast proms. Perfect. So our low poly plane is done. Basically, what will happen is that's where our texture will be baked on. Everything that our plane is sitting, everything that is sitting in front of our plane will be baked down into a texture. And that's what we're going to do now. First of all, let's go ahead and very quickly save Arsene. Here we go. So I just quickly saved our scene, and now we're going to start with the baking. The baking is actually very easy. If you go up here, there is this little bread icon, which is the new bake project. Now, when you click on it, this is what you will get. It's pretty much a folder structure. Before we do anything, quickly go to Low and turn off outer bake. So set this to none because else it will try to bake while we are not even done yet with our settings. Once you've done that, you have our low poly plane, drag it under low. You'll have your wall capture high poly drag it onto high. Now it will automatically height, but you can just turn this back on. I love the look of this. That's the thing with photograms looks so cool right away. Anyway, the next thing that we need to do is we need to go to low and we need to basically set our cage. The cage basically means from which point that it will start baking. If I set this higher, as you can see over here, because if I would do this, everything that is not included in the green will simply not bake. So if I push this out, just out like this, there we go. That is a lot better. So now it will just basically bake this piece over here. And that's about it. Now all we need to do is just change some settings. So if we go into our Bake project, we have over here our file type, or I mean, our file location, and we can go ahead and go textures, photo three material wall. And what I like to do is then make a folder that I'll call bakes just to keep everything separate. And I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to call this Well J wall. File type, you can choose your file type. I personally tend to just go for PSD and then press save. Now the next thing, samples. I like to go for 16 samples. It takes a bit longer to bake, but it will make your bakes a little bit more crisp and a little bit higher quality. For s, all of these settings are default. They're fine. All you will need to care about is over here the resolution, which I always bake at four k resolution when it is photogramry. But if your PC is powerful enough, you can even go higher, but it's not really needed. And we have our maps. If you go ahead and press Configure, you can choose which maps you want. So if we have a look at this, I want to have here, let's just turn all these off a normal map, a height map, do I want to, let's do an ambien clusion map. We can also generate our mbenclusion, of course, from our map, but maybe it will give us a better result if we bake it. And we want to have an albido map. Oh, sorry, not albido, a vertex scholar map over here. And then we can go ahead and close this. Now, the first thing that we need to do is we need to go into our height, and we need to go to this little gear icon because the height settings are almost always wong at the first start. What I always tend to do is I always tend to set my inner distance to zero and my outer distance to around three, I believe. You can sort of see this as levels. So remember how in levels, we have those two bottom sliders. This is sort of the same that if you keep these values too low, your height map will not be strong enough and you will barely be able to see it. But I find that these settings often just give me the best result, and then we can tweak it later on. So we have got this stuff. Now, the first thing I'm going to do is I'm just going to turn off my height, and this is because hype map always needs to be baked in 16 bits, like when we go into substance, we need to generate it in 16 bits. But at this point, we can go ahead and save our scene, and then what we need to do is we just need to go ahead and press bake when it's done saving. It's a lot of jom try, so it often takes a second to save. Here we go. And now just go ahead and press bake. Now, the first time baking will take a while because it needs to load in your hi poly. But after that, things should be quite a bit faster. Perfect. So that is now done, as you can see. And now what we need to do is just quickly turn on our height and then set our format to 16 bits and go ahead and press bake once more. And this time, you can see that it goes very quickly. Okay, now I do want to, of course, test it out. I want to make sure that everything is correct. So I'm going to turn off my high pool and I'm going to create a new material that I will just very quickly call test, for example. Now, this material, just drag it onto our low poly, and then we can get started by importing our vertex colors, which is this one. Import our normal, this one. Okay, roughness I probably don't want. Let's go for our ambienclusion, so ambiclusion. This saves me needing to open them up into Photoshop here so that I can, like, see, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's nice. Okay, so we got all that stuff. And then the last one would be our displacement. If we just very quickly go and import that in here, now, I'm just going to preview it. See? Yeah, this looks totally fine because we don't have a lot of geometry, so then I would need to increase it. Another thing that you can do to quickly test it is to simply use parallax, if you go to normals and go to parallax. Parallax is basically like a fake displacement. And if you drag that on here, set the depth center all the way down, you can kind of see that it is working. But of course, parallax is not as high quality because it doesn't use actual geometry. But the goal is that I could see that the height map is reading correctly. So now that I know this, I can just quickly turn back on just like a white material. And what I will do is I will leave this scene like this for you guys so that you can have a look at it yourself. But our baking is now done. So what we're going to do now is we are just going to do some very quick balancing using substance designer, and then we can go ahead and we can start by making the tilable. So here we are once again in substance designer. So I'm going to just make a new graph, and I'm going to call this um will underscore pre balance, the reason I call it pre balance is because this is actually being done so that after this, what we are going to do is we are going to go to substance painter where we'll actually make a tilable. But once that's done, we need to come back to substancesigner, just to out like some final touches. So we got this stuff over here. Let's get rid of all these outputs. Let's get rid of our metallic map and our roughness map. We don't need those yet. Here we go. Those will be in the final balances, and now you just want to go ahead and you want to import all of these resources. Now in the vertex colors, it always adds a new layer. So what you can do is, I believe that you can just go ahead and turn off the vertex color layer and only need the top one. So go at them because one of them is low resolution. I just forgot which one. So go at the press, okay. Here we go. And the only thing I need to check is that our vertex colors is four K because as I said, one of them is lower resolution. But this is perfect. So what are we going to do now? We are just going to do some very quick balancing. The first thing that we want to do is, let's go ahead and let's set our height map to be grayscale over here and let's set our AOMp to be grayscale. Now, in our tmp, I always like to go ahead and art in outer levels, just to make sure that everything is pushed in nicely. Another thing is that you want to make sure that your texture is straight. Now, this looks fairly straight to me, but if you want, you can go ahead and just art like a transform. Yeah, you can, like, tweak it like the tiniest bit. This is the last change that you can, because, of course, right now, nothing is tilable. Yeah, this looks awful, of course, but that's something that we will work on. So that looks pretty straight to me. Yeah, that looks good. So we got that stuff. Now, another thing that I'm always mistaken in is if I just quickly add the transform to this, which direction 180? Oh, no, no. Okay, so we are in the right direction. So I just want to make sure that I don't edit my texture upside down, for example. So now that we have done this transform, we've slightly changed the rotation. We just want to go ahead and we just want to over here, duplicate this transform and add this to all these other pieces, like you can see over here. Okay, great. Also done. Another thing that we need to do is, as you know, as I've been explaining, for our base color, we do not want to have any shadow detail in it. So over here with photogrammetry, it's normal that you always just get quite a bit of shadow detail, and you can see that over here. A way that we can combat this is if we go into our library and we go down here to scan processing, we actually have something that is called AO cancellation. You can do with this is you can plug in your color and then you can plug in your ambien occlusion map. And it will basically just cancel out all of these really strong pieces inside of our ambien clusion. So if I now go ahead and play around with my AO cancellation, I would say I will set it to 0.45. Don't make it too light, but now you can see the difference before and after. So basically just gets rid of all those really dark spots, and that's really nice. Now this looks a lot better. So now that we've done that one, let's see what else do we need to do? So we've done our height. Oh, yeah, let's do a color equalization, color egalize. Wow. Equalizer, I cannot pronounce. A color equalizer can often be nice for also your height map, but also for your base color map. And basically what it does is it will just make your colors a bit more even. So you plug this in and you turn on input tiled like this. And if you press space, you can see that now. See, your colors are a lot more even. So that's basically what it will do. It will make your colors a lot more even. However, I found that this also works quite well for your height map to basically even things out, which will make it easier for us inside of substance painter. So if you plug in our height map, it does not allow it because the height map is gray scale. So we just need to select it and turn it into a gradient map. And I can just press D to docket. Here. So now you can see the difference. Where it is just a little bit more even and it doesn't have that weird. It's almost like a fogginess or like a glow coming onto it. So often this does give me better result, and else we will just go ahead and do another pass on this later on. So we have a height map, our normal map, our column map, and our amoclusion map, ready to go. So we can just go ahead and we can start by plugging these in, and we can start by exporting these to substance painter. So plug all of these in here. Let's save scene, and I'm just going to go ahead and save it into a our sage folder. And we want to go ahead and what the export is also. And now we can just go ahead and we can export these things over here. So I don't know why, but for some reason, I cannot really speak today. But, okay, so we are going to export this, and I'm going to actually export this as a Yeah, TJ file. For some reason, I thought that TJ doesn't support 16 bits, but it does because else wouldn't have used it before. So we can just go ahead and we can export all of this, and that should now arrive in this folder over here that I have in the two painter folder. Okay, perfect. Now, because the next chapter is going to be quite a large chapter, I will go ahead and cut it off here. In the next chapter, we will go ahead and we will go inside of substance painter, and I will show you how to make this texture perfectly tilable. 43. 