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
