From the course: Substance Designer 2020 Essential Training

Gradient map - Substance Designer Tutorial

From the course: Substance Designer 2020 Essential Training

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Gradient map

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- One important aspect of material creation is that of controlling color information. Now this can be on full RGB values, most simple grayscale dates that ranges from black to white, both of which can be controlled via a gradient node. And both of which can play a huge part in adding detail and interest to a material, a model, not only in the base color flow, but also for the normal height and roughness flows as well. And so let's see how this tool works. According to the O5 Nav pin, we can select the gradient node and press the D key to undock it and right away with it selected, we see that we can change its color mode. Now this means that the grading can not only be fed into mask slots or data nodes, but can also be used as it is here as an overall base color driver, farther material. Now, obviously which direction we choose to go in will be determined by what we want to accomplish in our texture with this node. Now, we also see a small preview of what the end results are from the gradient editor that we'll look at in a moment, which is a good way to make quick or small edits that don't require us to open up the editor dialogue. Here we can click and drag on the gradient markers to change their position, or we can single click on the gradient, which we see allows us to add another marker into the mix. And we can also set its position with a drag of the mouse also. If we, however, do click to open up the gradient map editor, we see that we have a more fully featured version of the gradient bar preview. With the a fair view controls that we can use to our advantage. Now we can still adjust the existing gradient markers via click and drag just as we've been doing, but we can also add new ones here in the same fashion also. But we can actually also click and drag to marquee select them all which opens up a few more options to us. Some of the helpful controls that now become available are the ability to invert the colors found on our gradient, which is very helpful for tweaking how the gradient node acts as let's say a mask, but also allows us to take a gradient that has originally been set up with color. And as you can see here, we can instantly de-saturate all of the swatches as well, so that, well, then this could then be used as a mask input. Now powerful tool found in this editor is the pink gradient button. Now this allows us to create a cross section as it were of colors that really is controlled via a simple click and drag. So this can be done by dragging over an image or even over the UI of designer like so. Now this means we can utilize colors that we've created here inside the application should we want or need to. If we feel that after using this tool, we have far too many markers to keep track of and adjust, we can then put the precision slider to use, which will either increase or decrease the amount of markers that are being used to generate our end result. Now, once we're happy with the amount of them that we have, a marker can then be selected, then we can use the usual RGB or HSV sliders to adjust and find you in the color that we need in our gradient. For now, I'm just going to undo all of those changes we have made, so as to not affect the end result of the flow. So knowing how to remap colors and data in the gradient tool means that while we can easily take grayscale information and then repurpose it for use as a base color flow, or we can simply add more variation to a dataset by adding extra markers or even by making use of an image to sample colors from. The gradient map tool, definitely being one that we will want to put to good use as we create more and more believable materials.

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