41 Making Our Wall Texture Tileable In Substance Painter: Okay, so we're getting close to the end of our wall material, at least. Our sad material will be a lot easier. So if here we are inside our substance painter. Now, substance painter, I expect that you know a little bit of the basics, but this stuff is going to be super easy. Like we don't need that much functionality within painter. We can just go to file and New, and this will also feel very similar because we have already done this. We already have used substance Ziner so this will feel very similar. And we want to go ahead and the first thing that you want to do is we want to select a file. Our file is going to be our low poly plane. So if we go to Expots photogram tree material wall and just grab our plain low poly over here. Now the next thing is our document resolution. We are actually going to work at two K resolution because we will later on convert this to four K. We will have our normal map format. I just want to go ahead and set this to OpenGL because we will be working in open GL format. The only difference really between the two is that the green channel is flipped. Lastly, we just want to import our baked maps. Now, I'm actually not going to do those because this import will automatically assign them. And the maps that I want, I want to assign very specifically. So I'm just going to go ahead and press Okay, and then this is what we'll get. Now, first of all, you have this weird split window. What you need to do is you just need to go down here and go to two D only. Here we go. And if you just hold out Middle click, you can just pen around and you can just use your scroll wheel to zoom in. So now we are going to import our textures. If we go to file and import resources, we can drag in the textures that we have just exported from substance designer. We can go ahead and set these to be a texture over here. And then in the input your resources, too, you want to go ahead and press Project PBR metallic roughness. That is the current project. I just haven't saved it yet. That's why it has a generic name. So for example, now that I've done this, if I want, I can now, for example, save my scene, and I can just go ahead and I can go to save photogramt material wall capture, and I will just call this wall underscore painter. I hope that will be clear for you guys that this is this current scene. Okay, perfect. We have our textures here. What I want to do now is I want to just apply my textures to my actual plane. The way that I can do this is we have over here a layer editor. If you do not have any of these windows, you can very simply go up here to window views and here you will find all of your windows. So we want to go ahead and go to our layers. We want to go ahead and delete this layer just by pressing the little bucket or the little bin. And then we want to go ahead and press this little bucket. It's a fill layer. What we can do with a fill layer is we can basically assign a texture. All we need to do for that is we need to go in and you can see your base color. We don't need a roughness, so we can turn off our roughness. We have a height. We can turn off metallic, and we have our norm map over here. Now we're missing one. We're missing our ambien occlusion map. If you go to your texture set settings and you scroll down to channels, you can go ahead and you can press this little plus sign and you can add in ambien clusion. Then if you go back, you can go in here, ambien oclusion and now you have your ambien inclusion node over here. The rest works almost like any other Mom said, for example, you just drag in your base color into your base color, height into height, normal, into normal, and ambienclusion into ambien oclusion. There we go. Now we have our texture that is now mapped on our plane. The next thing that we need to do in order to make a tilable is we need to set our offset over here, if you go here at the top 2.50 sorry. By 0.5. And now we can see our seams. So let's have a look. Yes, we did a pretty good job at placing our plate, as you can see, because the seam is pretty much everywhere on the grayness. Now, over here, if we have a look, so this one is easy to fix. This one is going to be a little bit more interesting. We will need a little bit more space. So yeah, these pieces, we definitely need those are going to be interesting to fix. This one is going to be annoying. The reason why it's annoying is because it just doesn't have enough space, so we need to move some stuff around. Same for these ones, like Hmm. You know what? I might want to actually go ahead and rebake this. I'm not sure. So I know that my bricks over here are already really long. So I think I can get away with it. But then, of course, these ones, yeah, we would have then a lot more space of grout in between them. So it would be more like the grout that you can see over here. And that's going to be the tricky thing in this. So I just want to make a decision. And if I just have a quick look at Mamoset here we go. So this oh, sorry, there we go. So yeah, this is basically the important thing. So now is our chance to still change it. Once we start, it will be a lot more annoying. So right now, I am mostly focusing, I believe, on just getting these pieces around. If I just go to my plane, and I'm just going to go ahead and just press W, I'm going to move my plane forward, and I think I'm just going to do a rebake. I think what I want to do is I think I want to move this a little bit to the side like this so that it is covering mostly like the center of these stones. There's only so much we can do, of course, but I think that this will be the best thing. So if we now go ahead and just push this back, let's push it back a little bit more. There we go. Make sure that our cage is still correct, which it is. So I'm just going to go ahead and I'm just going to very quickly press bake again. So it will just over wide all of our files. That's why it's not that big of a deal to just rebake now. So I will go ahead and bake this. Okay? So the baking is done, and I've just re imported them into substance designer and export them again. Now, I must apologize because I do realize that I could have just double check this in substance designer instead of painter. So I am sorry for that. But as you can see over here, like this stuff, it's a lot more manageable. This brick wall, I did choose quite a difficult brick wall for, like, our first material, but in the end, it will also be a very interesting looking. So now that we've got this, what we can do is we can go ahead and we just need to go in here. We need to press reload on our alts. Now, most time you will need to go ahead and just very quickly restart, or you can go ahead and I believe that you can delete this and then press Undo. I think this was a little trick that we can do. But I'm not sure. Oh, no, wait here, we can just re add this. That was it. So if we re art these pieces. There we go. See? Okay, so these are new important measures. Okay, great. So we got this stuff. Yeah, we can work with this. So I'm not too worried about this one. How are we going to make this tal? Very easy. Double click and let's call this Wal. The way that you want to do this is you want to go ahead and you want to go down here and add a little box, you want to add a paint layer to this. In this paint layer, there is a specific thing that you need to do. You need to go next to the paint layer and you need to set everything to be passed through. And this will basically make sure that we are editing everything at the same time. So in our height, pase colog in our normal pass through, and in our ambien oclusion. You want to set all of these to pass through. You can switch between them here at the top. Now, substance painter has something that is called a Clone tool. I'm sure that you're very familiar with it if you've ever used Photoshop. It is down here next to the what is called Smudge tool. So the Clone tool, the way that it works is we basically just get this brush. What I like to do is, I always like to scroll down to my alpha and set the hard is a little bit higher. And you can scroll up and you set your size a little bit lower. Let's pick a good example. Let's go, for example, over here. The way that you can do this is if you go ahead and press V on your keyboard and click one, you can see that you get this square box. This basically is telling us whereabouts our clone tool will start. So I'm going to add quite a bit of grout to this that I can art this over here. I then just basically click somewhere and I start painting. See? Es does it. So I'm just starting to paint, and like this, I can just paint in an entire brick like this. Now, this is just an example. Of course, you wouldn't want to have two of the exact same bricks next to each other. But the way that this would work is, for example, I go, let's say up here, I press V and I click, let's say, up until this point, and then I go here and I basically just paint this brick in here to make it less noticeable. You can see, there we go. So we just got this brick, and now, yeah, we do need to do something with the grout. And for that, I often just tend to go ahead and grab some grout from over here. And I tried to add that, but sometimes you just need to set your brush eyes a little bit slow, a bit smaller. This one is going to be a little bit tricky, as I said before, just because the grout itself is not going to be the most easiest, but in the end, we should be able to just get something that's quite interesting. So you just see me basically pressing V a lot of times, and I'm just trying to, like, I don't want to do that kind of stuff. I'm just trying to find some grout that is fairly plain, maybe over here. Let's do over here. And let's just try and art this. Now, I'm still not completely happy about that. Let's go ahead and press V, and let's just literally reuse this grout over here. So as you can see here, the reason why I'm not happy with it, if you go ahead and you can scroll down here. So our base color is probably fine. And if you just go ahead and press C, you can swap between the view. So the base color is fine. The height map, it's not looking very good, but we can live with that. I think it's a norm map. No, actually, you know what Oh, it's a normal map plus height map. I see. So basically, we have this map, which what it is doing is it is converting our height map into a norm map and adding that on top of our normal map. Now, I do not I believe that normal mixing replace. I believe that's the one that I can do to fix this, but I'm not 100% sure. So I would say don't worry about it too much because we won't have it exactly like this. We will just export our own normal map. So yeah, I'm not too worried about it. I just need to keep an eye out and just press C while viewing that our height map we can fix, but we'll see how it goes. So that's basically how we can make this stuff tilable. Now we can also, of course, do this with larger pieces. So if we go back into our paint layer, maybe set our size a little bit larger, we have this large piece over here. If I go ahead and, for example, grab, let's say up until see this point over here, and I just go ahead and I can just start by painting all of this in. You can see over here, and be a little bit careful, but once you've got it, here we go. We can just paint in this brick wall and yeah, then over here, we do have some interesting details, but that should be fine. And that's basically it. Now for smaller details, like you can see over here, you would just go ahead and press V and just click around this area and do this. That's a general idea of how to make this stuff tilable. So it is going to be quite easy. And I will just now go through the process, and I will do this in real time, just because this can be quite tricky to do, especially with, as you can see how our height is sometimes behaving, but we'll see how it goes. So here I'm just painting another one like this. There we go. So we got that one. That's fine. Over here. If we can just, find a fairly long one, that's why something like this, we can start start by replacing it over here. And just art that grout, see. There we go. So luckily, because these stones are really sloppy, we can get away with having more grout and everything. Now, over here, this one is a bit interesting because it is exactly on the line, but what I can remember is that over here, we actually have a missing piece type of grout that we might be able to use. So if I do this, and I just like this stuff over here, that might just look totally fine here, see? Yeah, I think we can get away with that. Okay, so this one over here, oh, that one's really close by. I want to go ahead and let's see. What can I grab? Let's grab this one over here. And just start with that. Let's start by painting it around here and just continuing it. There we go. Here, so we'll have one brick over here, and then we just need to go ahead and I'm just going to grab this rout over here in order to kind of paint it in out because I know that my height map will not be as intense and I also later on, I can just polish up my height map in order to fix it that I'm not too worried about it. So I'm just going to paint in some of this height information that we have over here. And then later on we can always improve it later. We can always improve it if it's needed. There we go. Okay, so we got that stuff. You can also hold Shift and right click if you want to just change your lighting in order to not have as strong lighting. So we got that