A correctly placed light will help you illustrate what you want to show, like how the sunlight shows the tiny details on my stone bricks or the big roughness impact on my Brutalism wall.

Substance Designer: How to Start

The strong advantage of Substance Designer is its community, there are tons of tutorials, breakdowns, and tips on a lot of websites such as Youtube, Polycount, 80 Level and more. The thing I really recommend for beginners and intermediate level artists are the Substance Academy videos, they will help to really understand the basics and the best practices of this software.

I recommend also to dig into Substance Source, download the Sbs from the Signature series or others and start to study them from beginning to the end. It will help you create your own workflow, find some good tips and see how professionals use this software. Of course, there are so many ways to create just one thing, so you need to experiment with all you already know to find new things that will help and boost your productivity.

Experimentation is the key of Substance Designer, don’t be afraid to open the software and just mess around with some nodes without any objectives. You’ll find some cool stuff that will probably give you some ideas for larger creation. It was the case for me and my last substance “Gothic Ornament”.

One last thing I really recommend is to try to quickly recreate some simple pattern like this: