Sometimes, I create some small tools in Substance Designer to facilitate the process. For example, during Substance Game Jam in Montreal, I created Splatter that worked with the position and the normal maps. I could choose any pattern and splatter it in 3 directions, choose a range where the mask will be smaller, and so on.

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However, I mainly use Substance tools as they are a better fit for what I want to achieve.

The challenges I’m facing (for now) always revolve around the same issues: How to create things? How to be more efficient at each iteration? How to make more stunning assets and optimize them? The real challenge starts when you move onto a new project, sometimes with a new engine, and have to adapt your way of doing things and find turnarounds to improve your work. When I started in AAA, I was really afraid of new challenges. But the more experience I get, the more exciting and less scary these new challenges are to me.

Column & Pattern Generators in Substance Designer

The Pattern Substance appeared when I was asked to create something that would help to identify the different areas of Paititi. I had to find the balance between our artistic direction and the gameplay needs. I decided to create two generators for it: one for the patterns and the other one for the columns.

With the Column Generator, I was able to split the canvas into columns with 4 different sizes. By defining the column width, the generator produced a color mask with 4 different main colors (one for each width) but slightly different to determine a different ID for each column. Furthermore, the generator also created a different kind of gradients for each column. With this technique, I was able to quickly generate masks and work in an iterative way by picking individual colors or a color range.

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The Pattern Generator was a tricky one. I wanted to get some basic shapes with color masks inside them. I used a unique Polygon Node and exposed the Sides parameter so that all my shapes were derivatives of this node. I exposed some other parameters like Rotation or Size, then used a Tile Generator Node for the “color” version and another one for the “black and white” version. I also exposed some of the Generator parameters to control the number of Rotations to allow more flexibility.

I combined these two generators (usually, I used one Column Generator and as many Pattern Generators as necessary) in a big graph where the Heightmap was created. Finally, only one roughness and one normal map for all the albedo maps were used.

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With this, I was able to deliver high-quality results really quickly and find a good balance between the gameplay and artistic direction needs.