Substance Designer 2.1 Tutorials
Starting a Substance / Substance Basics
Subtitles of the Movie (Substance Designer 2.1 / Starting a Substance / Substance Basics)
In this chapter we're going to begin to look at how to Create our own Substances and in this particular video, I don't necessarily want you to follow along with what I'm doing, I just want to kind of demonstrate for you, sort of the big concept of what makes substances go. To begin with I'm going to come over here to our Templates Package, go to our Sample Materials and I'm going to open one that we haven't seen before, which is Fencing. So I'm just going to go ahead and double-click that and what I want to focus on here primarily is the graph and the reason why is because the graph is sort of the heart of what makes substances. And right of the bat this may look very complex to you and very confusing to you and it is complex and confusing for new users, so don't feel as if you're alone in this. However, the bottom line here is that this is actually very simple and very similar to the way that you would create any kind of 2D image in any kind of 2D image editing application. We're reading from left to right in sequential order, so we start with bringing in some sort of base asset and these can be any kind of base asset. So we're basically just starting here with these Red Nodes as you can see as our four base assets and then we've got all these various different Filtering Operations and these would be the same type of Filtering Operations that you would run in any, any kind of 2D image editing application. We've got things like Blur and Sharpen and so on and so forth. And then as we're filtering, we'll come to a point where we say okay, we're done filtering, we've got what we want and now we're going to go ahead and output our final image. And that's what these nodes at the end are, so basically it's Input, Filter, Output. It's really that simple, it's not all that complex, the reason why it appears to be complex is because we're seeing every single step in the process all at once and this can be a little overwhelming at first. But once you get into the flow of it, it's really not that bad at all. So let's go ahead and create our own substance so that you can see how this goes. So I'm going to come over here to File, New, New Substance. I'm going to come over here and I'm going to be working in my Untitled Graph which is what you see here in the Graphs. I want to make sure that my focus is in my Graphs Panel by clicking in the background and then I'm going to use the Spacebar on my keyboard. And what's that going to do is, it's going to bring up a list of commonly used Filter Nodes. These are all the basics of working in Substance Designer. Now if I don't want to use the Spacebar, I could do the same thing by using my right mouse button and clicking and then you see there's a Context Menu Item there for Add Filter and it's the exact same thing. So the Spacebar is just a fast way of accessing that same bit of information. Now what I want to do is, I want to start my substance by bringing in some sort of asset. Now I'm going to come over here to Base Elements and I'm going to choose a Noise, I'm going to choose Black and White Spots, I'm just going to drag that in and drop it like so. And I'm just going to go ahead and zoom in on this so that you can see it. So I don't need my 3D View so I'm just going to go ahead and close this. This is my way of working as my start point, this is the source graphic that I'm going to build everything that I do from here on and I could do a lot of things off, of this. So there's really not that many limitations. For instance, I could come over here and I can say okay, let me go ahead and change this Disorder and you can see right off the bat, that I'm getting a lot of different noise. And this might be the same thing as building up a couple of different levels of noise in a program like Photoshop but this is our starting point. This is the thing that's going to allow us to work from here on out. Now what I do want to point out to you, is that we have an output on this node and that output and I'll just go ahead and scroll over so you can see the node itself, that output is in gray scale. So we are going to have to a need to run a filter that also runs in gray scale. So I'm going to come over here and click on my node just to make sure that I have that selected, click the Spacebar on my keyboard and I'm going to run something like say, Blur on this. So if I double-click on the Blur, you can see that now we have a blurred image and if I come over here, I can change the intensity of that Blur to get precisely the image I want. Now that didn't change the noise, the noise is still there and I could work with that noise in anyway that I wanted to, by changing say the Disorder again. Come back over here and you'll see my Blur is updated, so these are both live at the same time and that's one of the strengths of working with this sort of node arrangement within Substance Designer. I'm going to go ahead and click our Spacebar again and this time I'm going to do something like Gradient Map. You'll notice that something changed here with the Gradient Map. Previously we had a Gray Scale Input and a Gray Scale Output, here we have a Gray Scale Input but we have a Color Output, that's denoted by this orange dot. This is the way that we convert something from gray scale to color. So if I double-click on this, right off the bat, you'll see that nothing's really changed and the reason why is because I need to come over here and I need to Edit that Gradient. So I'm just going to come over here and I'm going to drop in some points and add some color to this thing and it really doesn't matter which colors I add because I'm not trying to create anything all that awesome, I'm just trying to show you the basic fundamental process. So there's our image right? Maybe this is water, who knows, so I'm going to come over here now and I'm going to add an Output Node. So the way that I add an Output Node is I right mouse button click and you can see here that we have Add Output Node as one of our Context Menu Items. And you can see here that we have this sort of half and half dot, it's half orange and half gray. What this means is that our output can accept either color or gray scale, so I'm just going to go ahead and pull this over and drop it like so into our output and there we go. This is our substance and as I say, if I zoom out so that you can see it all, it's Input, Filter, Filter, Output. That's basically the basic fundamental concept of working within Substance Designer, is really not any more complex than that and from a basic fundamental point of view, if you can understand it in that basic step order of input, filtering, output, it's no different than working in a program like Photoshop. So just kind of keep it simple in your brain and we'll focus first on our inputs, then we'll focus on our filtering and then we'll focus on our outputs and that way you can sort of put together the whole idea of what this package can do based on this very simple step by step process of Input, Filtering, Output.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Substance Designer 2.1 |
| Author: | Jason Maranto |
| SKU: | 34327 |
| ISBN: | 978-1-61866-040-4 |
| Release Date: | 2012-04-09 |
| Duration: | 7.5 hrs / 85 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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