Substance Designer Essential Training (2017)

- [Joel] Hello and welcome, my name is Joel Bradley, and I am very much looking forward to working through this Substance Designer 6 course with you. A course in which we will take an in depth look at the tools found in this powerful, procedurally-based texturing application. At the beginning of the course, we will use a quick start project to serve as an overview of the types of things that can be done in Substance Designer. Hopefully wetting our appetite for the larger course ahead. Once we get going on that, we will discuss important preference options that can help improve our work flow, as well as consider fundamental concepts, such as what substance package is and substance graphs are.

Working templates, graph properties, and even custom 3D meshes will also feature in the early stages. Understanding how the Substance Designer UI works, such as the 2D and 3D views, will be important to us. As will the all-important graph area, the part of the application where we construct our textures. Given that lights and cameras play a big role in how we perceive the materials that we create, we will want to take a look at how to control those elements as well. About midway through the course, we will dive into what I consider to be the heart of the Substance Designer work flow, by taking a look at some of the most used atomic nodes that the program has to offer, such as blend, curve, slope blur, normal, gradient, as well as the very powerful water level node, to name just a few.

We will even take a look at creating a panorama from scratch, that we can then use as our very own lighting and environment map. We will familiarize ourselves with the creation of MDL graphs and materials, making use of the tool set to create a custom anisotropic metal that could then be used with the array renderer in Substance Designer, or inside another DCC application, such as 3ds Max. In the closing chapters, we will discuss the use of functions, seeing how we can unlock their power, should we be brave enough to make use of that tool set.

Finally, we will take a look at using our substance inside the UE4 game engine. Now to do this, we will cover exporting, both .sbsar and bitmap files for use inside UE4. And then, take a look at how we can import our substance package into the game engine, and make it look even better by adding a displacement effect to it. As we work through this course together, you will hopefully get to see just how quick, powerful, and easy to use Substance Designer 6 is.

As we have lots of ground to cover here, and as I am sure you are eager to get to the texturing process, let's get going and dive right in.