HOW CAN I CREATE A JADE MATERIAL USING SUBSTANCE DESIGNER?

Pietro Chiovaro replies

This month I will show you an easy and really powerful way to create a jade material using Substance Designer. For this type of substance, I selected the Physically Based (Metallic/ Roughness) Graph Template and deleted the Metallic output since it is not necessary for this material.

At this point, we can start to add the nodes necessary for this material, so from the Substance Designer library we need: the Blue Noise Fast, Clouds

3 and BNW Spots 3 noises (these three are the main elements of the texture of this jade material), the Height to Normal World Units filter, the Blur filter, a Blend filter (a key element that will help us to blend together the noise generators), the Gradient Map filter to give colour to the substance, and a Curve filter which will be used in relation to the Roughness output.

Next we have to link all of these things together. First of all, we need to link the

Blue Noise Fast noise to the Background input of the Blend filter, then we have to link the Clouds 3 noise generator to the Foreground and Opacity of the Blend filter. Now we can link this last filter to the Blur filter, and that will be linked to the Gradient Map. Once you set the colour for the jade (using the Gradient Map), we can link this filter to the Base Color and Height output of the substance.

Now we can focus on the Normal and Roughness maps. First of all, we have to link the BNW Spots 3 noise to the Curve filter and consequentially to the Roughness output. This simple element will help us to add a heterogeneous and realistic roughness to the jade, and thanks to the Curve filter you will be able to change the roughness of the jade as you prefer.

Last but not least we have to link the Blur filter to the Height to Normal World Units filter and link this element to the Normal output of the material. Concerning the parameters of this substance, you can choose the ones you prefer, but I suggest you use a value between 3 and 8 for the Blur Intensity of the filter in order to achieve a realistic effect.

Experiment with new values to create particular materials