one. Over here, we can actually also just, like, do this. There we go, just to fill that up. So let's see. So we got those ones. Let's first of all, start with this one. This one is very large, so I need to go in and probably try and find something that's just as large. So Let's try this one over here. Let's make our size a little bit larger. Here we go. Let's try this one. And I think I will start around this point over here, and I will just start to, like, paint this in. There we go. See. That looks good. So we got that stuff, and let's give it like that little extra grout line that we have, and now we can use, for example, some other grout like we have over here in order to basically fill this up. And, we can make this quite sloppy. Let's make our brush size a little bit smaller and I can grab some grout over here. I am actually getting really annoyed by the way that non map. I never notice how strong this was. But as far as I know, here, if I turn off my height map, I guess I can do that. I guess I can turn off my t map. And because it is the same paid layer, it should just add the height later on. So we can do a little test if I turn off my ight map now, and I just add a let's say this break over here. If I grab something that's um let's see, maybe this one over here. Let's go ahead and grab this one. Press V. And let's paste it. Think if we start over here, that we should be able to make it. Yeah, there we go. So we are able to make that. So we got this one. I just now want to just double check if I turn on my height and just press C. Okay, see? Yeah. Okay. Perfect. So that still works totally fine. So I don't need to worry about that. So we can just go ahead and we can turn off our height right now to kind of, like, avoid that really strange look that I know that we will not have in the end. I will go ahead and just also map a little bit of grout over here. And for this one, I'm probably going to just go ahead and like, Okay, that might be a bit too dark. Let's go over here. Let's just map this and just grab some of this grout. I would say that you probably have a much easier time. This is definitely one of the more difficult brick walls that I've ever worked with, but you never know that when you actually are scanning. So I'm going to grab probably this one. Let's grab this one over here. And let's just I think I want to give it most of the space around this area. So let's go ahead and just paint this in Here we go. Okay, so that's looking good. So we got this one. Let's just finish painting everything. Perfect. Okay. And then over here, what I can do is I can just go ahead and I can just paint in Oops. Don't go too close to your edges. It works just like the Clone tool inside of Photoshop where if you go too close, it will look strange. But there we go. This doesn't feel stnge because now that we have so much crowd here and there, it will actually feel like it's part of it. It just feels in place. I'm going to go ahead and grab this one. And I'm going to paint this one in nicely over here. Here we go. Something like this. It's painting some of this crowd over here. Okay. And also over here, we kind of need to do the same because it has given us not much options. I'm just going to paint this in. I'm going to make my brush size a bit smaller, and I'm just going to, like, just fix those really small areas over here, just to make sure that everything looks correct. This one is interesting because it is mapped like this that might give us a little bit more trouble because this texture now, the way that we are tiling it, it will only work like this. Like if we go to our map and set this back to one or sorry to zero by zero, here, see? I will break in our tiling. That's just how it works. So we need to go from 0.5 to 0.5. But then for this map, I do need to have a quick think about how I'm going to map that. I think the easiest thing is if I just like, No, wait, I cannot grab one of those things. I'm going to have a think about that. That one is a bit of a tricky one. So let's in the meantime just continue with the top, so we can, first of all, finish that off. So we have one basic stone over here. I'm just going to go ahead and grab um let's grab like this one over here. Make a part size a bit larger. So let's grab this one and place it all the way here at the top. No one will notice that it's the same stone. That's a goal, no one will notice that we are reusing the same stones in order to make everything nice and tlable. So we got those pieces here. Okay, let's have a look at this. This I can paint in. Maybe if I just simply paint this in That we can get away with it here because it will already have an edge like that. I think that actually does the trick just fine. So if I just do the same over here because it is just on the edge, and I think we should not because else it becomes a real pain if I need to fix that and then I would need to have a quick look how we would do that, but I don't think it's needed, and those situations don't happen very often. Be it basically means that we most likely need to change our offset again and then change it back again. So yeah, okay, for the people that what you can do is, for example, if I would then go for 0.3 by 0.3 and in my offset, I would need to look at that specific I would need to try and find that specific brick and then fix it up. But yeah, this is so broken right now if I do it like this. So I think we would then be better off if we actually do that when we reimport our texture. But anyway, I'm talking too much about stuff that doesn't really matter too much. So over here, we have a paint layer. Let's go ahead and let's just fix these really harsh edges that we have over here. I'm just making my brush eyes a little bit smaller. Here we go. This one I can get away with. Over here, I still want to Yeah, play around with it just to make this look a little bit nicer. And, of course, I would say, take your time. Like, I'm doing this fairly quick now, of course, because I'm doing this in real time. But I would say just take your time, relax, and just paint away every little problem that you have. You can see over here, there we go. Okay, so we got those pieces. Is there anything else like holes in my bricks? Because I can remember we had one that we had to avoid, but I don't see it here. So I think we just never actually included that one. So this is looking actually pretty good. So now that we have this piece, now what we can do is we can actually go ahead and we can export it. So this looks pretty much tylb in my eyes, as far as I can see. So I can go ahead and I can save my scene. And the way that we are going to export this is very easy. We are just going to go to file and export textures. Now I will go ahead and I will have another folder that I will call designer. Oh, sorry. To underscore designer. And in this folder because we need to do one last pass inside of substance signer, this is the folder where we will export things. So PBR metallic roughness. If we just go ahead and go to our output templates, the reason I want to have a look at this is I want to go into my PBR metallic roughness because I need to make sure that our height. Okay, so our normal is going for normal direct X. Which is our converted maps. I do not want that. I want to actually go in and I want to grab a nom map. So that should be in here, I believe, here, normal. So what I'm instead going to do is I'm just going to create a new preset. A new preset is basically just an exporting preset that allows us to say which thing we want to do. If we go ahead and just copy this value plus Control C, you can then go to presets and press the little plus sign and, if you just double click on this, you can call this. Photogram underscore export, for example. Now, the output maps that we want is we want to go ahead and we want to go for one, two, three, four RGB As. And then you basically go in here, you paste it, so this is going to be a base color, you paste it again. This one is going to be roughness. Again, this one is going to be normal. Oh, sorry, not roughness. This one will be our height, normal and AO. There we go. Now all we need to do is we just need to go ahead and Ambclusion up here goes into embinoclusion, and just say gray channel. And then we want to go ahead and we want to go for our base color, into our base color, RGBA channels. We want to go ahead for our height. That's going to be this height over here, gray channel, and our normal is going to be our normal over here. RGBA channels. Perfect. So now that we've done that, all we need to do is go to settings. In our open template, just scroll all the way down and you will have photogrammetry Export. The file type you want to go ahead and set this to Targa file and the size you want to set to four K because we are going to export in four K. We can then just go ahead and press Export and then save our settings. And that should totally do the trick. So here we have our files. If I just right click and just properties, four k, that's all totally fine. So what we'll do in the next chapter is we will go inside of substance designer. We will make sure that everything looks correct, and then we'll do some final balancing, and then I will showcase this material inside of Momset. 44. 42 Finalizing Our Wall Material: Okay, so now that we have exported, I just import it into a clean scene inside of substance designer just so that I can have a look. And it is looking really good. There's just one thing, that 1 stone, remember? Yeah, I just don't like it. Ironically, I do not mind this piece, but for some reason here down at the bottom, it is actually looking really bad. So I do want to fix that. But for the rest, here, you can see that everything else, looks perfectly tilable, so that's looking really good. You wouldn't even notice how much work we did on it. So in order to fix this, this is going to be very easy. I'm just going to go ahead and do another part. I basically just do this. I just add a new fill layer over here and just turn off the roughness, metal and metal, revision on the score A. And all I need to do now is just go to File, Import resources, and I just want to go ahead and I want to import the pieces we just exported to designer, and just input them as texture. And go ahead and set this to be the project. And there is a way that you can avoid this at the very beginning that has some fancy tiling stuff where I believe you set the UVs of your texture to be 120% big of your plane. But I personally, yeah, I tend to just do this because it feels like it doesn't take that my checks or time. So I just throw on all of my stuff over here. There we go. I just temporarily turn off my height map. And what I want to do with this one is I simply go ahead and I just change my offset a little bit. Oh, turn off your original wall. Here we go. So I changed my offset and now I can just do whatever I want. Now I'm going to actually change my offset, so that it is still Oh, it's a bit sensitive. Let's try 0.11. Here we go. Because this will actually improve the tiling even more because now we have a large stone down here and a small stone down here. So that might just improve the tiling a little bit more. So having that done, I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to now quickly add another paint layer and just quickly just set everything to pass through. Normal am inclusion, but I'm quite excited to see how this is looking. Here we go. And now all we need to do is in our paint layer we have over here already our clone tool selected. Oh, our clone tool is very small, so let's make this a little bit larger. Okay, what do I want to place there? I'm going to go for I feel like this one might work here, all the way up here. Just go ahead and press V and just click like this, let's just go ahead and paint this. There we go. Any last minute things that we also need to change? I don't think I see any, so that should be fine. Now what we can do is we can just go ahead and save, and we can just reexport this all over the same file. So we can just go ahead and press Export. And there we go. Okay, perfect. So that is done. