Haunted House Project - Substance Designer

    Substance Designer - Wood

    I started texturing my 3D Haunted House environment by making a scratched wood material in Substance Designer first. The reason for that is because I was already quite familiar with making wood in Designer, it's something that I had done last year – however, the reason I decided to start from scratch is because now that I know how to make my base, I wanted to spend some time making it a little bit more detailed. Attention to detail is something that I think I lacked in my previous project. 

    In order to make my scratched wood material, I followed this tutorial on YouTube – Making a worn glazed wood PBR Material in Substance Designer - Tutorial - Full-process series part 7 - YouTube.

    Making the base was quite easy. However, adding the details later on was a little bit more challenging. The YouTube tutorial that I inserted above helped me a great deal, because it broke down every single step and explained everything very clearly to me – for example how to make the knots and the scratches separately and then blend them together in order to create the details. 

    I found this approach a lot more efficient rather than making the base of the wood in Substance Designer and then transferring it to Substance Painter in order to add the details there. This is something that I had done before, only to realise that it doesn't really work very effectively.

    In addition to that, in the end, I pulled out a couple of images from the internet in order to use colour pick (in the Gradient Map) recreate a similar realistic colour, rather than setting up a flat one. 

Channel Packing in Substance Designer

    Once the material was finished, I made sure to channel pack my maps before exporting the outputs as bitmaps and moving onto Unreal Engine in order to make the material ball and connect them. I exported the base colour map, the normal map and the roughness (R), the ambient occlusion (G) and the height (B) maps I channel packed together. 

    

    I had an issue with my roughness map. Basically, after I connected and applied my material to the asset in my scene, I realised that it looks extremely shiny. And how I attempted to fix that was by adding a constant, although this didn't fix my issue. This is a problem that I also had with another one of my textures.. so I ended up asking one of my tutors for help and they helped me resolve this – basically, I ticked sRGB off and changed the sampler to linear colour. 

    The last node, the height, I connected to World Position Offset in Engine. 

Unreal Engine

    Once that was done, I simply dragged and dropped my scratched wood material onto my unwrapped assets. (PS: I tried to make sure as much as I can this time to make my texel density look good so that there wouldn't be any strange stretching or blurred edges.)

 

Result