Lynda – Substance Designer Essential Training (Updated 8.02.2018)

Substance Designer is a powerful, procedurally based tool for creating textures for 3D art and games. This training course provides a complete overview of Substance Designer 6, the 2017 version of the application. New texture artists can use this course to get a jumpstart in the field, while experienced artists will find plenty of advanced tips and tricks to take their skills to the next level.

Instructor Joel Bradley begins with an overview of a prebuilt substance graph, demonstrating the strengths and nondestructive workflow of Substance Designer, and walking through basics such as navigating the Substance Designer interface, adjusting important preferences, importing meshes and maps, and using the 2D, 3D, and Graph views. He then moves onto the large array of essential “atomic” nodes in Substance Designer, including the Blend, Curve, Slope Blur, Normal, Gradient, and Water Level nodes. These nodes comprise the heart of the Substance Designer workflow. Then learn how to create a custom panorama from scratch, and explore more advanced topics such as MDL materials, functions, and FX maps. Finally, Joel closes out the course by putting a substance to use. Learn about the advantages of using a published substance file (SBSAR) over hard-coded bitmaps for in-game materials, and see how to import a substance package into a game engine such as Unreal.

Topics include:

• Choosing a graph template
  
• Importing meshes and maps
  
• Navigating the Explorer and Library
  
• Working with the Graph view
  
• Using 3D and 2D views
  
• Using the atomic nodes
  
• Creating and combining normals
  
• Blending shapes together
  
• Creating MDL materials
  
• Building an FX map
  
• Publishing a substance
  
• Using a substance in a game engine like Unreal