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to get rid of this one and also just right click and remove my resources over here so that I now drag everything in here and just press Import. Oh, sorry. I forgot that we do need to turn on our height map when exporting this because se D of course wouldn't work. So exportets Exports. There we go. So now we also have our hit Mt turned on. Now, this is input, but because we use the input function another link function, you guys can use the Link function. I just need to remove this and reimport the height. Here if I do this, you can use the Link function if you want, because you already have your file form. But because I need to send this to you guys, I tend to just use the input function because then it will just stay within my resources and I don't risk actntly forgetting it. Okay, perfect. We got this stuff. What are we going to do now? We need to go ahead and we need to generate a roughness map, maybe do some a little bit more color balancing and we'll see how it goes and then everything should be done. So I'm just doing the same things over here. The aminocclusion is already fine. The height map over here, if I just press space, maybe sometimes it's nice to just do one last color equalizer on it. Over here. There we go, just to make sure that everything looks correct or not. Um, Let's see. Oh, turn on input is tiled. Yeah, I think that will work well. So let's go ahead and add this to our height. Then we have our base color over here, and we have our normal. There we go. Okay, so for roughness, the way that we are going to create this is going to be quite easy. It's very similar to our other materials that we've created. We are going to start with a gray scale conversion and we are going to convert our base color into a gray scale. Then we want to go ahead and add the levels on top so that we push everything a lot more into the white over here, see? So just use my white slider and my middle slider to make this all fairly bright, like you can see over here. Once we've done that, I always like to just add a blend, and I like to always just like a generic crunch map in order to make it look a bit more interesting. For example, I can grab crunch map 013. I can add a transform to it and rotate it 90 degrees just to give it some directionality. And I can plug this onto my blend and set this as a subtract. At which point I can just use my opacity to tone this down like this. There we go. So we now have pretty much our final texture over here. The nor map is looking good. Yeah, everything just seems fine. I wonder how the height map will work, but that's what we are going to check out inside of Mamas at Tolbac. So for now, you can go ahead and you can save this, and I will save this as saves photogramt material, wall capture, and I'll call this will un score final. Over here, and I will go ahead and export this for you. And let's also turn on automatic exports when outputs change just in case we are going to play around with our roughness even more. So we can go ahead and save this now. Okay, so let's go ahead and preview this. This is our Z brush material. So if we just do a quick saves, we can just as well save this as our own thing. So saves photogram tree material, and I will just go ahead and call this photogram theoncRnder. And I will also render my ground in here. So I can go ahead and press Save. Now, this over here is atarmic material, but we can pretty much just replace all of these maps, and that should already do the trick. So what do we have? We have an ambiencluson. Oh, wait. I'm going to turn off my rate raising because it's, of course, very slow. There we go. Okay, I'm the inclusion. We have our roughness map over here. We have our normal map. We have our base color map, and finally, we have our height map. Okay, it looks like that our height map is a little bit strong, so let's tone that down. But this is starting to already look quite good. It feels a little bit sharp, and I don't know my roughness. Oh no, my roughness is fine. Let's go ahead and just turn on rate raising so that I can actually have a better look at this. Ah, yes, rate raising definitely softens. This is just because we, of course, made our scene like completely dedicated to this. Let's flip our green channel in the no map because I have a feeling like my channels are inverted. Oh, no, no, they're not. Oh, sorry. I thought for a moment that they were inverted. Now they are inverted. Now you would see the difference if they are actually inverted. Okay, so let's have a look. Everything that we need to change. Now, most of our changes will most likely be just in the render. So we just want to go to a camera one and just tone down like this sharpening because we really boost up our sharpening for cobblestone because they were looking quite soft. So we got this. So that's looking quite good. Let's go ahead and m do I want to make my displacement a little bit stronger? I think I do. Let's go ahead and just turn off our rate racing, set our displacement to be a little bit stronger. Like this over here. And we can go ahead and we can go into our texture. And if we just go ahead and play around a bit with offset, Let's do something like this. Sorry, it's a bit sensitive. Okay, so right now, the tiling is three. What if I set my tiling to two? Oh, come on. To? Mm, that might be a little bit, that might be too much. I think we want to stick with three in our tiling. Let's go ahead and go. Let's turn on rate raising again. Here we go. And let's go into our free camera so that we can have a better look at things. So it is looking quite good. I still feel like my base color feels a little bit lower resolution than I expected it to be compared to when I checked this over here, this feels, okay, as, so don't worry about this because that's just the thing with photogram tree. It just often feels a little bit lower resolution, especially with things like bricks, because, of course, you need to cram in a lot of information in this. So I'm not too worried about it. We are going to use a few tricks in order to hopefully improve our things a little bit to make them a little bit better. But right now, if I look at this, this seems quite right. Yeah. Maybe in our displacement, we actually want to maybe blur our displacement like tiniest bit over here if we just do a blur high quality color in this case, and that often just gives us because a displacement doesn't need to be as sharp, so it will give us a bit of a smoother result. There we go. Now, if we go over here, we have our bitmap. Let's add a very quick sharpen to this. And not too sharp, just like a little bit of sharpening. So maybe 0.5, just to push it out a little bit more so that when we go up close, it does feel like a little bit better, as you can see over here. Let's see, our normal. I feel like our norm map could probably also use a little bit of sharpening. Now, I need to be very careful with this because I don't often sharpen my actual normal map. But in this one of those cases where I just want to try it out, basically. So let's see. I think for the rest, everything seems to be quite right. So it should have outer exported. So if we now go back over here, let's go back into our camera one. Here we go. So that's how it's starting to look a little bit better. Now, another thing is that I'm just going to tweet my render a little bit to make it more towards this material because, of course, our render it's still like the base default. So I'm just going to go ahead. Let's start by going into Light one, and I just want to kind of like, let's see. I just want to see if I can get Light one to be a little bit stronger like this. If we then go into camera one, I just want to see if I can boost up my contrast a little bit here because I think in this material like a bit more contrast and maybe a little bit less exposure will look a little bit more interesting. So let's see. So we got that stuff going on. That is fine. Maybe push up by sharpening a little bit more, not too much because I don't want to make it look fake. Okay. So let's go into our second light so our second light over here. It's really soft, so I'm just going to, like, kind of push this out. And my third light over here, I'm going to do the same. And I just want to basically rotate my sky around. So I feel like that maybe this sky is not as good for this specific scene. So I just want to go into my sky, and I just want to see something like a brick wall. Um, Eli Graffiti. Here, see. That adds like quite a bit more. So I don't know. This one, let's keep it in mind, but I always like to try a few ones, as you might have noticed. Ooh. Alli Narrow. Yeah, I know the lighting is a bit intense, but I kind of like that. It makes it look very interesting. So right now I'm going to go for Alli Nero. Let's just quickly tweeze. No. Japanese apartment, no. CastleGate. No. Mm, City Hall entrance. So everything City Hall entrance or we're going to go for our Ay Narrow. Now I'm going to go for the Ay narrow. I think that one, just gives me a much more interesting look. So I'm just going to go ahead and just rotate my sky around until I get something that I like, something like this, okay? So we got our sky. That's looking quite interesting. Maybe make the top light a little bit brighter. And then in our fork, just tone this down a little bit to make it a little bit darker. Something like this. Okay. Now we have our sunlight over here. I don't know if we want to play around to the brightness. Let's make it maybe only like seven. And finally, if we go into our camera one and just play around to the contrast. So yeah, at this point, I've already went over all of this. I'm just, like, playing around to get, like, the best possible results that I can get. So we got that stuff done. We have a normal base color. Let's post up my ambien occlusion a little bit. Here we go. I think 0.7 looks quite nice. Okay, so the only thing that I now have is that over here, we have those really strong details. These details basically come from our height map over here, but I first of all, want to just do that trick that I've shown you before where we just make a quick render to make sure that everything's still correct. I'm going to set my shadow quality to mega just to get even more quality out of this. And then I'm just going to go ahead and I'm just going to source files, images, photogramry final renders. I will just call this brick underscore wall. And safe. I'm just going to make a very quick render just to make sure how this will actually look in our final renders. Okay, so the final render is in, and as expected, it is looking a lot better in our actual final image. So this is great. So I'm actually quite happy with this. I'm also looking at it, for example, a four case screen now, and it looks so much better. So I wish I could show you exactly what I'm seeing right now on my other screen. But now, it's looking really good. Over here, we have, maybe a little bit of leftovers, which are from our t map, but that kind of stuff yeah, it's crowd. You can kind of get away with it. And if you really want to, you could go inside of substance painter, and you can very simply create a new fill layer and just only have the height on it. And then if you go over here, you can, like, for example, set this height higher. Go down here, art a black mask, and then you can only paint in this height, for example, where you want. Oh, sorry. Yeah, just a brush. You can only paint in this height where you want in order to kind of fill those pieces out. So that would be one way of doing it. I'm doing this very quickly. But like this, you can, of course, make everything feel a little bit more plain. But personally, for this material, I think that is not needed. And for other materials, you often will never even come across this problem. So it's like, yes, there are solutions for it, but do you really need them? That's kind of like the question. Now, for the rest, this is looking really good. And as you can see, yeah, that's the power of photogramry. You can get really good qualities really fast. Now, you might often higher resolution to get those good qualities, and of course, it's a lot less flexible. Like, there isn't much I can do. I made the roughness, which is looking fairly good, but for the rest, there's very little flexibility in what I can actually do with this. But I'm very happy with this. So what we will do in the next chapter is we will start working on our very final material, and that's going to be our sand material. It will follow the same techniques up until the point after baking, because we will only be using substance designer for the sand material because I want to show you a more automated process that doesn't really work for something as complicated as bricks, but it definitely works for something that's as tilable as sand. So let's go ahead and continue with that in our next chapter. 45. 