Final Major Project - Floor Tiles

Making Materials in Substance Designer

    When it comes to creating the bases for tiling materials such as metal, different types of wood, floor panels and such, I've always preferred making them in Substance Designer rather than heading straight to Substance Painter. The reason for that being that Substance Designer gives me a lot of freedom when it comes to creating a base from scratch. 

    In terms of the floor tiles in my scene.. I remembered this very useful tutorial that I had watched for one of my previous projects last year and I decided to apply it once again, only this time make sure to do it better as I had a much better knowledge about how to use Substance Designer. (TIMELAPSE | Substance Designer Tutorial | Marble Tiles - YouTube).

Graph

    I began by creating a Checker 1 node in order to set up the pattern that I wanted - the squares. Then, I connected the Checker to a Tile Generator (in order to create the actual pattern) and the Tile Generator, I connected to an Edge Detect. What the Edge Detect does is detect the contrast in any image that's black and white and create a black and white mask, highlighting the contract. 

    Next, I created an Invert Greyscale node (in order to invert the colours because we want the black to be invisible and the white to be visible), a Histogram Scan and a Levels node in order to regulate the lightness and the darkness of the black and white manually. The created pattern is what I connected to a Base Colour, to which I'm going to add a Gradient in order to adjust the colours, to a Normal, to Roughness and to an Ambient Occlusion. 

Creating Dirt

    I quite like adding small details such as scratches, dust, dirt, etc to my materials because in my opinion, they add so much to the immersion - almost nothing in the real world is spotless, unless it's brand new I suppose.. although the furniture in my environment is very far from that, so. 

    I created the dirt effect by adding a bunch of different both Grunge and Cloud maps, then adjusted their settings in order to make some stand out more than others and capture somewhat of a more realistic feeling. (Adding Grain also works.) In addition to that, I added a couple of Blurs in order to make the spots not stand out too much. 

Result

    What I would like to do next is adjust the Gradient map in order to get the right colours for my environment. In my next entry, I'm going to insert some Beauty Shots of the progression of my level, as well as the result of the floor tiles.