您需要 登录 才可以下载或查看，没有账号？注册
x
Introduction
Hey there! My name is Cairo, and I’m an Environment Artist originally from South Africa, recently moved to the UK. I graduated as a Civil Engineer at the end of 2019 but pivoted into games shortly after. 3D art was something that I was interested in during university, and I’m really glad that I made the switch. I’ve met so many incredible artists over the past two years and learned so much.
介绍
嘿！我的名字是开罗，我是一名来自南非的环境艺术家，最近搬到了英国。我在2019年底以土木工程师的身份毕业，但不久后就转向了游戏。3D艺术是我在大学期间感兴趣的东西，我真的很高兴我做出了改变。在过去的两年里，我遇到了很多不可思议的艺术家，学到了很多东西。
I’ve worked for Next-Gen Dreams, which is a worldwide outsource studio, on a number of awesome projects in 2020 and this year. I was part of the Age of Darkness team as well as some exciting unannounced stuff! At the beginning of 2022, I will be joining Cloud Imperium Games to work on Star Citizen as part of the Environment team.
我曾在Next-Gen Dreams工作，这是一家全球外包工作室，在2020年和今年开展了许多很棒的项目。我是黑暗时代团队的一员，也是一些令人兴奋的未宣布的东西！在2022年初，我将加入Cloud Imperium Games，作为环境团队的一员，在Star Citizen上工作。
Nodevember 2021
At Next-Gen, I was lucky enough to be working on a AAA project where we had a dedicated Material Artist. As such, I didn’t get to do much texture or material creation of my own besides the odd trim or edge decal here and there. I thought it might be a good exercise to do a few of the Nodevember prompts and stretch some of those Designer muscles in my spare time.
节点成员 2021
在Next-Gen，我很幸运能够参与一个AAA项目，在那里我们有一个专门的材料艺术家。因此，除了这里和那里的奇怪装饰或边缘贴花之外，我没有做太多自己的纹理或材料创作。我认为在业余时间做一些Nodevember提示并伸展一些设计师肌肉可能是一个很好的练习。
Plus, it’s always fun to see how much you can do fully procedurally. In production, time management is so often the deciding factor on the method of asset creation that it’s not often that we go full procedural. Unless the Substance Generator is going to be used over and over in various forms throughout the project, we often use other software (like ZBrush) to supplement those procedural bases to get the best result as quickly as possible, without worrying whether it was “100% Designer.”
另外，看看你能在程序上做多少事情总是很有趣的。在生产中，时间管理往往是资产创建方法的决定性因素，以至于我们通常不经常采用完整的程序化。除非物质生成器将在整个项目中以各种形式一遍又一遍地使用，否则我们经常使用其他软件（如ZBrush）来补充这些程序基础，以尽快获得最佳结果，而不必担心它是否是“100%设计师”。
I find that I often rely on the nodes that I am used to in Substance 3D Designer, so this was also a challenge for me to break out of my comfort zone and find different ways to achieve good-looking results.
我发现我经常依赖我在Substance 3D Designer中习惯的节点，所以这对我来说也是一个挑战，要突破我的舒适区，找到不同的方法来获得好看的结果。
As for Substance 3D Designer’s new procedural modeling, I haven’t had the chance to test it out yet! Hopefully, I will get to do so sometime in the future. Add it to the long list of stuff I still need to try. Exposing Substance parameters has always been a powerful and greatly iterative workflow for textures, though, so I can imagine that procedural modeling would be a great tool for creating variation in shape and size of multiple assets – similar to Houdini.
至于Substance 3D Designer的新程序建模，我还没有机会进行测试！希望我能在将来的某个时候这样做。将其添加到我仍然需要尝试的长列表中。不过，公开 Substance 参数一直是纹理的强大且迭代性的工作流程，因此我可以想象程序建模将是创建多个资产的形状和大小变化的绝佳工具，类似于Houdini。
Inspiration
This was my first time giving Nodevember a go, and I was glad to see they reduced the number of prompts to 15 instead of 30. As a working professional, trying to get a finished product done every day after a full eight hours of work can be quite draining. Even so, I decided to just do the prompts that inspired me, instead of trying to finish all of them and sacrifice a bit of quality. I also set myself a time limit for each material of about 5 hours. This meant that I needed to have my idea and rendering and lighting setup nailed down from near the start.
