I always start a material by trying to visualize beforehand all the steps I’ll need to do. Just sitting down and taking a moment is a great way of preparing yourself for the dreaded BLANK GRAPH. If you’re not so familiar with Designer then it’ll probably be easier for you to just throw down some nodes that seem like they might do what you want and then just fiddle. Designer is made for fiddling, so fiddle.

At any rate, I’ll usually throw down a tile sampler, clouds, or random grunge, maybe shove some stuff into the Non-Directional Warp Node - whatever gets the brain in gear really. Then, we do the tried and tested ‘Big to small’. I won’t get into all of that because it’s been done before. Height info, then color, then roughness. Tried and tested.

Setting Up the Base

Setting up the base color is quite simple: I always just start with a base, which in this case is slightly off white for the paper. I then decide what I want to feature. With the sandy rocks material, I wanted different shades of ink for different areas of the heightmap, highlights, cavities, shadows, light facing info (which will simply reinforce the effect of the shadows), and lastly, I wanted some subtle ink splotches for a little artistic touch.

For the height info, I just use a histogram select node to mask out the values that I want, whack up the contrast and then plug it into the base color. I use histogram select basically everywhere, especially in the color map, it's fabulous.

For our highlights we need some normal information, so plug your heightmap into a normal node, then shove that into a curvature or curvature smooth - both will do similar but different things for you. Then, once again pick your values with histogram select. Sharp corners are white, deep cavities are black, and flat surfaces are grey. This is the true meat of my base colors.