HOW CAN I CREATE POLISHED MARBLE MATERIALS USING SUBSTANCE DESIGNER?

Adam Smith, Chicago

Today I will show you how to create a simple but realistic polished marble material using Substance Designer. For this material, I selected the Physically Based (Metallic/roughness) Graph Template and deleted the Metallic and Ambient Occlusion outputs since they are not necessary for this material.

At this point we can start to add the nodes useful for this material, so from the Substance Designer library we need the Clouds 2 noise (the base element of this polished marble material), the Height to Normal World Units filter (or the Normal filter, which has the same function), two Levels filters, and the Gradient Map filter that will give colour to the marble.

Now it’s time to link all of these elements together. All the connections have the Clouds 2 noise as a base, so one of the first connections we need to make is to link the element with the Gradient Map filter, which can then be linked to the Base Color output of the material. After that we need to link the same Clouds 2 noise to the first Levels filter, then connect that filter to the Height to Normal World Units (or Normal) filter, and finally link this element to the Normal output of the substance. We also need to connect the previous Levels filter to the Heights output, before linking that first Levels filter to the second Levels filter, which then connects to the Roughness output.

Once all the connections have been made, we can devote ourselves to setting up the parameters of the components for the material. Starting with the Clouds 2 noise, I set the Scale of the noise to 6 and the Disorder to 0.59, although you can pick whatever value you like as it is only used to randomise the base noise.

After this, for the first Levels filter we set the curve in order to smooth out the texture and minimise the imperfections of it, since it is polished marble and needs to be flat without any particular deformations. For the same reason, we set the second Levels filter to be almost black to give it a clear, reflective surface. Last but not least I set the Gradient Map to green to give our marble material an emerald-like appearance.