灵感
这是我第一次尝试 Nodevember，我很高兴看到他们将提示的数量减少到 15 个，而不是 30 个。作为一名在职专业人士，在整整八个小时的工作之后，每天尝试完成成品可能会非常消耗精力。即便如此，我决定只做那些激励我的提示，而不是试图完成所有这些提示并牺牲一点质量。我还为自己设定了每个材料大约5个小时的时间限制。这意味着我需要从一开始就确定我的想法，渲染和照明设置。
For my color prompts, I was inspired by nature and organic objects. I’m not sure what it says about me that I found those prompts the easiest to come up with ideas for! I drew inspiration from a few starting references but also freestyled if I had a good idea to work off. For the colors, I was specifically inspired by cracked red earth, natural ivy vines, and the ocean.
For other materials, I was inspired by traditional painting and contemporary art.
对于我的色彩提示，我受到大自然和有机物体的启发。我不确定它对我有什么影响，我发现这些提示最容易提出想法！我从一些起始参考中汲取了灵感，但如果我有一个好主意，我也会自由式地学习。对于颜色，我特别受到开裂的红土，天然常春藤藤和海洋的启发。
对于其他材料，我的灵感来自传统绘画和当代艺术。
For each prompt, I was also thinking about how I would incorporate it into a framed "gallery exhibit art piece" which was my presentation idea for Nodevember. I find consistency in presentation to be an important factor that I quite often overlook, so I wanted to improve in that area.
对于每个提示，我还在考虑如何将它整合到一个框架的“画廊展览艺术作品”中，这是我对Nodevember的演示想法。我发现表述的一致性是我经常忽视的一个重要因素，所以我想在这方面有所改进。
The Workflow
Generally, I follow a pretty standard procedure for creating materials. I start working with a flat, grey-colored base and begin with the Height and Normal. Then I use the created Height, Curvature, AO, and other useful Maps to start building the base for the Albedo. I like to sample albedo values with scanned textures from Megascans instead of trying to guess or pick color values from reference pictures, they have a lot of lighting information. I normally create Roughness and Metalness Maps with a number of masks, noises, and generators derived from the other maps at this stage.
工作流程
通常，我遵循一个非常标准的方法来创建材料。我开始使用平坦的灰色底座，并从高度和正常开始。然后，我使用创建的高度，曲率，AO和其他有用的地图开始为反照率建立基础。我喜欢使用Megascan扫描的纹理对反照率值进行采样，而不是试图从参考图片中猜测或选择颜色值，它们有很多照明信息。在此阶段，我通常使用许多蒙版、噪声和从其他贴图派生的发生器来创建粗糙度和金属度贴图。
Like anything, materials go through a lot of tweaking and iteration to get them looking right, especially in-engine. This is particularly true for games where we need to minimize the amount of obvious tiling over large surfaces. That being said, sometimes rules are meant to be broken, and with the time constraints I set for myself with Nodevember, I normally worked on different textures out of order to get a result in Marmoset as soon as possible!
像任何东西一样，材质经过大量的调整和迭代，使它们看起来正确，特别是在引擎中。对于需要最大限度地减少大表面上明显平铺量的游戏尤其如此。话虽如此，有时规则是要被打破的，并且由于我使用Nodevember为自己设置的时间限制，我通常会按顺序处理不同的纹理，以便尽快在Marmoset中获得结果！
Round
This was probably one of the simpler materials to create if a little bit more time-consuming. I wanted to recreate the painting “The Pink Cloud” by Henri-Edmond Cross in a pointillism style. This involved creating a number of masks which I could then feed into the Tile Sampler to fill that space with small “paintbrush dots”, with a generous number of random strokes and warping for that slightly splattered look. I worked from back to front (in terms of the depth of the scene in the painting) to create the masks, as I imagine the painter might’ve done as well.
