procedural materials
complex knit structure 1
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Blender
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Substance Designer
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Substance Sampler
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CLO
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Photoshop
Sometimes photographing or scanning wouldn't capture the character of the material. Sometimes a sample repeat is too large to capture accurately, or certain micro details just don't reveal themselves by scanning alone. In cases like this, its best to go the procedural route. Building a material from the ground up, starting at the large details and creating a series of processes to refine, and then refine some more, until you have created a believable representation computationally is one of those brain teasers I truly enjoy.
One of my favorite programs for material creation is Adobe's Substance Designer. Not only am I able to process scans and graphics in a non-linear fashion, but I am able to fully generate complex knit structures using nodes in a non-destructive manner. It's a lot like Photoshops layers, but taken to the nth degree.
The material above is one such material that had far too many large repeats and random twists and turns to scan with the available scanning hardware, so I had to build it from scratch.
I started by studying the samples that I had available to me. Luckily I had access to a microscope to get me down into the nitty gritty. The material was essentially numerous twists with varying tension to give different sized holes as you scan across the surface.
This is the main workspace in Substance Designer. I always likened it to a guitarist connecting a bunch of effects pedals together to craft their sound. The main workflow is to start big and work your way to tinier and tinier details. You also start with just the height of the material, color and roughness and opacity come later. In the graph above, you can see a series of colored rectangles surrounding a ton of nodes, the largest one is the first thread I worked on, which happened to be the large hexagonal honeycomb pattern in my sample.
I won't go into detail overload, but the screenshot here shows a little bit of the end result of that largest rectangle frame around those nodes, so you can see how you build these things up from tiny little changes here and there until you can start building the pieces of your structure.
From here I switch to some of the other knit patterns, and combine those together using a pattern I generated that mimics the overall blocking of the pattern in the sample. Then there is a lot of tweaking to get the final fabric just right.
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complex jacquard
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one of my favorites
procedural landscape
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Blender
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Substance Designer
The next logical progression after tackling procedural knits was to attempt something a little different. Drawing from the same skills I learned creating complex knits, I decided to make a fully procedural landscape in designer to test my abilities.
Like any good project, this one made my mind overflow with possibilities. My immediate next steps are optimizing the graph so that it responds to exposed parameters quicker, linking the random seed function to numerous parameters to have one button access to quick landscape iterations, and lastly, structure generation and placement.
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