Substance Painter & Designer

Zeus · Jun 10, 2021

Hello all!

I've been using Substance for around a year now and I thought i'd try to get some discussion about h ow other people are using it.

If you havent used either program, they are basically a way of procedurally creating textures. This means that you can modify parts of a texture very easily. Designer you make 2d textures (albedo's, normal maps, specular masks) and in Painter you use it like a 3D photoshop. Substance is pretty much the industry standard texturing tool these days so it's also worthwhile to learn it if you wanna do this beyond TF2.

I'd love for people to share their creations, node graphs, or techniques in this thread! I'm still very much learning how to best use it myself.

Heres a few textures things I've done using Substance Designer:

None of these are my own design; just used it for practice

Zeus · Jun 10, 2021

one technique i've found to get a chipped paint type look is by doing this pipeline:

Nodes:

Result:

Zeus · Jun 10, 2021

A technique for creating a "brush" shape procedurally
Basically we use a clouds or fractal sum noise to multi warp, then add distortion with a slope blur, and make it look "brushed" by warping up vertically up then back down

Nodes:

Result:

Freyja · Sep 5, 2021

I've put together a small package of nodes I've made to shortcut a lot of stuff I did for Oasis and Hades

It's only got 4 nodes at the moment:

TF2 Utils - Brush patches

Allows you to select a greyscale mask of 4 paint patches exported from the TF2 files. Zeus3005's is more comprehensive but I only ever needed a few.
Also includes a uniform scale built in for convenience

TF2 Utils - Brushy Base Colour

Allows you to select 4-5 colours that are blended together in a painterly style that results in a useful "base colour" for tf2 styled textures, rather than using a uniform colour.
Has presets for Red, Blue and Gold paint, but you can make any colours.
Takes an input of an alpha brush to add variation between uses.

TF2 Utils - Paint Wear

Takes an alpha input and applies a paint weather effect to it. Useful for making overlays and signs look like they've been painted, or worn over time.

TF2 Utils - Marble Pattern

idk I've made two theme packs with substance designer now and both of them have needed a marble pattern so I made a generator for it

Download Here

Zeus · Sep 5, 2021

Excellent stuff Freya! I'll def make good use of these items.

I got a small generator similar to that i used to build this brick texture. Planning to release it soon

Zeus · Sep 5, 2021

It would be cool to add a slider to the paint wear generator that could set a "wear level"

Basically subtract just more brush-y looking strokes from the text

Freyja · Sep 5, 2021

Zeus3005 said:
It would be cool to add a slider to the paint wear generator that could set a "wear level"

Basically subtract just more brush-y looking strokes from the text

That's a good idea, I can include that

Pocket · Oct 6, 2021

I have no idea what any of this stuff is, but I like the results and I support anything that means getting more custom assets to play with.

I dinne ken · Oct 6, 2021

You make textures with "code" like Blueprints in UE4, it's pretty cool

radarhead · Oct 7, 2021

Freyja said:
I've put together a small package of nodes I've made to shortcut a lot of stuff I did for Oasis and Hades

Oh, thank you for sharing these! I was trying to get back into using designer last month and was not having much luck making a similar nodes on my own.

I've been using Substance on-and-off for about a year now but it always felt like I was barely scratching the surface- and after the Adobe acquisition, I wasn't sure how much time I should invest in learning. Now, knowing that it's probably gonna remain industry standard for a while now, and thinking about just how convenient having this stuff in my pipeline could be- gotta give it another shot now!

Zeus · Oct 20, 2021

Ive been doing daily challenges for myself on making TF2 style textures inside of substance.

Here is a basic wood plank texture I tried to make.

This one i learned a few cool things

You can use a negative value for intensity for a slope blur. Thats how i got the really good base shape of the planks
Using a multi-dir warp driven by a crystals 2 noise gives the planks their signature warp-y brushed look

I was not able to use my base shape for the planks in a flood fill since flood fill cant seem to handle it when a shape wraps horazontally. Doing so would give me a really good looking plank variety so Im def looking for ways to do that

Zeus · Oct 20, 2021

Here is a texture version of the truss from Mercenary park

this was is pretty straight forward. Build the base shape, and multply AO on top of the color base.

