Our substance library for Robinson was mainly made up of human-made materials and focused on materials that would be used for texturing assets in Substance Painter. For exterior environments we used substance to blend scan data or add additional effects on top of the scans. Only in situations where we were not able to get proper scans or needed a lot of flexibility, did we use full procedural materials (tar, mud, or lava).

I think the main benefit of using procedural materials is flexibility and that you can create very specific materials. Scanned data will usually look much more realistic, but lacks that flexibility. It can be hard o find the exact real-world materials that you need for your library. So it comes down to what you need for your project and being clever about combining both approaches.

Building Materials Faster and More Efficiently

With the creation of our Robinson library we learned a lot about how to do things and how not to do them. In our first iteration we thought it would be a good idea to keep all our materials centralized in one single substance package. While this allowed quick access to all our materials, it proved to be a nightmare as our library grew larger and larger. Publishing our .sbs package took far too long and only one person could work on the package at a time. So while the library still sped up art production, this decision made maintenance of the substances inefficient. Only after we shipped Robinson did we find the time to reorganize everything. Every material now has its own package, and it works like a charm.

The substance library made in-house art production much faster. We prepared a set of base materials that covered all human-made materials in our game. As most human-made objects in Robinson come from the same fictional manufacturer (DSEV) and use a repeating set of base materials, we could make sure that the DSEV white plastic material, for example, looked exactly the same on all assets. With substances and smart materials we were able to ensure that the values for the base materials were consistent. Even material effects like dirt or moss followed predefined values. Our prop artists were able to texture their assets faster and with more consistency. Another cool thing is that we were able to provide our exported library to our outsourcing partners, which ensured that their results were very close to our expectations and improved their production time as well.