Substance Designer 2020 Essential Training

Course details

Substance Designer is a powerful, procedurally based tool for creating textures for 3D art and games. This course was designed to give texture artists a complete overview of the Substance Designer 2020 application. If you're new to the field, this course can help you quickly start creating your own textures. If you're an experienced artist looking to add a new application to your toolbox, this course provides plenty of in-depth material with which to work. Instructor Joel Bradley begins with an overview of the application, discussing key concepts such as how to set preferences, use the Materials menu wisely, and make lighting changes. He then covers essential concepts such as how to import meshes and leverage the array of essential "atomic" nodes in Substance Designer, including the Blend, Curve, Blur, and Gradient nodes. Joel closes out the course by explaining how to get the most out of published substances, including how to export and import packages from Designer.

Concepts

1. Becoming Familiar with the Application

01 - Menus and preference settings
02 - Viewports and how they work
03 - Using the Explorer pane
04 - Navigating and understanding the library
05 - Accessing and changing properties
06 - Making good use of the Scene menu
07 - Using the Materials Menu wisely
08 - Camera and rendering options
09 - How to make environment and lighting changes

2. Substance Graphs and How to Use Them

10 - What are packages and graphs
11 - How to use Atomic Nodes efficiently
12 - Adjusting and working with node connections
13 - Important Quick Access Toolbar functionality

3. Baking Maps to Improve Texture Creation

14 - Discussing mesh preparation prior to import
15 - Importing meshes and maps into designer
16 - Elements, Output, and Values sections of the bake dialogue
17 - Bakers render list and parameters

4. Texturing a Mesh with Atomic Nodes

18 - Color to mask
19 - Color
20 - Blend
21 - Grunge maps
22 - Gradient map
23 - Normal
24 - Base material
25 - Dirt generator
26 - Metal edgeware

5. Building Materials with Atomic Nodes

27 - Tile Generator - Start of new material
28 - Warp
29 - Crop Grayscale
30 - Shape Splatter
31 - Shape Splatter to mask
32 - Ambient Occlusion
33 - Curve
34 - Normal to height HQ
35 - Water level

6. Getting the Most Out of Published Substances

36 - How to expose useful parameters
37 - Organizing exposed parameters for ease of use
38 - Exporting and importing packages from Designer

Conclusion

39 - Next steps

Substance Designer 2020 Essential Training

Authors

Joel Bradley