HOW CAN I CREATE A BRICK MATERIAL USING SUBSTANCE DESIGNER?

Jerry Bono, Helsinki

I will show you an easy and powerful way to create a brick 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 Clouds 3 noise, and the Brick Generator pattern (these two are the main elements of the texture of this brick material). We also need the Height to Normal World Units filter (required for the creation of the normal map), two Blur filters, a Blend filter, two Gradient Map filters that will give colour to the substance, a Levels filter and the Warp filter, a key element that will help us to mix the two noise generators.

Next, we have to link all of these elements together. First of all we need to link the Clouds 3 noises with the first Blur filter, and then we can mix it with the Brick Generator using the Warp filter. Now we can duplicate the previous Blur filter, keeping it linked to the Clouds 3 filter, and consequentially we can link this filter to the first Gradient Map. Next we have to link the Warp filter to the second Gradient Map and link these two elements to the Blend filter (blur-gradient to the first input, warp-gradient to the second input and the Warp filter to the third input of the Blend filter). At this point we can link this filter to the Base Color output. Now we can create a new connection between the Warp filter and the Levels filter and link this one to the Roughness and Height output. Last but not least we have to link the Levels filter to Height to Normal World Units, which will be linked to the Normal output.

Concerning the parameters that I used for this material, I created a grey/red gradient and a yellowish/red gradient for the Base Color map of the brick material. In the Height to Normal World Units filter I set these two values: Surface Size 900cm and Height Depth 33cm. About the normal format, since I will use this material in Unreal Engine I selected the Directx format. For the first Blur filter I recommend that you use a value between 2.6 and 2.9, while for the second filter a value between 0.1 and 0.9. The other parameters for the two noise generators can be changed as you prefer, and as always I suggest you experiment with different values to create your material.

The Blur filter let me modulate the imperfections in the shape of the bricks