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1

Contests Archive - 2017 - MATERIALIZE Contest - Re: Materialize Contest - Wooden tiles on golden sea

 on: November 24, 2017, 06:15:00 am 

Ok, re-reading the judging criteria, I decided to go closer to the reference.


It's made out of a few substance graphs, first the tiles themselves:

With these params:


Another graph for the leaves:



Then the tiles:



And the MDL:




Cheers

2

Contests Archive - 2017 - MATERIALIZE Contest - Materialize Contest - Wooden tiles on golden sea

 on: November 19, 2017, 08:16:46 am 

Hi,

Here is my work in progress. I chose for inspiration this image:


And here is a temporary render (not fully resolved, but it gives an idea of where I want to go):


I have a graph that makes tiles only, with a single "seed" parameter:

Changing the seed produces different tiles...
seed 0:

seed 1:

seed 2:



Then in a separate graph, I tile a bunch of them and create the golden layered sea. Here are the params I've got:


I'm working on the MDL now (fairly simple, just dielectric for the wood and ggx for the metal), but it keeps crashing my machine. (Since I updated my nvidia drivers on my old MacBookPro, Designer crashes frequently on large graphs, but trying to render my MDL simply crashes OSX! Yikes.)

I want to spend time refining stuff (e.g. my scratches on the gold are too subtle, my wood tiles should probably be rougher to contrast more with the gold, etc...) but I want to be able to get a MDL that doesn't crash, so at least I could render something.

Ideas and feedback are welcome - as well as optimization suggestions for someone with a an old machine/graphics card (I've got 384 CUDA cores, that's not a lot is it?)

3

Substance Designer - Discussions - Tile generator to increment user-defined parameter

 on: November 02, 2017, 05:01:28 am 

Hi, newbie here,

I created an sbs graph (let's call it "my_tile"), which takes a user-defined "seed" input to randomize aspects of the tile.

In another graph, I want to use a tile generator (or tile sampler, or splatter, etc) which can take as input the aforementioned sbs graph, and automatically increment the "seed" parameter for each instance. Otherwise, I'd have to instance many of "my_tile", manually set different "seed" values, and plug all those in my tile generator which wouldn't be as elegant as I'd hope.

Anyone knows how to do that?

4

Substance Designer - Technical Support - SBS downloaded from Source crashes Designer

 on: April 15, 2017, 02:14:00 am 

Hi

The sbs bricks_terra_blend_irregular downloaded from the Source crashes Designer.
OSX 10.12.4
Designer 6.0.2
Before crashing, it mentioned incompatible Font Data XML.
Joining a log file.

Cheers

5

Substance Designer - Discussions - Re: First impressions

 on: April 11, 2017, 04:48:23 am 

Thanks for your answers, Eggfruit.

Another question: the blur node has a single uniform parameter for the blur size. Is there a way to plug in a map to get a varying blur size?

6

Substance Designer - Discussions - First impressions

 on: April 10, 2017, 06:36:42 am 

Hi,

I just have been starting to play with Substance Designer just a few days ago (I haven't played with other Allegorithmic products yet), and here are my initial reactions.

First of all, i'm impressed by this tool. Well designed, preset noises and filters are done with taste. Kudos, guys, for this super exciting package.
The workflow, however, seems a little wonky at times. Take for example the resolution problem: you don't know your final resolution, therefore you need to export with "parent". No problem here. But as you work, you need to switch to 1k, 2k, etc., but you still need to revert to parent before exporting? Why isn't there a "preview" resolution?

Another example is with regard to plugging nodes. You can't select one side of a connection and reconnect it to another node. That's a shame because it means that you need to see both output and input at the same time. But if one of the connected nodes is far in your graph, you need to zoom right out. We need to work faster than that.

One surprising thing I've learned from one of the excellent tutorials I've found on Youtube is that you better force the output res of a uniform color node to be 16x16 (because you should waste time on computing the same color for a larger image), then put a subsequent Level node set to Parent. Whaaaat?!? Doesn't the "Uniform Color" know it's uniform, therefore not computing the same color for each pixel? This seems, workflow-wise, cumbersome to do.

Lastly, I've already come up with a reproducible crash, but it seems like the crash reporting isn't working here (OSX). Do you guys post that type of stuff on the forums?

Don't think I'm whining here, if I didn't feel enthusiastic enough, I wouldn't bother writing on this forum. Be assured that my desire to pursue the learning of Designer isn't impacted by the few things that I think could be improved.