Creating a Procedural Rock Material in Substance Designer

Discover how to build a fully procedural rock material in Substance Designer and Master Toolbox. Explore base heightmaps, normals, noise, color, roughness, ambient occlusion, and three-point lighting in Marmoset.

Use a hawk reference to guide large rock shapes in Substance Designer, and use tile sampler with pearl noise to form cracks and dirt before building height maps for displacement.

Create and refine large shapes and cuts in Substance Designer by using levels, invert grayscale, blend nodes, and directional warp with Tilahun tiling to craft controlled, sharp cutouts.

Continue this tutorial on creating large cuts for a procedural rock material. Learn to add breaks, cracks, and bulges using directional warp, noise, bevel, snowblower, and non uniform grayscale techniques.

Explore techniques to create medium-scale cracks in a procedural rock material in Substance Designer, balancing lines, applying tile-based patterns, random rotation, and directional warps for natural variance.

Explore thin line shifting and large breakup to add uneven long lines and subtle height variations on a procedural rock heightmap, using directional warp and balance in Substance Designer.

Set up a Marmoset scene to preview a procedural rock material in Substance Designer, and create large and micro cracks using displacement and noise for realistic texture.

Learn to create small crack clusters with density-driven variation using the distance node, shape splatter or tile sampler, and two-stage breakup with directional warp and gradients for rock textures.

Create a procedural rock material in Substance Designer by generating large noise with height-based masks and ambient occlusion, then blend, bevel, and transform for cracky, fitting textures.

Balance a procedural rock material by layering micro noise with directional warp and purley noise, tweaking density, displacement, and cracks to achieve puffiness and integrated texture.

Learn how to clean up and optimize a substance designer graph by understanding node order and millisecond delays, reusing notes, lowering resolutions, and using optimize settings to reduce duplicates.

Create a procedural rock material in Substance Designer by deriving color from heightmap masks, gradient maps, and dirt and curvature for head, cavity color, and white collar.

Convert the base color to grayscale, use masks to drive roughness and dirt details, then set up a three-point directional lighting, sky, and shadows, and refine texture resolution.

Refine the base color in Substance Designer by balancing blur, the normal map, and curvature, then adjust diffusion and reflection density and prepare micro noise and displacement tweaks for realism.

We diagnose shading issues from insufficient geometry, subdivide a render sphere for smoother shading, then tune lighting, tone mapping, bloom, and depth of field before refining the base color.

final polish of a procedural rock material in Substance Designer, detailing dirt, cracks, roughness, and occlusion via masks and histogram select, and exporting high-resolution renders.

Finalize the procedural rock material by switching to the correct camera, creating a turntable render, and exporting a looping 1920x1080 video for marketing and portfolio use.