Create ornate tiles in Substance Designer

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Substance Designer is a great 3D tool for creating realistic tiled floors, as the huge array of noises, patterns and generators available give you lots of creative freedom. 

However, Substance Designer is a program that plays well with others, as height, mask and other texture maps can be easily imported and used to springboard your texturing process, especially if you have something specific in mind.

• Download the files for this tutorial

Over the course of this tutorial, we will show you how to combine mask textures created outside of Substance Designer to generate a modifiable ornate tiled floor. We will show you how to create a striking albedo map, believable tile damage, and how to realistically age your texture through the use of subtle surface details and blends. 

We'll also cover some tips and tricks to help you generate masks and interesting details that will aid you in creating believable, high-quality materials. For a deeper look into the texturing process, head over to my Gumroad page.

01. Gather material references

Find some reference images of your chosen material (Click the image to make it full-screen)

Before creating any Substance material, gather a body of high-resolution reference images of your chosen material, preferably in different lighting conditions. 

For this tiled material, looking on Shutterstock, Google images and Flickr uncovered 10 images that show close and medium distance detail. It can help to create a mood board to refer to, perhaps on a second monitor.

02. Create the input patterns

Create tile patterns in Hexels, then clean them up in Photoshop (Click the image to make it full-screen)

To generate the various tile patterns, use Hexels then clean up in Photoshop. Create three different patterns, each made of solid blocks of colour defining each tile in the texture. It's important to ensure that no two adjacent tiles have the exact same colour, or the Edge Detect node in Substance will merge them together, giving oddly shaped tiles. 

Import the patterns into Substance Designer, where you can swap and replace them with others, which is part of what makes the program so powerful.

03. Combine the input patterns

Combine your inputs to create a new tile pattern (Click the image to make it full-screen)

Combine the patterns using Safe Transform, Transform 2D and Symmetry Slice, plus a few simple blend nodes. Use the cropping and mask functionality of the blend nodes to mask each pattern together. 

The combined patterns are used as the initial base colour for each tile in the albedo map, with a mask for tile Edge Detect and warping of grunge and noise information.

04. Create the tile height

Follow these steps to give your tiles depth (Click the image to make it full-screen)

Make a greyscale version of the images, Edge Detect (to keep the masks' sharpness) then combine them. This gives you a black and white mask of each tile with a black border that you then need to bevel for tile height. 

To vary tile size, use two Histogram Scan nodes with different values then blend the result using a mask generated from a Multi Directional Warped fractal sum pattern.

05. Add tile edge damage

Use the Slope Blur node to rough up the edges of your tiles (Click the image to make it full-screen)

To give the tiles some age and character, add damage to the edges. The Slope Blur node pushes detail from one input down the slopes of a second height input for this. 

Combine some grunge and patterns to generate a heightmap with varied detail, allowing for large and small edge damage. The heightmap also contains areas of solid black where edge damage will not occur.

06. Cause surface damage

Follow up the edge damage with some surface damage (Click the image to make it full-screen)

Now that the tiles have damaged edges, add some surface damage to remove larger chunks. To generate the damage, use a Tile Sampler node scattering Gaussian shapes. To make sure the damage originates from the edges of each tile, use the tile height from earlier in the graph as a mask. 

The other nodes in this step Slope Blur and Warp this data with grunge and noise to get a more detailed damage map. This helps to ensure that each tile looks uniquely worn. 

07. Add tile cracks

The Cells 3 node is a great starting place for adding cracks (Click the image to make it full-screen)

To make the tiles look like they have undergone years of foot traffic, blend in cracks using the Darken blend mode over the unbroken tiles. The Cells 3 node is a great place to start when building cracks, but is too uniform without some modification. 

After Warping the cracks, use consecutive Slope Blurs with Grunge/Noise inputs and a blurred version of the input itself. Slope Blur an input by itself at low intensities to give the effect of the inflated details.

Next: grout and finish off your tiles

08. Create the grout

Don't forget your grouting (Click the image to make it full-screen)

Make the grout by subtracting the tile height you already have from a Slope Blurred and reduced range version of itself. The final Histogram Range node modifies the grout blend with the tiles – the brighter the pixels the closer the grout is to the height of the tiles. 

This works as the tiles and grout are eventually blended together using Lighten (max), so only the brightest pixels show.

09. Create the grout detail

Add detail to your grout to make it look more natural (Click the image to make it full-screen)

To make the grout feel old, use the Clouds 2 node as three inputs on a Multi Directional Warp to get a marbled effect. 

Then combine this with BnW Spots 2, contrast and Slope Blur to add natural detail and multiply onto the base grout height. Make some pebbles and pores using Gauss Spots 2, pass through a Tile Generator and use the Add/Sub blend mode to blend with the grout.

10. Vary the look of each tile

Bring the floor to life by adding some variety to your tiles (Click the image to make it full-screen)

With the heightmap out of the way and the grout looking damaged, you can move on to the albedo/colour map. To darken the tile edges, blend the combined inputs map from step 03 with a darkened version of itself, then use a mask based on the edge bevel to regulate the effect. 

To give the tiles some variation, blend in some hue adjustment using a tile mask generated by Warping the Perlin noise zoom node for added realism.

11. Build the albedo map

Your albedo map will need plenty of layers (Click the image to make it full-screen)

Building up a good albedo/colour map takes many layers. Hairline cracks are a great example of this kind of subtle detail. Although not immediately obvious, they add believability to the tile texture when it's viewed up close. 

Create these as well as a thin layer of surface dirt, using some Warped Perlin noise combined with the pebbles and pores masks that you already made in step 09. This gives the tiles a really lived-on look.

12. Albedo map the grout

Give the grout an albedo map as well (Click the image to make it full-screen)

Create the grout colour by passing the grout height through a gradient map with brown values. Use a saturated version of this grout colour as the interior colour of the broken tiles, and blend with a contrasted heightmap so only the very highest parts of each tile show their tile colour. 

Finally, add some extra edge damage using an inverted Ambient Occlusion generator as a mask.

13. Create a roughness map

The roughness map is made up from previous masks and details (Click the image to make it full-screen)

The roughness map is the last map to create when making a material, as it's mostly made from previous masks and detail. 

Use your tile mask from step 04 and reduce its contrast in the Histogram Range node. Then subtract a surface dirt mask and add in the tile edge mask from step 12. Blend in the grout made from a uniform colour and a mask reused from the pebbles and pores.

14. Finish off

Add some final touches and you're ready to go (Click the image to make it full-screen)

Lastly, apply some finishing touches now. By Non-Uniform blurring the height with the Histogram scan output from step 10 then multiplying this result with the previous height, you get more variation in the heightmap. 

To make the tile surface catch better specular reflections, blend some tweaked normals created with Warped Perlin noise and a gradient map full of tangent space normal colours. Finally, generate and output the Ambient Occlusion and the final height. 

This article originally appeared in 3D World issue 223. Buy it here!

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