圆
这可能是创建更简单的材料之一，如果更耗时一点。我想以点画风格重现亨利-埃德蒙·克罗斯（Henri-Edmond Cross）的画作《粉红的云》（The Pink Cloud）。这涉及创建许多蒙版，然后我可以将其输入到Tile Sampler中，以用小的“画笔点”填充该空间，并具有大量的随机笔触和翘曲，以获得略微飞溅的外观。我从后到前（就绘画中场景的深度而言）创作面具，我想画家可能也会这样做。
Blue
The Blue material was a really interesting one to work on; there’s a lot of colour information as opposed to height information because the majority of the rock structures are underwater. I first created the rocks Height Map and created the Base Color for those, before pushing most of them underwater. From there, it was a matter of playing around with darker blue gradients which represented the depth of the water. The colours underwater also gradually become blurrier, to fake some of that depth.
I used a couple of simple techniques for the rocks, also taking the time to manually transform and place them as I wasn’t concerned about this material being tileable. Firstly, I created a rock generator which I believe is similar to the one made by Wes McDermott a few years back. I exposed a few parameters which would make creating a variety of rock shapes possible and then blended the different individual rocks together using Max Lighten.
蓝
蓝色材料是一个非常有趣的工作;有很多颜色信息，而不是高度信息，因为大多数岩石结构都在水下。我首先创建了岩石高度图，并为这些岩石创建了基色，然后将大部分岩石推入水下。从那里开始，这是一个玩弄深蓝色渐变的问题，这些渐变代表了水的深度。水下的颜色也逐渐变得模糊，以伪造一些深度。
我对岩石使用了几种简单的技术，还花时间手动转换和放置它们，因为我不担心这种材料是可平铺的。首先，我创造了一个岩石发电机，我相信它与几年前Wes McDermott制造的岩石发生器相似。我暴露了一些参数，这些参数可以创建各种岩石形状，然后使用Max Lighten将不同的单个岩石混合在一起。
To complete the underwater rock foundation, I used the Tile Generator with a shape extrude to create some interesting, ridged shapes which I overlayed over the initial rocks. It helped to unify to overall formation a bit more.
为了完成水下岩石基础，我使用带有形状拉伸的瓷砖生成器来创建一些有趣的脊状形状，我将其覆盖在最初的岩石上。它有助于统一到整体形成更多。
On the right, you can see my final Base Color Map for the material. You might notice that there is more lighting information than is normally seen or required by a PBR texture. I used the Shadow node quite a bit, which was useful for creating an extra sense of depth on the rocks under the water. I also included some specular highlights from the wavelets and from the trail the speedboat creates. There was very little Normal information besides adding some extra detail on the rocks and on the water.
在右侧，您可以看到我为材料提供的最终基色贴图。您可能会注意到，光照信息比 PBR 纹理通常看到或需要的要多。我使用过很多“阴影”节点，这对于在水下的岩石上创建额外的深度感非常有用。我还从小波和快艇创造的小径中加入了一些镜面亮点。除了在岩石和水面上添加一些额外的细节外，几乎没有正常信息。
Red
The Red prompt was an appealing challenge in terms of balancing large, medium, and small shapes. This is exactly the type of material that I would prefer to do in ZBrush normally – to create a less procedural, more individual look – so I tried to break up the pieces as much as possible in Substance 3D Designer. I tried a few different techniques to break up the ‘procedural cells’ look of the fragmented pieces. As I said earlier, I was inspired by cracked red earth for this material, but eventually, this morphed into something similar to Himalayan salt rock.
红
红色提示在平衡大，中，小形状方面是一个吸引人的挑战。这正是我更喜欢在ZBrush中通常使用的材料类型 - 以创建一个不那么程序化，更个性化的外观 - 所以我试图在Substance 3D Designer中尽可能多地分解这些部分。我尝试了几种不同的技术来分解碎片的“程序细胞”外观。正如我之前所说，我受到这种材料的破解红土的启发，但最终，它变成了类似于喜马拉雅盐岩的东西。
The process for creating the cracked pieces was repeated for all sizes, from large to small. I used a simple Cells 4, warped it to create some irregularity, and then used a Non-Uniform Edge Detect node made by Maxime Guyard-Morin to create the initial binary mask for the pieces. This would work just as well with an ordinary Edge Detect as I didn’t end up using a large amount of randomness anyway, just to keep the segments tightly packed.
