HOW CAN I CREATE SEA WAVES USING SUBSTANCE DESIGNER?

Maria Taylor, Madrid

Pietro Chiovaro replies

I will show you how to create sea waves using Substance Designer, in particular how to generate the Normal and Height textures needed for your material. This material is really simple, but by applying texture in your 3D software the results you can achieve are amazing. In this render, I have recreated the castle of Hogwarts from Harry Potter, featuring the water material based on the texture that I generated from Substance Designer. So let’s jump into it!

For this type of material, I selected the Physically Based (Metallic/roughness) Graph Template and deleted the Metallic, Base Color and Roughness outputs of the template, since these are not necessary for this substance.

Next we can start to add the nodes useful for this material, so from the Substance Designer library we just need: the BNW Spots 1 noise, a Levels filter, the Height to Normal World Units filter (or the Normal filter, since this has the same function), and lastly the Blur filter.

Before setting up the nodes and proceeding with the links, we need to make the Height in the viewport visible, as this way it will be easier to see what’s going on and have a clear preview while setting up the nodes. To do this, we need to go to the Viewport panel and click on Material>default>edit, and in the right-hand panel, increase the scale of the Material Height; I usually set it to 1.

Now it’s time to link the filters and generators in the following way:

At the start, we have the BNW Spots 1 noise, which we can link to the Blur filter. Next, link it to the Levels filter. Now we just have to link this Levels filter to the Height Output, and the Normal filter (or Height to Normal World Units) and link this element to the Normal Output. As soon as we link this latest element, we will see an initial preview of the sea waves.

At this point, the only thing we need to do before finishing off is to set a few parameters. First of all, we should decrease the intensity of the Normal and Height Output of the noise texture. To do so we have to change the contrast of the texture, just by decreasing the white point of the Levels filter.

Now the only aspect missing is the intensity of the Blur filter, and here you can choose the type of waves you need – in general, with the intensity set to 1, you have a more complex and ‘crispy’ sea wave, while a value of 2 or higher makes the waves softer, like a calm sea.

Finally, you now need to just export the two textures and apply them to your water material.

The use of Normal and Height textures helps to improve the performance, decreasing the calculation time and helping the render engine work faster