Substance Workflow

We used Substance quite extensively. We used Substance Designer to create almost all of our tileable textures. Substance Painter was used primarily for texturing assets. Almost every environment art asset in Forza Horizon 4 had some part of it run through Substance Designer or Substance Painter at one point. Roads, rocks, terrain, foliage, barriers and buildings all had some degree of Substance authoring.

For terrain materials, we would generally start with photogrammetry elements that we’ve captured in-house and scatter the elements to create our textures in Substance Designer. Every terrain material was authored to have a near and far version. This allowed us to keep high detail close to the camera, avoiding tiling and work in macro shapes in the distance. Substance Designer made authoring the distant textures much quicker as we were able to leverage a lot of work done for the near textures as a base. Every terrain material is comprised of diffuse, normal, ambient occlusion, roughness, height, blend, and hardness (wetness behavior) texture maps. We’d author the summer version first, and once we were happy with the material we’d then create the seasonal variants. Depending on the reference, sometimes the seasonal variant might be a tweak in color, which might mean a simple adjustment of a gradient ramp, or sometimes it might look completely different, which would mean very different distribution density of the photogrammetry elements. All winter variants of textures were created using in-house ‘Winteriser’ nodes. These Winteriser nodes allowed us to achieve a snowy look or a frosty look.

Assets went through a very similar process, creating the summer version of the texture first and then the winter version later. For assets, we had a Winteriser smart material in Substance Painter which was used to create their frosty or snowy winter variants.