创建裂解碎片的过程对所有尺寸（从大到小）重复。我使用了一个简单的Cell 4，扭曲它以创建一些不规则性，然后使用MaximeGuyard-Morin制作的非均匀边缘检测节点为碎片创建初始二进制掩码。这与普通的边缘检测一样有效，因为我最终不会使用大量的随机性，只是为了保持段紧密包装。
From there, I used a Flood Fill for multiple masks. Flood Fill to Random Gradient was used for the Height Map, tweaking the angle variety to make the pieces appear to tilt inwards, as they would from impact damage. Additionally, I used the same Flood Fill to create a Random Greyscale map (Step 3 below). This was used in conjunction with the Histogram Scan to determine which pieces would crack further into medium and small pieces. It was very easy to change the percentage of secondary and tertiary cracks formed by exposing the Balance value as a parameter. The below image is the setup I copied for the finer details as well, only changing the scale of the cells each time. From looking at references, I found that the likelihood of a certain piece of rock/ground further cracking is decreased as the cracks get smaller. So, it was a bit of a balancing act to achieve the correct ratios between large, medium, and small.
从那里，我为多个蒙版使用了洪水填充。高度图使用了“将洪水填充到随机渐变”，调整了角度变化，使碎片看起来向内倾斜，就像撞击伤害一样。此外，我使用相同的洪水填充来创建随机灰度地图（下面的步骤3）。这与直方图扫描结合使用，以确定哪些碎片会进一步裂解成中小碎片。通过将余额值作为参数来更改形成的二级和三级裂缝的百分比非常容易。下图是我为更精细的细节复制的设置，每次只更改单元格的比例。通过查看参考文献，我发现随着裂缝变小，某块岩石/地面进一步开裂的可能性降低。因此，在大，中，小之间实现正确的比率是一种平衡行为。
Another node I really like to use for detail (whether that be height, roughness, or color) is a Vector Warp Greyscale. It’s extremely useful for offsetting grunge or noise by different amounts based on the Gradient Map you feed into it. For example, if you have cracks and you don’t want them to cross over different tiles or areas of the texture. Here you can see how I used it to offset grunge based on the cracks of the salt rock.
我真正喜欢用于细节的另一个节点（无论是高度，粗糙度还是颜色）是矢量扭曲灰度。它对于根据您输入的渐变贴图的不同数量抵消垃圾或噪音非常有用。例如，如果您有裂缝，并且您不希望它们交叉在纹理的不同瓷砖或区域上。在这里，您可以看到我如何用它来抵消基于盐岩裂缝的垃圾。
Rendering
I used Marmoset Toolbag 4 for rendering, with a pretty simple lighting setup. I’m a big fan of the PBR Render node in Substance 3D Designer, and I usually use it for all of my material renders. However, it is still a bit limited in terms of the meshes you can use with it and other features like Subsurface Scattering, which I used quite a bit for Red and Green. For that reason, and for all the fancy new ray tracing features in MT4, I decided to go with it for this project.
渲染
我使用Marmoset Toolbag 4进行渲染，具有非常简单的照明设置。我是 Substance 3D Designer 中 PBR 渲染节点的忠实粉丝，我通常将其用于所有材质渲染。但是，就可以与它一起使用的网格和其他功能（如地下散射）而言，它仍然有点有限，我将其用于红色和绿色。出于这个原因，以及MT4中所有花哨的新光线追踪功能，我决定在这个项目中使用它。
As mentioned previously, I wanted to evoke the feeling of being inside a modern art gallery and viewing a framed piece hung on the wall. These types of places are nearly always brightly lit, with special emphasis on frontal lighting to highlight the art. That being said, I did angle the main light slightly to either the left or the right to create some interesting shadows.
如前所述，我想唤起一种在现代艺术画廊内观看挂在墙上的框架作品的感觉。这些类型的地方几乎总是明亮的，特别强调正面照明以突出艺术。话虽如此，我确实将主光稍微向左或向右倾斜，以创造一些有趣的阴影。
My lighting setup in Toolbag reflected this. It consisted of one Front and one weaker Side Light, as shown above. The secondary light served to catch some interesting edges and add some slight highlights. I set the radius of the lights quite high (around 8-12) to get nice soft shadows.
The only other settings I played around with were the camera settings. I sharpened the image slightly and changed the tone mapping to ACES as opposed to the default Linear setting.
