Introduction

Mark Foreman: In this tutorial, I’m going to guide you through the creation of my Malachite with Chrysocolla Materialize competition entry. I’m going to cover the graph and MDL in full and then finally go into some detail on how I set up my final renders.

Preparation

Before I even put my first node down, I had to decide whether I was going to try and recreate the reference image as precisely as possible, producing an isolated piece of malachite on a white background, or if I’d use the reference as inspiration to create a piece that recreated what I saw as the essential features in the reference, but filled in the blanks around the reference to become what was more of a traditional material. Ultimately I felt it made more sense to embrace the strengths of Substance Designer and translate as much of what I could see in the reference image into a procedural tiling material.

Having settled on an approach, my next port of call was to expand my reference library and to learn a little more about malachite. I started by gathering some extra reference images of other cut malachite samples. As well as the apparent malachite from the cut face of the reference, there is also the chrysocolla mineral coating on the outside of the malachite. So as well as malachite images I also gathered some other references of uncut stones showing off the chrysocolla coating on the exterior.