To get the chipped edges i just warp the base shape and invert it on itself and then subtract the middle plate.
Again making use of Freyas Brushy Base and TF brush texture nodes.

this could probably benefit from some more work on the edge chipping. They still are a bit too smooth and flow-y. The techniques in this texture could def be re-used to apply to a model of this type though very easily.

Zeus · Oct 20, 2021

Here is an attempt at making TF style grass.

this one was pretty simple; just build up some roughly grassy looking shapes and use a tile sampler to spread them everywhere.

To give it a bit of a 'brushy' look, i use a combo of quantize greyscale, into a slope blur (to distort the lines where the colors split).

Then its just on to a simple gradient map.

Zeus · Oct 20, 2021

This is an attempt at a cliff wall texture.

I think it could work on it's own, but doesnt match the style of existing ones very well imo.

This was easy to build up the basic shapes. Just make jagged looking rocks by taking gradients off of a base shape, warped a bit.
Plugged into a tile sampler to make them huge and add a ton of variation.

Getting the brushy look is difficult for this. Basically I just tried to add a bunch of random brushy noise to it.

Zeus · Oct 21, 2021

Simple snow texture

Turning down the warp on a "liquid" noise gives a pretty cool alternative to a perlin type noise.

Theres not much else to say on this one. Fluffy and soft with some sprinkles of flakes around

iiboharz · Oct 21, 2021

I just wanna say this thread kicks ass btw and I will definitely be glancing over it whenever I have to go make TF2 stuff in Substance.

Zeus · Oct 21, 2021

iiboharz said:
I just wanna say this thread kicks ass btw and I will definitely be glancing over it whenever I have to go make TF2 stuff in Substance.

Be sure to share it here when ya do! I'm hungry to learn from other people

Skylark · Oct 22, 2021

This is fascinating, such complexity can come from fairly simple rules. Like the wood plank textures not having any wood or plank inputs. I own Substance but I haven't actually played around with it much.

Zeus · Oct 22, 2021

Stumbled on this the other day, this stuff feels like it fits right into TF2

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/8eP0zO

Zeus · Oct 22, 2021

Just like Freya, today I decided to put together a utils pack as well.
Her pack and mine should supplement each other well!

Join the movement! Get the pack here: https://tf2maps.net/downloads/zeus-substance-utils-pack.11928/

If anyone uses this pack please do reach out to me about improvments you'd like to see or new util nodes.

TF Brush Selector

Features 11 different brushes. This is basically the same selection as is in my Brush Alpha Pack

TF Brush Splatter Selector

A lot of textures feature little groups of brushes (usually square shaped).
This is 10 premade splatters.

TF Brush Splatter Generator

Basically the same as above, only this is completely procedural.
This may be somewhat funky and error prone but should allow for a lot of variation

Base "Noises"

01

02

03

04

Warpaint Bases

These all come from the basic warpaint textures valve uses for all painted items to give them their "wear".
These work well as base textures for things tho imo

Edge Mask

Take an input shape (make sure its almost all white) and this outputs a tf2-style edge mask.

You can give it various params to tweak its look like edge width and chip size

Substance Painter & Designer

Not a Krusty Krab

Not a Krusty Krab

Not a Krusty Krab

Not a Krusty Krab

Attachments

Not a Krusty Krab

Half a Lambert is better than one.

Has currently had enough

Basically? Kind of a Huge Mess

Not a Krusty Krab

Attachments

Not a Krusty Krab

Attachments

Not a Krusty Krab

Attachments

Not a Krusty Krab

Attachments

Not a Krusty Krab

Attachments

eternally tired

Not a Krusty Krab

Super Gay Developer

Not a Krusty Krab

Not a Krusty Krab

If this is your first time logging in after the migration (Feb 8, 2022), you must reset your password to log in. Follow this guide if you're having trouble