43 Building And Baking Our Sand Material Timelapse: Okay, so welcome to the ground material scanning. So what I did with this material is when I was scanning, off camera, I also scanned, like, a few different ground materials that are in the same area just in case that one went wrong. And I actually end up going with this one because I like this one vastly better. This one, it has, like, some cool tie tricks in it, so just keep that in mind that the material might look slightly different from the ground that we were scanning on. But for rest, everything is super basic. Just align your images, calculate your model at normal, and then go ahead and go to colorize and just colorize your actual material. And this is what we got. So it is looking pretty good. Now, once we've done that, we can just go ahead and we can export this as a hypoly. So same process as always. And now I'm just going to go ahead and have a saves on my bake scene for my wall, and I'm just importing my model and we are just going to bake it just like normal. So it's just the exact same way. We import the hypoly, we reposition our plane. Add on our hipole material over here, and then we just go ahead and press bake. So it is looking really nice. So that's what I'm going to do next. I'm, of course, always double checking. For example, I found that those little sticks that you can see over there. I didn't really like those. So we are actually going to go inside of substance painter and just like polish up the material a little bit before we make a tilable inside of designer and making a tilable inside of designer that is going to be in real time. So it's bone BT lap, so don't worry about that. So over here, I'm just setting my cage to make sure that it is pushed out. At which point I can just save my scene, and we can go ahead and we can, first of all, bake our normal ambien occlusion and vertex color on eight bits, and then we can bake our p map on 16 bits. Now, I'm just going to go ahead and import my low polyplne same thing as that we've done before. Now, this time, we do not need to do any tiling or any offsets because I'm only fixing my material before it has become tilable. So the process is the same. I add a fill layer. I add on my textures, and I add a paint layer on top of that that is set to pass through on every channel. But the only thing that I'm doing now is I'm just cleaning up the current material that we have as she can see over here. And it's just to basically get rid of some arrows that we might have because you never know when scanning, there might sometimes be arrows. And although the system, when we turn this into t twice, it's best in order to fix those arrows. I cannot always do that. So I always like to also double check my material, and over here, see like those sticks. I really didn't like that. There's just some other details that I didn't like. I'm simply just painting those out again using my clone tool, and this one is a lot easier to do than, for example, val. So here you can see me just basically doing. And, yeah, I'm just some pieces that I didn't really like how they looked. I'm just going to get rid of those and just make it look a lot better. And for that, what you see me doing here is even in here, you see me using, like, a zigzag pattern because I'm just double checking to make sure that there isn't anything that I missed or something like that. And that's what you see me doing here. But for us, that is pretty easy, so that's about it. So nothing too special. And once we've done this, you can just go ahead and you can export this. Once again. Remember, export the height map as 16 bits and the rest as eight bits. So the way that I do that is I export everything as TGA, and then I also export everything as a TIF file with 16 bits and then just remove the TIF files for everything except for the height map. And once that is done, we can now go ahead and we can continue to the real time chapter where I will also give a recap on this. 46. 44 Finalizing Our Ground Material: Okay, so before we start, let's have a quick recap of our time laps. So first of all, I went with some different pictures than the ones off the ground than the ones that I have taken in the actual video part. And it's just because with sand, I always like to just take, like, a few different surfaces because they can be very different. And also because sand is very noisy. Sometimes you might mess up with the scanning, like I tend to do sometimes. So I always have, like, a few variations. So we did that. They came out fine, and then we went ahead and we baked everything down just like before. And then one thing that I did differently is I just because we had a few pieces in our sand that weren't really good, like the branches and everything, and there were a few spots that were missing. Although reality capture does often fill in the spots that are missing if there's ever a tiny little hole inside of your scan, for example, it will fill in those details. But I just want to clean up a little bit by hand. I didn't do any tiling on it yet. I just went in to substance painter, and I just basically painted out the stuff that I didn't like. And this is what we end up with. So what we're going to do now is I'm going to show you another technique on how to create these textures and how to make them tilable and this technique, it's a little bit more automated. It's great for when you have more noisy textures. Although with our tire tracks, they might be a little bit tricky, but we'll see how it goes. And it's just a really nice way to just quickly make your textures tilable using substance designer this time. So I'm going to get started and just create a new substance. Let's go ahead and call this sand nscoreFinl. Four K is fine, and just press Okay. Let's close a Trey few. Now, we do not need a metallic map. For all of these inputs, we can just delete them. And now what we want to do is we just want to simply import the from painter stuff. Let's go ahead and input that, and I'll pause the video until it's done. Okay, so here we go. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to turn my height map to gray scale and my ambiclusion map to gray scale. And now I'm going to show you basically two techniques. You have the fast technique and the little bit slower technique. Now, the fast technique is fast, but it isn't always the best one. So let's just go ahead and start with that. So over here we have our bitmap. Now, the first thing I'm going to do is I'm just going to throw on a AO cancellation. By the way, we are in our scan processing in our library. So Ao cancellation. Let's go ahead and throw in our color, and let's go ahead and just throw in our ambien occlusion. Yeah, that's great. See? So that makes it a lot more plain. That's great. That it looks like that. Okay, so we got that one. Now, I don't really think we need a color equalizer. Let's have a look. No, we might need for a height map. Yeah, yeah, for a height map. So we still have specks of green in here. That's good. So, okay, let's get started, and I'll show you with this one, how it works. So in your scan processing for the quick making a tile, you have the smart Auto tile. Now with this one, if you throw this in here and you also need to throw in a norm map and a height map, it kind of needs those things. So over here, what I can do is I can have the equalizer. You know what? Keep your height map as color because the color equalizer needs it. Here, see, so yeah, you can see that it just softens out the colors a little bit, which in this case is great. So that's what I want. So let's plug this into our height map. Now a height map because the height map is normally considered to be grayscale, we need to convert it back into a grayscale conversion again. But let's see. So we have a smart outer tile. Now, if we just double click on this and we press space, you can see that it is tiling. The only thing that is a problem with this is that depending on your texture, it sometimes leads like this quite harsh line over here. You can try and fix that or improve it by just boosting up your smoothness and your blur. It will not actually blur your images. It will just blur the mask around it. And now you can see that it seems to work actually pretty well if I look at it like this. Yeah. Now, the grid resolution basically just dictates because it's displaying on the grid, if we set it's very low here or see. You can see that it doesn't have enough resolution, so it starts to be sharp again. But if we set it high, it is able to do it. But the higher you go, the more resolution gets, which actually causes us sometimes to have a harsher line. I tend to actually leave down here or see. So I try to always find the sweet spot, which seems to be number eight. So that's looking pretty good. Now, another thing is that we are losing quite a bit of our texture. That's just the thing that happens because it basically shings down our texture, and then it does some offset stuff in order to tie it. If you hold console, oh, sorry, not control shift. You can carefully here, see, you can boost it up and you can try to get it to a location that you want to see if you can get a little bit more of your details in here. This stuff I recommend just for very, very basic noisy things like very plain sand or something like that, like beach sand or something like that. I will now show you another technique. So this is this technique. I will not actually use this technique because I have developed a better one. Yeah, developed. I'm sure many people have figured this one out. So instead, what I like to do is I like to go ahead and I like to go for the clone patch tool. Now, I think that the multiclone yeah, I think we should be able to use the multiclone. So let's have a multi clone color. And then basically what this is, it's like a massive patch tool. So all you need to do is you need to plug in whatever your texture. And now I first of all, need to change some settings. So if I just make this a bit larger, if I move this around, you will see here, over here, look at this area. You will see that it will start to move around. So it will try to, like, patch everything around. Now, if we set our shape to a square, that's the first thing that we need. And then another thing that we need is we need to have this shape to be bigger. I do not want to use the scale tool over here. The scale tool does not seem to work. Instead, what I tend to do is I tend to go to my height and set it quite large to like 600% and press apply. Let's see, 600 maybe. It arts on top. So you do not just want to go 700 because then it will apply it by 700. So let's say 200 and press apply. Oh, you see, that's already too much. 100 and press apply. Fine, 150. Apply. There we go. Okay, so now what we get is we get basically just like a stream of texture. Now, the way that this is going to work is we are going to place it somewhere. And then if we scroll down to the target offset over here, you should be able here. So if I go from my X xs, I should be able to move this wherever I want. So if I set this value to one, maybe a bit more 1.5, here. See, you can see that it is now on the edges over here, but it is tiling. So if I press space, it has made it perfectly tilable. Now, we still get this little edge over here, which I don't know. Maybe I do want to do like a color equalizer in between this. I think that helps a bit. But basically, another thing that we can do is we have the same controls here where we can boost up our blur and our smoothness in order to make this, this is pretty much perfectly tilable. I have a very difficult time to see the difference. Of course, we still have tiling over here at the top, but I have a very difficult time to see the difference in tiling down here. So that's basically it. So we can use this to our advantage. Now, I think our tire tracks, they are fine. What you can, of course, do is you can, you can move this around if you want, but, Alexi, let's not move it around. Let's instead, if we just set our target offset, we can have it only just on the edge if we want to in order to blend it better. But I think this seems to be fine. Again, you can also play around with your grid resolution. For example, here, if I set this to eight, it seems to work even better. So that is the multi clone patch. Now, we only have done horizontal, vertical or we've only done vertical. I now need to go ahead and go for horizontal. You would think after 25 years, I would know the difference between the two. So I'm going to go ahead and I'm just going to duplicate this once more. Plug in output one in here. And this time, I'm going to set my height. Set this to 20. And then to 80, 80. Yeah, I just want to make it square again, and then set my width to 800. Here, now I can just move this. S, I want to try and avoid the green. So I'm just going to move this a little bit like this and then go to my target offset and this time, just copy your X target offset, paste it into your Y, and just for the sake of it, I'm just going to set my target offset to zero. Here, see. So now if I press space again, I'm losing that little bit that little patch of green. Not that one, the top one. So basically, now I'm just moving this around, and I just try to find an