CREATE BLUEBERRIES PROCEDURALLY IN SUBSTANCE DESIGNER

Learn how to replicate complex natural patterns and shapes to create realistic-looking blueberries

Substance Designer can be overwhelming when it comes to creating fully procedural textures, and we can often be stuck questioning ourselves. Questions such as, how can this pattern be made efficiently, and how do we start? There’s no specific set of steps and no fixed rules to follow when you’re creating in Substance Designer. One thing that’s important is that everything is kept flexible and as simple as possible to reduce overhead and keep things logical.

Organic materials in the real world are naturally formed and can often share similar patterns. These patterns often contain some sort of symmetrical details, vein-like edges and cracks, tessellated and repetitive shapes, and corners or angles with splits at 90 or 120 degrees. Recognising these similar patterns will help us figure out how to recreate these patterns easily. Once we can confidently recreate these patterns, approaching any organic surface becomes much less of a challenge and a more fixed logical set of steps.

This walkthrough will be going over various methodologies and steps to follow that can help you to recognise and create complex shapes and patterns with ease. Not only will we be going over how to create these patterns, but how to easily break up and remap them for controlled variations in our textures.

In order to replicate patterns in a more procedural way, we should become familiar with some of the common patterns seen in real life. Creating a blueberry in Designer can be very similar to creating a starfish, honeycomb, snowflake and other patterns. These patterns are just a varying combination of geometric shapes, lines and fractals, all of which are then duplicated symmetrically to form more complex patterns. Once we can visually break this down, it becomes a much easier task to create challenging shapes that may seem complex but are actually quite simple.

At this point it’s not a bad idea to preview the shape converted to normals: to do this we use the sphere before we flatten it to a mask so it still has gradient shaping. We blend (mode: multiply) it with our projection result and use a height to normals node (adjusting the height as needed). View this with tessellation/height if possible to make sure the shape is formed properly.

11 PUT IT ALL TOGETHER

So now that we have most components of this blueberry done, once we put all these things together we should end up with a pretty solid network and workflow to create a blueberry. But we are not done yet, now is the time to go back through the network and dial things in a bit better as well as duplicate our projection nodes to make different variants of the blueberry.

12 TILE THE BLUEBERRIES WITH VARIATION

Once we have our variations we can start plugging them into a tile generator to give us a more randomised grid of blueberries. This starts to feel a bit more realistic. We will have to add tile generators to all output nodes and make five-by-five blueberries to get a good amount of variation. At this point, it’s a good idea to go over your graph and eliminate any unnecessary nodes, or just add some comments to group things better in order to keep our node graph organised.

13 FINE-TUNE HEIGHT/TESSELLATION

This helps if we add a bit of variation in the height/ displacement for each of the berries so they don’t all appear the same size. For even more realism adding slight distortions on each berry can help, and this can be done with a warp and a noise using the sphere normal as our position input for the noise. This can emulate small surface imperfections and overall randomised shaping.

15 PUT THIS TEXTURE TO USE

Once we have the maps exported it's just a matter of bringing them into Unreal or Maya with your choice of renderer. Connecting the maps into a material and of course setting up the displacement is fairly easy since most of it was fine-tuned inside Substance Designer, so there's not much if any lookdev or additional shading work that needs to be done. This can also be applied to a stack of rotated cards or a stacked shape to emulate a basket or a pile of blueberries.

14 EXPORT MAPS

Finally, to export everything out we should ideally export our blueberries at the highest resolution we can, then afterwards scale it down to the desired resolution and save out to the file format we need. Usually this ends up giving us the best results with the sharpest details, even though it will end up taking a bit longer to export or generate.

16 THE RESULTS

Of course games will have more limitations and it would be advised to use lower texture resolutions inside any real-time renderers. But if we do export high-resolution textures with displacement/height maps and set it up inside of a ray-traced renderer, the result is quite impressive. Substance Designer can produce some amazing and flexible textures for both games and film. •