我在工具袋中的照明设置反映了这一点。它由一个前灯和一个较弱的侧光组成，如上图所示。辅助光用于捕捉一些有趣的边缘，并添加一些轻微的高光。我将灯光的半径设置得相当高（大约8-12），以获得漂亮的柔和阴影。
我玩过的唯一其他设置是相机设置。我稍微锐化了图像，并将色调映射更改为ACES，而不是默认的线性设置。
ACES is a filmic curve that’s become more widely used in the games industry. It does make the image somewhat darker, but it increases the exposure range as well, as you can see in the comparison image above. It also reduces the saturation of brighter areas. You can see that with the same settings, ACES looks a lot better than the clipped values of Linear. However, with some playing around with Linear, you can get a similar result – it does come down to personal preference.
ACES是一种电影曲线，在游戏行业中得到了更广泛的应用。它确实使图像有点暗，但它也增加了曝光范围，如上面的比较图像所示。它还降低了较亮区域的饱和度。您可以看到，在相同的设置下，ACES 看起来比 Linear 的剪切值要好得多。但是，通过对Linear进行一些尝试，您可以获得类似的结果 - 这确实归结为个人喜好。
For the most part with these gallery shots, I tried to create complementary colors between the material itself, the picture frame, and the wall to create a unified, pleasing image.
在这些画廊照片的大部分时间里，我试图在材料本身，相框和墙壁之间创建互补色，以创建统一，令人愉悦的图像。
Conclusion
I couldn’t say how difficult it is to master Substance 3D Designer. I’m so far away from mastering anything, that it seems a foreign concept. Ask Josh Lynch, Daniel Thiger, Jonathan Benainous, or other artists who are the real masters in their field.
结论
我不能说掌握Substance 3D Designer有多困难。我离掌握任何东西都太远了，这似乎是一个陌生的概念。问问Josh Lynch，Daniel Thiger，Jonathan Benainous或其他艺术家，他们是他们所在领域的真正大师。
However, I will say that it’s fairly easy to make huge improvements in Substance 3D Designer very quickly. There are so many great courses and tutorials out there (from the artists I mentioned above as well), plus the software is rather intuitive itself, with its nodal approach. You can go from knowing nothing about making procedural materials, to your first good-looking material with a spare hour and a well-made Youtube tutorial. I would say, at the very minimum, it requires a basic understanding of the different texture outputs and their contribution to the final material, PBR or otherwise. I think that what takes longer is learning how to mix and match the endless nodes for yourself. I’d say time, repetition, and practice, like with anything else.
但是，我要说的是，在Substance 3D Designer中快速进行重大改进是相当容易的。有很多很棒的课程和教程（来自我上面提到的艺术家），而且该软件本身相当直观，具有节点方法。你可以从对制作程序材料一无所知，到你的第一个好看的材料，有一个空闲时间和一个制作精良的Youtube教程。我想说的是，至少，它需要对不同的纹理输出及其对最终材料（PBR或其他）的贡献有基本的了解。我认为需要更长的时间才能学会如何为自己混合和匹配无尽的节点。我会说时间，重复和练习，就像其他任何事情一样。
Learning what combination of nodes is going to give you the result that you need is vital – and make a subgraph of it if you need to! Building up a graph library of common functions that you use frequently is extremely useful, especially when you have a deadline coming up and you can’t remember how exactly you did those nice cracks you made 2 years ago, for example. Also, always helpful to have some nice utility nodes that can be shared with your team and speed up production.
了解哪种节点组合将为您提供所需的结果至关重要 - 并在需要时制作它的子图！建立一个你经常使用的常用函数的图形库是非常有用的，特别是当你有一个截止日期，你不记得你是如何做到2年前的那些漂亮的裂缝的，例如。此外，拥有一些可以与您的团队共享并加快生产速度的漂亮实用程序节点总是有帮助的。
At the end of the day, Substance 3D Designer is an extremely powerful tool and a fun one at that. If you’re thinking about diving into procedural materials, I can highly recommend it. I had a blast creating these materials for Nodevember, so I hope this article was helpful in some way to someone! Thanks to 80 Level for having me, and best of luck to everyone fighting the node spaghetti.
归根结底，Substance 3D Designer是一个非常强大的工具，而且很有趣。如果您正在考虑深入研究程序性材料，我强烈推荐它。我为Nodevember创建了这些材料，所以我希望这篇文章在某种程度上对某人有所帮助！感谢80 Level邀请我，祝大家好运，大家与节点意大利面作斗争。
|
评分
