Creating Painted Metal in Substance Designer

- [Voiceover] Hi there, my name is Joel Bradley and I'd like to welcome you to my Substance Designer: Painted Metal course. In here, we're going to create a painted surface that can be tweaked and changed long after the substance creation process has been completed. To do this, we will, first of all, in chapter one, create three gray scale flows that we can use to help give our surface the illusion of both texture and depth. In other words, some dents, scratches, and pits or pockmarks.

We will also want to create a diffuse or base color for the paint; only here we will do it in a way that adds some much needed variation, simulating a bleaching effect that would suggest our surface spends a lot of time sitting outdoors in direct sunlight. To go along with that, we will also create a fairly detailed dirt layer that can be overlaid over the top of the diffuse colors by means of blending modes, opacity values, and a splatter node. Chapter two will see us put the gray scale flows that we created earlier to good use as we create a number of normal maps from them.

These can all then be combined in order to give our painted surface both the depth and texture that it really needs. We will need other elements adding to our substance graph such as some specular or reflective break up via a roughness flow that will create by utilizing blend, gray scale conversion, and levels nodes in order to give us the level of control over our reflections that we want. The chapter will come to its conclusion as we create a procedural ambiance occlusion effect that utilizes both normal and height maps in order to bring us a completely dynamic system.

Finally, in chapter three, we will walk through an easy-to-use and yet versatile way of exposing key parameters so as to give the texture artist real control over various aspects of the material, such as diffuse color, normal intensity, dirt amount, and of course, roughness or reflectivity. If you are as excited as I am to dive straight into the action then, let's get started on our Substance Designer: Painted Metal course.