Substance Designer

- [Joel] Hello and welcome. My name is Joel Bradley, and I'm very much looking forward to working through this Substance Designer Essential Training course with you, a course in which we will be looking to make good use of the texturing tools found in this powerful application from the team at Allegorithmic. At the start of the course, we will discuss, amongst other things, the welcome screen, import and preference settings that can help improve our workflow, along with key fundamentals, such as just what a substance package and substance graphs are.

This will lead nicely into using templates, graph properties, and even custom 3D meshes as we take a look at creating textures for very specific pieces of geometry. We will then familiarize ourselves with the substance designer UI by taking a look at the menus, explorer panel, library, and parameter areas of the interface, after which we will study use of the 2D and 3D views in Designer, both of which are important for helping us see how our materials are developing.

We are then going to dive into what I consider to be the heart of material creation in Substance Designer by taking a look at some of the most used atomic nodes in the program, nodes such as blend, curve, slope blur, normal, gradient, the very powerful water level node, and the shape extrude node, to name just a few. The creation of MDL graphs, including a look at just what MDL is, will lead on to our making use of the provided tool set to create a custom anisotropic material that could then be used inside any render engine that supports the MDL format.

We will also make use of functions inside Substance Designer and see how we can potentially unlock the power that can be found there, should we be brave enough to want to make use of the tools, that is. Finally, we will round out our course by looking at how we would go about taking an exported substance into a game engine, such as Unreal Engine 4. As we have a lot of ground to cover here, and seeing as I'm sure you are eager to get into the texturing, let's get going and dive right in.