Substance Designer 2.1 Tutorials
Starting a Substance / Bitmap Node
Subtitles of the Movie (Substance Designer 2.1 / Starting a Substance / Bitmap Node)
So in this video, we're going to continue on where we left off and we're going to begin to look at Bitmap Nodes. Now just like before if we go ahead and click here with our Spacebar, you'll see that we have Bitmap and we can choose From File. Now this suffers from the same problem as importing an SVG from file, in the sense that it brings up extra nodes that we don't necessarily want. So we're going to go ahead and bypass that method at first and we're going to come over here instead to our Resources Folder, Context Click and we're going to say that we're going to Import Resources. Now we could choose to Link Resources and basically what that means is, that the resource, instead of being imported and contained within our substance, it would actually be someplace outside of that. My preference is to always import, however if you have resources that you want to change out for whatever reason, then you can choose to link instead. So I'm going to say Import and I'm going to bring in our Grunge Opacity Mask and our Painted Background, I just held down the Control Button and clicked both of those and then I'm going to say OK. Now if we come down here, you'll see that both of these are now within our Resources Folder. Now what I want to do here is I want to just go ahead and drag these on to our graph just like before and you can see that it automatically gets a Bitmap Node. Now what's important here is if we double-click on these images here, you'll see that we're actually working with the Bitmap Quality of 0 and a Bitmap Format of Raw. Which basically means that if this comes in and right now it's a 1024 by 1024 RGB image in PNG format that this will not be changed, it will maintain it's full quality no matter what we do. However if we come over here and we change this to JPEG, then what'll happen is, then this will be changed by Substance Designer to be a much more efficient storage format in the form of a JPEG image. And then we can control the quality of that JPEG, so we can just come over here and we could just move the slider and it will change the quality of that JPEG. Now what's important to note is that, let's say that we now have a Bitmap Quality of 81 percent in JPEG Format of that particular asset. If we come over here in our Bitmap, you'll see that it's 256 pixels by 256 pixels because this is getting it's output size from Relative to Parent. Whenever we're working within Substance Designer, the Default Size is 256 pixels by 256 pixels because that's our Default Relative to Parent Size. So this image has been resized from it's 1024 by 1024 to 256 by 256 and it's made into a JPEG because we came in here, double-clicked on the actual image itself, set it for the Bitmap Format of JPEG and set the Quality Level to whatever we want it to be. So this is a very efficient way of working with Bitmaps and like I said, I prefer to do this, just to go ahead and import those resources and bring them in. Now you'll notice here that our Color Mode is set for true and because the Color Mode is set for true here, we're getting a color output. If we want a gray scale output we just say false and that will automatically give us a gray scale output for that image. So we could do the same thing for this image, so I'll just go ahead and bring this one in like so, drop it in here, like so and then double-click on that. And you'll see that it is 256 pixels by 256 pixels but if we double-click on that image, you'll see that we're keeping it at the raw data. We're not JPEG compressing it so our Quality Slider has no impact whatsoever at this point. If we wanted to make this more efficient for working within Substance Designer, then just go ahead and change it to JPEG and then just put in something like say .8 which would be 80 percent. And that would then give us a more efficient way of storing that within our Substance Package. Now again, if we don't want this to be a color output, we can say false and it will automatically convert that to it's gray scale values and give us a gray scale output. I'm going to go ahead and leave that one this color, this one it doesn't make any sense to have a color output because it is a gray scale image after all so we can set that Color Mode to false. Now what I want to do here is I want to mix and match a little so I'm going to come over here, I'm going to go ahead and Context Click on him and say Delete Selection. And then I'm going to bring this one in like so and I'm going to put this right behind as my background in my SVG. So now you can see my SVG has this Bitmap as it's background, we could also do the same thing, if I just come over here, Context Click and say Delete Selection. Drag this Bitmap over and remember that our SVG can take either a gray scale or a color input so here I'm going to put in that gray scale input, double-click and you can see there's our SVG on top of our Bitmap. So you can see by combining our Bitmaps along with our SVG images we can generate some fairly complex stuff, really quickly. Now of course the disadvantage of working with something like a Bitmap is that it's fixed, meaning that this doesn't change dynamically. We can do something within Substance Designer that looks an awful lot like this by using some Procedural Textures and mixing and matching those together to create various different noises. And if you remember, if we come up here to our Base Elements we do have some noises and what not that we can start with right here. So if I just go ahead and click on this, you can see there's the Gallery View of all the various different noises and a lot of these look like this, however they're going to be a lot more flexible. So only use a Bitmap when it absolutely suits your needs because generally speaking as far as Substance Designer is concerned, you're going to be better off working with the various different noises. And we'll go ahead and look at the basic fundamental building block of those noises in the next video.
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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