pushing the limitations of substance designer

When you think Substance Designer, no doubt the name Javier Perez pops up. Javier gives us a short but sweet insight into some of his work from the Signature Series and his contribution to Artstation Learning. Read now to see how he works with Substance Designer.

Introduction

My name is Javier Perez, and I’m a senior material artist currently working at Playstation VASG. I’ve been in the industry for 8 years now and I graduated from The Art Institute of California – San Diego. Throughout my career I’ve worked at studios such as Infinity Ward, Kojima Productions, Sony Online, and Redemption Games. I’ve also contributed to projects such as Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, Lawbreakers, and Planetside 2. I'm passionate about sharing my Substance Designer knowledge at various industry events in my spare time including GDC and Gnoman.

Career - Becoming a Material Artist

Throughout my schooling there was a strong emphasis on how to build environments and props so naturally I ended up graduating as an environment artist. At the time having just graduated, I wasn't aware of  studio structure and how many different disciplines go into creating environments.

As I moved from studio to studio throughout my career, I was noticing certain disciplines becoming more and more specialized having to do with environment art. Some people were just modeling, while some people were just texturing. At the beginning I was doing both, but I found myself constantly learning new software, and ultimately, Substance Designer. During my time at Redemption Games is when I started pushing the boundaries of Substance Designer, I had been seeing more and more updates within the software and all the work people were doing on Artstation. Once I saw all of these possibilities I pushed myself to get better with it. 

Building Materials

In my opinion a good material always starts with the height map.  Substance designer is so reliant on creating all your other maps based on the height information you create, so not putting enough time into it can really show through in the other maps you create. With my materials height maps I always start with the largest forms and move on to the finer granular details. From there I move onto my albedo and finally to roughness.

I love experimenting with new nodes. Every new substance release I make sure to implement the newest nodes they have added into my workflow. It gives me the ability to try them out and remember them for future use. Though I do have certain ways that I always create certain effects, I like incorporating new techniques as much as possible, especially because there are so many different ways to get the same results within substance designer.

I use pureref a lot, so I tend to grab as much reference material as I can. I like getting images that have different angles, but also images that are super close up to know what kinds of details to incorporate into your material that you wouldn't necessarily see from a far away shot. I also like to get the same material with different lighting and environment scenarios, this is a great way to get an early start on how you want your final renders mood to look like.

Signature Series

I really wanted to do something different with my substance signature series so I moved away from the traditional sphere renders and moved towards how they could actually be used and applied in a production environment. I gathered a lot of reference to see where  these materials would be applied to in an environment. Sometimes they would be inside the cabin of a shuttle, or on the exterior of a satellite. Creating the renders in space was as easy as finding the right HDRI that had the correct background, and applying a few lights.

Substance Alchemist

I've been finding that Substance Alchemist is great for processing scan data. The layer stack to fix repetition and tiling seams has been great for working with scanned fabrics. I also love the ability to use it as a material manager that shows all the materials you have imported and worked on.

Artstation Learning

My Artstation learning courses were released a few weeks ago, and there are more on the way. I also will be opening mentorships in the near future so look out for that.

If you've been wanting to learn Substance Designer make sure to check out my Artstation course videos. They are a great way to learn the UI & fundamentals of Substance Designer. For anything else, feel free to drop me a line on Artstation or email. I'm always open to helping anyone anyway I can.