area where the details are not as specific something like this, here, see. And like that, we have a very tilable. Now, we still like a little bit of details over here. We can take those out if we need to, but I don't think they will be that much of a problem, only when we tile it many, many times, but in a game environment, you would often blend this with other textures. But as you can see, we now have a very nice and tilable material. So because this is a multi clone patch tool, we can go ahead and we can actually use it for multiple pieces. And that's what I was talking about. So although we cannot use it for the norm map because you can see over here there's a setting because norm maps behave a little bit different when we clone them. We can go in here and set the input to I think three, because I think if we just temporarily, yeah, we just like a gradient map, if we just temporarily turn our AO to just like a color map, that's totally fine. Then we can do that. So here three and here three. The nice thing about this is that it will just copy and paste the exact same thing that we did for our base color into all these maps. Just like this. So now we have output one. Here, let's press space. Output two, and output three. Da da. Okay. Now, the only thing that we need to do is we just need to quickly duplicate our multi patch. Let's get rid of the beginning and set the input count back to one and just turn on the is normal. Let's get rid of that. So you just need to wiggle around your slider in order to make it update. So we plug in our normal map, and our normal, by the way, is it I want to go for OpenGL. Right now it's a Direct X. So I'm going to go in and I'm going to type in normal invert over here. C, OpenGL. So it just inverts the green channel for us. Let's press D to dock it. Okay. That's now also working. So that's step number one. So we've done our color equalization. We got this stuff done. If you want to go ahead and get rid of this color because it's too obvious, you can, for example, try a replace color range, for example, plug it in here, set your source color to be this brown stuff, your target color to also be the brown stuff. Yeah, and she said, the source range a bit lower. And then you just kind of, like, wiggle this carefully into the white. But, yeah, you need to make sure that your source color is like this really dark brown stuff. And then yeah, see, because it's very sensitive. But this way, you can, like, play around with things and just make your sent even whiter, if you want. But as I said before, I'm not going to do that. So we got this. Let's see. Do I want to, like, throw on? Maybe like for the fun of it, I'm going to throw on like a sharpened note. I always like to do that, but my photograms at, like, a very low level, just to give it a little bit more of that crisp feeling. So let's set it to 0.07, probably. And let's plug this into our base color. This one is our height. I wonder how it looks because in our height, it is much more obvious to see those lines that we have. So we might need to play around with this, but we can plug in our height, and we can plug in our ambien occlusion because it doesn't always just show up our nom map. And finally, all we need to do is just create a roughness map for which I'm going to go for a greyscale conversion, and I'm going to grab my base color over here. Here, I'm going to add the levels. Sand is dull, so let's make it quite white. Maybe give it a little bit of some blacker or some darker specs. Add another blend to this. Maybe thrown like a nice little noise. Just for the fun of it. I know, clouds two, would clouds to be too generic. If we set this to be subtract, I think that's fine. See, just to add, a little bit more glossiness to it. And actually, if you want, so sand often has these specks. So maybe we want to also add like a blend. And this blend has, like, a white noise over here. And then with the white noise, if you just add the levels and just push out the black slider to add basically less of these specks. Throw this on top and set this to be subtract here. So it's like a low level. I can just give you that little glistering effect that you often see with sand. So that might actually be quite cool to have. So we plug this into our roughness, and there we go. Base color, normal roughness, AO, and our height. And I think in total, making this entire material took me around half an hour. So, of course, let's actually try it out. I'm going to save it. And I'm going to go ahead and textures photogrammetry, sand, sand underscore final is fine. Okay, that takes a long time to save. And right click Export outputs as Bitmap. SAND Let's make a folder called final. Select Folder. Taga. Yeah, that's fine. Automatic exports when outputs change, and let's go ahead and export all of that. Okay, cool. So here we are inside of Mamoset. Now, this is our wall scene. I did just realize that we made our wall scene really intense. So what I will most likely do is I will actually do a save as. I'm going to save this as. Let's see. Where did we So I just need to make sure that Okay, so we plugged it in here. So if we do the same, and I will call this saves photogrammetry, and I will call this photogram try underscore render underscore Sand. And I will just rename this underscore Val. So let's go ahead and press Save. Here we go. And now what we can do is we have over here our L. I'm just going to go ahead and turn off my rate raising to make my life a lot easier, and I'm basically just going to replace all of my al textures with something else with our sand. So I'm just navigating to my final, and here we go. So height. Normal base color, roughness, and amen occlusion. Okay, that's looking pretty good. That's looking pretty good. You might not see it, but that's because we don't have a good sky. So that's the next thing that we probably ought to work on. Tiling of three. Though we may want to go for tiling of two. I don't know, let's stick with tree for now. So the first thing I want to do now is I just want to quickly go to my sky, go to presets and pick something that is more fitting for sand, because this is, of course, very intense. So if we go in here, let's have a look Elli Graffiti. Me. Ei Oh, narrow we already had Highway, no trees to plane. Beach rocky. And the beach rocky could work. Let's keep that one in mind. Cars or courtyard. Also, yeah, I think my roughness is actually too strong now I look at it. So, you know, let's also sometimes just play around with my sky just rotating it around. Mmm. Come on, let's see. Courtyard cobblestone that might actually let's keep that one. I think that's my favorite so far, but I always just want to give it a go to try, like a few more. So let's see So this takes a while, but I do want to keep this in the soil, just because I like playing around with it. I think I'm going to go for that, here, because we do have like some forest scenes over here, or like some more orange scenes. But I think they are often a little bit too intense. So which one did we have? We have, like, the courtyard, cobblestone. Here we go. Okay, so let's go ahead and go for this one. Play a little bit with your sky to get a more interesting look. Now, if I just going to go ahead and go to my light, I'm actually going to make it a little bit more orange like this. And I was going to go to my Camera one. Let's make Camera one a little bit sharper. Let's make my roughness if we go in here. Let's see. Let's turn down or tone down the blend. It's export and Oh, okay, automatic exports is already turned. Okay, I'm going to increase the specks a little bit. So let's go in here and just increase those specks a little bit. Oh. Actually, this is bad because I'm not actually looking in it with rate racing, which makes a massive difference. So if I just turn on rate racing, it should actually make There we go. That's more the quality I was looking for. So I'm talking mostly about the roughness. So the roughness, if you're not using rate racing, you kind of need to make your roughness slightly different because it just gives off, like, a strange shine, something like that. So, okay, if I have a look at this, I'm going to turn off my rate racing and just play around a little bit more with let's see with my displacement. It's not to go too intense. I'm going to go for 0.22. Yeah, 0.22. Okay, so I've done that stuff. Are these two, these two seem exactly the same. I don't know if that's just like a tiling tin thing or if we have two of those that I accidentally placed them in painter, place two of them below each other. I place it below each other in painter. So yeah, if you want, if you want to fix it, you can go ahead and go to your scan processing, and you can also have a single patch over here. So technically, I could go in here, and I could say, like, Okay, I want to have another multi clone patch and just like, plug this in here. And then I would say, like, Okay, I'm going to you'll blur it, smooth it. Just keep it as like a disc. Go to your transformations and just Minus one. -1.3. There we go. See? Yeah, so now the patch is over there. So I'm just very picky with that kind of stuff because I don't like to see the tiling very obviously. So I'm just going to go ahead and set this input count to three. Plug in these three and then hold Shift and just swap around, you can see over here those pieces. And yeah, you can do the same with norm map. Only with norm map, you can just go ahead and turn the input count back to one, turn on is normal and do the exact same thing. There we go. That's just my preference, just that I can now go in here. Here see now that one is reduced. So we are now, if I just turn on rate racing, we are now at the tiling of two. For the sand, it might actually be quite cool if we go for a tiling of two because it will give me a really close up view of this, but I'm not sure. So let's see. So this is tiling of two. Let's now also just go ahead and I said tiling to three. I just took a while. I think I'm going to go for three, but I really, really dislike this stuff over here. That is way too obvious, but I thought that I already removed that, or did I not remove the right one? Maybe there's just one right on the corner. Let's Is it this one? I find this very strange. Let's go into our norm map. Let's see. Whereabouts are you? So, here are the tire tracks. You are sitting at the top of the tire tracks. That is this one, isn't it? I think our noise, we just cannot see it anymore, but it's probably still in our minoclusion. Let's also actually go in now I think of it and have a look at my amin oclusion. Okay, so 0.7 is fine. Okay, so what I'm going to do I will remove this one. That's the last thing that I will do, and then I'm going to make a final render. So this one, if these are tire tracks, I think I'm going to keep this into the tutorial just because we're almost there. It might just be these pieces over here that they are very obvious, although I find it strange to believe that I cannot see them on here. Oh, here they are. See? One, two. So it is this one. It's just very, very difficult to see. So that means that the one that I actually removed will most likely just be the Wong one. So I actually removed like one below here. So if I just go ahead and just replace this because yeah, this one was technically also Wong now I think of it, but we'll see. