Importing custom pattern?

[Joseph McMillan 0]

Hello

Is there any way for me to create a custom brick pattern in Gimp and import it to substance designer to be used in the same way as the procedural generated ones?

[justaviking]

Joseph,

You can import bitmaps, but it will only be a "picture," so it is totally different from a procedural material.

You could use "B2M" (bitmap-to-material) or some new features in the latest Substance Designer release that does similar work (I don't remember the details at the moment, sorry).  In short, it can create diffuse, height, and a few other maps based on an existing image.  But it's still not going to be intelligent and adjustable like it would be if you designed a Substance.

A great use for importing images into Designer would be for things like creating custom wallpaper that has a picture of your dog on it, so you use a photo of your dog (cut out, with a transparent background) to be placed into the repeating wallpaper pattern of the Substance you design.



If you want a better answer, please post a picture of the brick you're interested in.  Is there something very special or unique to it?  It's amazing what people can do with Substance Designer.

[Joseph McMillan 0]

What I am trying to do is generate a brick pattern which aligns with these bricks:



I decided modeling each brick onto the wall in blender wouldn't be very efficient, and it would be better to create a texture instead.

[justaviking]

Depending on the scope of the task, it might be most practical to leveral one or two existing brick substances with your modelin Substance Painter.

There's really two patterns:
A - This is jut a basic pattern that goes all the way up to the top of the picture.
B - Then you can "overlay" Pattern B on top of Pattern A (in a replace mode), so you don't need to worry about "cutting" the angles on the Pattern A (see arrow).  Then you just be sure to have your height map on Pattern B has a "low" border so you get the groove between the A-bricks and the B-bricks.

Then the only thing left is your color variations.

That's my 2-cents worth of suggestions.

[Joseph McMillan 0]

Depending on the scope of the task, it might be most practical to leveral one or two existing brick substances with your modelin Substance Painter.

There's really two patterns:
A - This is jut a basic pattern that goes all the way up to the top of the picture.
B - Then you can "overlay" Pattern B on top of Pattern A (in a replace mode), so you don't need to worry about "cutting" the angles on the Pattern A (see arrow).  Then you just be sure to have your height map on Pattern B has a "low" border so you get the groove between the A-bricks and the B-bricks.

Then the only thing left is your color variations.

That's my 2-cents worth of suggestions.

Thanks for the suggestions, I'll need to download substance painter and try to get a handle on it before I put it into practice, hopefully it will come out looking nice.

[Joseph McMillan 0]

What about creating an SVG pattern of the bricks in a program like inkscape, one which could be used the same way as the patterns created by a tile or brick generator? Could that work?

[justaviking]

An SVG?  That could work.

It's easy to dismiss SVGs because they're static and not easily adjustable.  That's a valid reason not to use them.  An invalid reason not to use them is some people might consider them a "cheat."

What you need to weigh is:
- The likelihood of changing the pattern in the future, and how much effort that would require
- The effort required to create the pattern parametrically

[Joseph McMillan 0]

So, here's what I did. In Blender, selecting the vertices on the facade of my mesh and clicking "U" then selecting "project from view". Then in the UV/image editor I clicked the UVs menu and selected "Export UV layout":



Then I edited it in image editing programs like GIMP and MS paint to remove the unneeded lines and make them completely black, resulting in this:



I then attempted to use inkscape to convert it to an SVG, but the no matter what I did SD would always show it as totally transparent. So following advice from another thread on this forum I used this online tool to generate the SVG:

http://image.online-convert.com/convert-to-svg

It converted the image fine, but made the white background transparent. I put it in Substance and used the built-in SVG tools to create a white box around the image, which I moved to the back to serve as the background. I was extremely happy to see that the program seemed to treat it in the same way as a regular generated pattern:



Obviously I'll need to tweak the SVG image a bit to get the exact result I want, but at least now I know it's possible, thanks for all the help and suggestions I got in this thread.

[justaviking]

Looks great.  Thanks for sharing your struggles, triumphs, and the result.

[Joseph McMillan 0]

Looks great.  Thanks for sharing your struggles, triumphs, and the result.

Yeah, felt wrong to have found a solution for it and not let anyone know, hopefully people with similar troubles will stumble across this thread and will be helped-out a bit.

[justaviking]

Hi, it's me again.

For some strange reason, I sometimes find it more fun to work on other people's projects than on my own.  Probably because I don't have to worry about finishing them.   

I continued to be intrigued by the problem you posed, and wondered what I could do with it if I actually sat down with Designer and gave it a whirl.

There are 78 things wrong with my graph, (such as where the angled grout lines meet the horizontal grout lines) but it sort of demonstrates the concept.  Remember I'm not accomplished at this, and  I'm sure I'm doing things in some horribly wrong and inefficient ways, but this was basically just an experiment and I'm mostly just having fun.

I'll attach the .sbs file again, in case you want to explore it (but don't use it as an example of good modeling practices, because it's not).