The end result may look like it’d be less effort to just choose the colours yourself but doing it this way gives you a base to work from and you may find you’ll only get rid of one or two colours in the swatch you’ve picked. Most of the time I try to half the amount of colours by deleting the ones that are near enough the same and typically I plug the ‘Gradient Map’ into a ‘HSL’ node to control the overall brightness and saturation, doing this in each colour that’s been picked can be a bit of a task!

Ambient Occlusion maps are also extremely helpful to emphasize the depth of your material but should never be multiplied over your albedo as you don’t really want any light information in your colour map.

Gloss or Roughness maps are pretty important to get your material feeling realistic. Depending on what material you are going for you should always spend as much time (if not more) working on them as you would with the rest of the texture set as they really help sell what kind of material it is. For example if you just use a solid mid-grey colour as your gloss map on say a stone-tile material your making, it’ll make it look a bit like lino flooring so it’s always good to have variation in your gloss / roughness map. I usually start out with a solid grey colour using the ‘Uniform Color’ node (brightness depends on the material and whether your using glossiness or roughness) and from there I basically back track through my material chain and using most of the masks that make up the individual elements like dirt, rust, concrete etc to blend different shades of grey in to the gloss map chain and slowly but surely you’ll start to build up your glossiness or roughness map.

Presenting and testing

There comes a point when I’m working in Substance where I’m happy with what I’ve got. It may not look like the final piece but the bulk of the details are there. That’s when I start to save out the textures and start to set up a render shot in Marmoset and more often than not I start to see problems or things that I’ve missed out in the texture straight away. So when I’ve started to set up my shot, I’m constantly going back and forth between Marmoset and Substance to add and delete things or to fine tune the textures by changing some of the values in the various nodes.

In terms of actually rendering your shot, there are a few camera settings to play around with. I’m always a fan of a little bit of contrast so I like to ramp that up a tiny bit as well as the exposure to really set the light and shadows apart, be cautious though as this will dramatically increase the saturation and brightness of the colours so a good way to combat this is to slightly desaturate the scene in the camera settings.

Pretty much all my work is rendered with depth of field and vignette as it really helps focusing on the area you want to show off, however, I tend to keep them quite close to the edge with a low strength when it comes to materials as you really want to show off the whole material.