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to 1 second because it's very difficult for me to, of course, see it. I think I'm going to look at it on my embonoclusion. Yeah. Okay, so keep that in mind. So let's preview it on my ambient inclusion, and let's go ahead and let's set our Y offset to one. Let's see. 1.3, and I'll play around with my X, almost there, almost there. There we go. Okay. And then technical we also still have some tiling here, which I'm very surprised about. I think it has to do with the cloning. I think I accidentally cloned white on that border, but I do not want to change this now. So first of all, let's go ahead and fix this. Don't forget to just reload your displacement. Okay, so now all we need to do is just copy this also to our norm map because of course, I forgot to do that. Here we go. So I'm just replacing this. Okay, so that should also fix our no map, which means that in here, there we go. I like nothing ever happened. And that other one, you can see that other one over here. I am just going to fix it. Now, normally, what you can, of course, do if you're not as lazy as me, you can just quickly go into Substance Painter and just fix it there. But if you are as lazy as me, then just like quick extra note in here. But I wouldn't recommend doing this if you're doing work for a studio because then they often like just having everything looking neat. But your graphs, I mean, they like having your graphs looking neat. But this is one of the few cases where I'm like, not in the mood to make it 100% perfect. Well, it is perfect because here, see, it's gone now. So I'm just taking it like a quick shortcut. So we got this one now also here. So we can just go ahead and we can Oh, whoops, let's go ahead and plug this in and just plug it out again. There we go. Yeah, as I said before, the quick tile is a lot quicker to do it. Now, I would say that what I'm doing now it is a little bit longer than it normally takes just because we had those few little proms, but every material is different. So I've had times where this only took me a minute to get everything perfect. But there we go. So I think our material is pretty much done. If we just go ahead and have one last look, and there we go. So I don't see any visible tiling anymore. Although, yes, we do have this one, but remember, we are tiling a tree. So if I see almost no tiling with a tiling of three on a photogram dream material, that's actually really good. So I think it is time for us to make a final render to see everything in its full glory. Let's go ahead and save our scene first. And let's just go down here and everything should still be on just like normal. So I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to make a nice images, and I'm going to go for tarmac, final render and just call this sand saves render an image and let's have a look. Okay, so the image is done, and let's have a look. So this is what we got right now. It's looking pretty good. Maybe this one is, like, a little bit too obvious, so you can remove it if you want. But for the rest, I will also have a quick inspection on my four k monitor. Yeah, here, this is looking great. So we got a really interesting looking ground. I'm happy that I went for this one, and not for the more plain ground that I scanned because I scanned multiple different types of grounds. Okay, but this is awesome. So our photogram tree materials are now done, so these are the materials that we end up with. They're looking really nice. So that's a very good way to just create some very quick photogram tree materials. Now, photogram tree is a very large subject, and I only scratch the surface of it. I only showed you, like, the basics. I am planning to do a much more in depth course on it later on. But for now, this will keep you going for a while. And depending on which order that you are looking this tutorial course, this will actually be the very end of this tutorial course. So we went over everything. We went over how to create materials in substance designer, both basic and advanced materials. We went over how to create materials using Zbrch which includes sculpting and also with substancesigner. And finally, we went over on how to create photogram try materials and other techniques, including for the first time me going outside and actually filming myself. So that was quite a fun thing for me to do. And I hope that the quality is good. I will try and do this more and improve upon it. Feel free, if you want to leave like a review, to let me know if you actually like to see my face more to make things a little bit more personal rather than just like a face. But I hope that you will enjoy this tutorial course, and we have many more environment tutorial courses at Fast Track tutorials. So I hope to see you next time in our new courses. 47. 45 Bonus Polishing All Our Materials: Okay, welcome to the first bonus chapter of this tutorial course. Now in this bonus chapter, everything that I will be doing we will have already covered. This is just me doing some polishing, adding some extra little bits, just stuff that is time consuming. And yeah, just general stuff like that. So I'm going to start probably by just adding some extra foliage in here. I found that the foliage was working quite nicely, so I just want to create a little bit more of this. You know, sometimes you just rotate this just to make it look a little bit more interesting. So there's nothing too special. And this kind of stuff, yeah, it's also like it's a bit time consuming. But we already have some really nice materials. This is just like to push it a little bit extra, which I always recommend in my tutorials that you take your time and do it. Of course, I cannot always take the time that I want to take because then a tutorial would be double as long and for multiple reasons, yeah, that would not be doable. So instead, I do it this way. I go a little bit quicker, and I use time napsters or I just have polishing chapters where I simply do not explain as much, basically. Oh, now that I think of it, I can also remember that we had a problem with some of the moss growing on top of our foliage. So that's something I just want to keep in mind. For later on, there we go. So we got some foliage there. Didn't we have, like a double one? There we go. Let's grab this double one, and let's just throw these grass bits. Maybe scale them up sometimes or scale them down a bit, just to fit this nicely in here. Okay, so we got some stuff there. I'm going to place like one of these smaller ones here. Maybe another one over here and just, like, rotate it and move it forward a little bit. There we go. So we got, like, some stuff there. It's looking good. I'm going to go for maybe just like a bit more grass in this area. And then I think it's enough. I don't want to overdo it again. I just really liked the look of that foliage. So I just wanted to increase it a little bit. B, if something looks cool, we can just well increase it. Even if that means that it is not like our reference because sometimes we can make stuff look more interesting in our reference for the sake of games. That's why even when, for example, make a post ocalyptic road or something like that, you might still use reference or just clean roads and then build upon it. See, I want to grab or grab. I want to place a little bit of grass here and a little bit of grass over here. And I think a bit more over here maybe. Maybe like one last plant over here and just scale it down a bit. Some grass. Okay, I think that should do the trick. Yeah. Okay. So let's go ahead and hide this and now I can just go ahead and export my foliage at the same location as normal. So we can just over wide it and just rebake it. So we went for exports as an FBX cobblestone foliage. Yes, let's do it. Let's go in here and save this scene, and let's just quickly open up our bake scene. Give a second load. Here we go. And all I need to do now is so this has now reloaded, and you can see that we have all of our foliage in here. So that's all looking good. I'm freezing up. I don't know why. Okay, that was strange. Anyway, I'm just pressing reload on my low poding just to make 100% sure. And now at this point, so we have an Alpha mask, a normal and an albedo. Those are the only ones that really mattered, so I can just go ahead and select those. Yes, sample 16. Don't forget to keep the padding. All of these settings are the same. So all we really need to do is just press over here, bake, and I will now go to substance. Yeah, so we do have these resources over here. Now, you can go ahead and open up your bags if you want inside the Photoshop and then overwrite these resources. But what I tend to do is I tend to just redirg them in and just remove the old ones, just like we have over here. Yeah, like the underscore one, and I just remove, like the normal alpha mask. So I can go ahead and go to textis Sbush material, bags, and just need to wait for Mum set to be done. Okay, so that's done baking. So if we go near, I'm going to drag in, and there is a link resource. The reason I cannot use this is because I'm supplying these source files to you guys, and the link resource basically doesn't input it. It will just link to it in your folder. But of course, you guys do not have the same folder structure as I have, because who knows? If only one person places this different in a drive with a different name like E instead of C or something like that, it would already be broken. So instead, I'm doing this. Oh, hey, that's interesting. That it no longer. Oh, yeah, because I removed the padding also from these pieces. I need to double check the padding that it doesn't cast like black lines. So okay, it looks like it doesn't cast black lines because sometimes the padding is to avoid black lines on this one bitmap, that would have been the only case where it could be going in the wrong direction, but it doesn't. So all I need to do is, here we go input my Alpha map and it's a bit slow because there are four K maps, and those are always a bit slow to input. There we go. We just swap this around. So that's fine. And now we also have our normal, which is over here, and I can just go ahead and input this one. Here we go. And let's just plug this in. Okay, and then we can delete that one. So if I now go to my base color, I just need to double check. Yeah, that's all looking good. Normals. Where did you go? Roughness. Yeah, so that all looks fine. Then what you can do over here is you can go ahead and like the foliage albedo Alpha mask and normal, you can go at a right click and just press remove because they are no longer used this time. I believe there's also I can't remember that. We had a note that basically says, clean up resources. But I forgot that might be in a different location, but I'm not going to go over that because I'm not 100% sure. I just remove them by hand. So we got this stuff done. Let's go ahead and let's actually open up once again, let's save scene and let's open up our cobblestone. Okay, here's our cobblestone. As you can see now we have a lot more foliage going on, which is looking nice. It's looking quite cool. Having this extra foliage, I'm not sure if I feel like my moss is too much now. I know that I've been pushing on getting more and more moss, and now that I have these extra bits of foliage, I feel like I'm changing my mind again because those foliage they cover up some of the dirt. Which, as a result, means that we don't need as much moss to show the green. So I can just go in my height of set and like, tone this moss down a little bit in order to not have it all over the place. And that will have just automatically exported like that s. So now I can once again see in between, and that brings out also the foliage a little bit more. So that's looking quite good. So we got this stuff over here, ready to go. Let's see. What else do I want to do on this one? So if we just go ahead and go to Images, Cobblestone, Okay, see, so this is what we have now. Oh, sorry. Yeah, we got, like, a bunch more foliage going on that's nice. I'm not sure. Are these colors still too strong, or maybe just those. Maybe just those are a little bit too strong still. So if we go in here, and these are these type of colors. So if I go into my gradient map, let's see. The stronger ones are this one. So if I have anything that's around that strength, I just need to get rid of it or at least reduce it. Could it be this one? No. Let's just go ahead and past delete. No, maybe it's in this area, delete, this area. This one is hidden. There we go. I believe it's this one. See? So let's just go ahead and increase that intensity. Now we have another one over here. Which is probably this one, I assume. Yeah, I see. So let's go ahead and just make that one a bit lighter. I believe that's about it. Yeah, here. I think that's about it. I think for the rest, this is all looking quite good. So we got that stuff all ready to go. The sharpness is looking fine. Maybe what I want to do is I just want to go into Momset and I just want to give this here. So the colors are now a bit compensated. In my camera one, I'm just going to give this like the tiniest bit of extra sharpen to 0.1 0.8, I mean. There we go. So a little bit of extra sharpen because when we take our image, we will also again lose some of that sharpness. So that will give me a little bit of extra sharpen, so we got that stuff ready to go. Yeah, maybe I will also go in here and just quickly tweak and a little bit more like these edge damages that we have. Let's set this back to three. There we go. So we just have those edge damages, ready to go also. So we got that stuff. Let's go ahead and just render out an image to make sure that it looks correct. Okay, let's give that a look. So before, after. Before, after. See? So, we got, like, a bit of extra foliage in here. That's looking quite nice. I feel like the sharpness on my norm map. You cannot really see it. Oh, yeah, yeah, okay. You can see it a little bit. So we've done that, and our colors are now a little bit more subtle. So for the rest, that's looking good. So we got that stuff ready to go. We got our roughness over here. Maybe I want to just, like, make my roughness if I can a little bit more interesting because right now, okay, so right now we have this stuff. So let's have a look. So blended. We add some noises. Okay, what I'm going to do is this one, I'm actually going to set this as like a subtract. I think maybe that might make it look a little bit more interesting. So it just looks a little bit darker. Yeah, let's hope that something like that maybe works. Here you see? So we just get, like, a little bit of extra shine here and there. That is looking a bit more interesting. I'm just going to go ahead and maybe, like, tone it down a little bit more. Here we go. Okay, I'm going to save this and I'm going to call my cobblestone done unless I change my mind later on again. But for now, so the cobblestone is ready to go. Also, cool trick. If you want to go ahead and paint out some extra foliage like you think you have too much, what you can also do is you can go into your bitmap. You can add a blend, and then you can add something that is called a bitmap over here, and you can say form new resource, and just call this like foliage underscore, paint out. When you do that and you set your color to be white and press okay, give that a second. So that will now just create a file for you. Now, you can go ahead and just set this to be a greyscale, and you can plug this in here. Basically, if we go to our blend, everything if we set this to multiply, everything that will be black in this bitmap, will basically just be removed. So what I can do is I can click on the Bitmap, and now you get painting tools or yeah, painting tools. If I go ahead and set my colors to be black on this, I can go to my brush and I can just like, right click and set the size and basically, whenever I feel like, Okay, I have too much stuff going on, for example, over here, I can simply paint it out, and once it is painted out, you would go in here, and then it would be removed. I'm not sure exactly where it is. But, for example, over here, I have these two next to each other, and I'm not the biggest fan of those, so I'm just going to find them. I believe it's I believe it's these two next to each other over here. Yeah, that must be it. So let's say I remove one of these and give that a second to upload or to reload the graph because it's quite far away. If I go in here, see? So now that one is removed. And it's very picky, but I just didn't really like that one over there. And now I can just, of course, need to turn off on my displacement. Here we go. And that just quickly gets rid of some of your foliage in case you want. So it's easier to remove than to add. So we got this stuff done. We can go ahead and save. Now there's another thing I want to and that is that I want to move over to my basic tiles over here all the way back to the basics. And I just want to add one thing that has been bugging me from the very beginning, and that is that I want to just add some height difference in between my cracks. And basically just works like this. So if we go ahead and open this one up, so where are we? Environment turing basic material, this one. So if we go ahead and open this up, and in the meantime, I will go to substance. We now already covered how to actually do this. So all we really need to do is we need to go in here, add a blend and then add a flat fill. For the flat fill, we do need something. We need to make sure that all of these pieces are not aligned. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to add a very quick levels in order to make to make this a little bit stronger like this. Here, let's do this. So we are making it quite a bit stronger. We throw this into my flat fill and hopefully, here that reads correctly. And then just do a very simple flat filter gradient and throw in your angle variation. So this is just to give me a little bit of variation in my angles. If I set this to multiply, I can go in here. And when I increase this, I do need to be careful that. I'm not increasing my edges too much because it looks like I am doing that. Let's go ahead and click on our flood filter gradient and then just in our level, see how far we cannot really go that far back without breaking our shape. In that case, there will be other ways that we can do this. For now, let's just actually see how this looks. If we go into Marmoset over here, Look is this outer exporting? It should be. Yeah, it is out exporting. So turn on and off my displacement? Oh, it's not as well, wait, maybe if I turn on rate raising, then it will maybe become quite a bit stronger or quite a bit more evident that there is a difference in height. Yeah, it is there a little bit. It's not very strong. Let's see. If I just increase this a lot just for the hell of it just to see how this works, Yeah, okay, so it is being dded. So if I just quickly turn on and off my displacement map. I see here. So it is starting to come through. I think I just need to make my displacement a little bit stronger. Her see, so it is starting to work. So let's make my displacement a little bit stronger like this. And I would just like to turn on my raid raising again. Here we go. See. So now we just get this effect that some of these cracks, they're basically sticking out. The only thing that I now do not like is that, of course, my cracks have become very large because they went from this stuff to this stuff, and I don't really want that. I think what I can do, actually, you know what this is a bit tricky. How am I going to let's see. What am I doing here? Sloler, Sloler, blend. Can I use this one maybe? Almost. I think I can almost use this one. So if you just do like the direction warps and then do this stuff, here or see, so that should fix it. Now it's not as strong. And also maybe something that I do want to play around with. Let's save my scene before I do this is increasing the amount of pieces. So if I go in my range and just like, add a few more pieces that are broken. Oh, here we also have problem that the cracks are being like, they are just being continued. Remember how I said that I never want to have that. I never cracks be continued. Now, a very easy way for you to actually fix that is that we probably need to do that Mm. Before we artist, I believe. Yeah, I think we need to do this before we artist stuff. So if we have a direction warp, you want to art another direction warp, but for this directional warp, simply go ahead and just input this the flat filter random grayscale, because since direction warps looks at gray scales, if we do this, give it a warp and just set like 50. What it will do is it will basically just split up all of your cracks based upon here or see. Oh, okay, we need to set it higher. It should split up your cracks based upon here on how they look. So now that they have been split up like this, it should give me better results. So if I go in here, here, see, I just get like, oh, that's one. Okay, that's unfortunately that it is continuing like that. Let's go ahead and see if I can just change my warp angle and set it to like 500. I need to set it really high. Okay, now there is no more transitioning, I believe. No. Okay. So let's give this a go. So if we now go ahead and just reload my displacement, here we go. So that will just add those extra bits of quacks and everything going on. The only thing that I have now is that I don't really like the pattern, but that is just a matter of playing around with my warbngle like this until I get something that I find a bit more interesting. Oh, and we are breaking. Oh, of course, we are breaking this. That makes sense that we are. So let's hold shift and plug this in here. Let's see if I plug this in here, will that look very silly? It might look very silly. Or it might not look very silly. Maybe this actually works. Maybe just doing it over here. I was a bit worried, but of course, because we are breaking up a shapes, these pieces would no longer work. So let's give this one more ty if we go to Momset. Okay. So yeah, that works. Yeah, that works. Only thing I would say is that I'm just going to set my displacement. A little bit lower if it allows me to. Here, 0.00 0.008. Let's go for that. So we got that stuff done. That's all looking good. Maybe you can go, play around with your offset if you want, just to get a more favorable angle just for your final renders. I like to probably have a line here in the center like this. There we go. Okay, so we got that stuff done. We can go ahead and turn on our rate raising again, and then we can also call this material pretty much done because I believe that that's about it. Just like a small addition to this. Yeah, for the rest, I want to keep them basic, just for the people that are opening this up, opening up this carve that it is not too overpowering. These bits over here, like we have the stones I don't think that we can do a flood fill and a flood fill to gradient to add some flood field to gradient to add some difference. I don't think it will read like that. If I go in here, add like a levels. Just push these levels all the way up. Actually, that might work. So here we have a where are we going with this? Not that one. I don't care about that one. I only care about this one. So if I plug this in here. Actually, no, I don't want, maybe I can right get away with just plugging it in here. Here, it will just give me a little bit more variation in terms of the stones that are sitting on top. Now, I do feel like they are not strong enough right now, let's set them to 0.025. There we go, see. So it just makes the stones feel a tiny extra bit more interesting over here, just by having some different depth in it. Okay, so those were the smart weeks that I'm going to end up with. I'm going to save my scene. And what I will do now is just have, like, a very quick look in my advanced material render to see if there's anything we want to do there. Okay. So let's have a look because I believe that we pretty much refined this quite well. So I don't think there's much, here. I don't think there's much that I want to do with this just because I refined it quite a lot. Maybe add some color difference on, like, a plain tarmac. That's about it. Just like throw in some blue or something like that. So I'll just quickly open it up. Here we go. So it might just need to load in. So basically what I'm talking about is I literally just want to throw on a grinch map with some blue in it, just because that often gives us, quite a nice result. So here we have our clean tarmac yeah. All I'm going to do is just add a very simple blend. In this blend, I'm going to throw on a uniform color, and this uniform color is just going to be a just like a very strong blue because, of course, we will just use our opacity. And then if we just go into noises and grab like a grunge map 13, change the sat to get something more interesting, tone down our balance a little bit. Let's throw this on here, and we basically just like set it at a very low level. Oh, wow, our graph Oh, no, wait, our graph is only slow the first time because we need to reload the entire thing. So let's go ahead and go in here. Give it a second down here. You can see the rendering for it to load everything into memory. And now that we've done that, we can go ahead and we can say, like, Okay, I want to increase some of this blue probably like this, and I'm just going to go in my crunch map. Let's see. Let's play around with the seed. Here. Let's go for seed number three and then just add a quick transform and set the transform to minus two. Here we go. So we just get little specks of blue sitting in here, maybe make it a little bit stronger in our opacity here. So some blue. Here you see. So now you can see, it's a little bit strong, but the general ideas, let's make a blue like a bit more of like a baby blue color that just gives us a very little, very small bit of discoloration which often just makes everything feel a little bit more digital and a little bit nicer. So we've done that stuff, and I think that's about it. I think for the rest, all of this stuff is totally fine. Yeah, we got some interesting roughness going on. Our stones are actually quite nice and shiny when the light hits them, all that fancy stuff. So I'm also quite happy about that. So I would say that is about it. At the point of recording this, I still need to do my photogram try material. But because the photogram try material is pretty much done after scanning, and after just cleaning it up, there isn't much that you can, like, art on top of that. So let's go ahead and continue in the next bonus chapter, which will be setting up a very quick scene in unreel to display our material. So let's go ahead and do that in the next bonus. O 48. 46 Bonus Creating A Scene For Our Materials: I, like Uh M I I I A B The