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Many of you loved the first BTS article about Sea Breeze; here comes edition two. Thank you guys for waiting for the second part of the BTS Sea Breeze series. This article took me a while to prepare because too many distractions happening at once. Among ETH Denver, there was also an unforeseen period of adopting the "Buffiflu," finishing my term as Lead Steward at Unlock Protocol DAO, and so much more. But I am back now and getting some good stuff into your hands.
Now, let's jump into this more detailed review of my collaboration for Sea Breeze with SenkDesign from the end of last year! The goal is to provide an in-depth explanation of how I create digital fabrics using visual coding in Substance Designer. The tool mentioned is part of the 3D suite with Adobe and specializes in creating procedural textures. The advantage of a tool like this is that you can generate multiple variations of your ideas in seconds and turn the results into high-end texture maps for your 3D fashion, characters, and environments. In comparison to AI, it delivers absolute control over every detail and produces high-quality outputs that can be transferred directly into 3D modeling tools and game engines with suitable plugins. While maintaining complete control over every step, it also ensures consistency.
If you are a beginner in 3D or Substance, you might wonder even more why you should learn a tool like this when you can produce seamless patterns with AI. It's an easy but multifaceted answer that starts with a question: Why do we still have oil paintings when there are computer graphics?
It's not entirely for the same reason, but perhaps it's a similar one where control is a factor. If you want to tell a specific story with your designs and your goal is to impress with high-quality and unique output, Substance is a tool you might want to learn. Substance does much more than produce seamless and procedural patterns. It generates texture maps that can define how your lighting and environment interact with your textured objects.
The fabric I chose for this is my personal favorite. While working on the project with Laura, I gave it a very creative name, 😂 "No3." The fabric is a multicolor silk chiffon with light metalized glass beading.
Every 3D material I create to me is a layered system. So I ask myself, what is the most essential element that is needed? In our case, that is the fabric itself. I start by layering and blending different nodes that create the base feel of the fabric. Sometimes I do use physical references (fabric swatches), especially when it comes to the final touches at a later stage.
I continue to explore the question of what the next layer is until the uppermost part of a 3D material has been reached. In our case, the next step involves weaving shapes on top of the base fabric using a metallic thread. I created two versions, but ended up liking this one more. It felt more refined and suitable for the fabric material at hand:
Next, I combined the woven fabric with the shape arrangement below. I wanted to re-create Laura's original pattern with as much detail as possible, which meant blending a lot of individual shapes in case I wanted to experiment with the layout later on. As you can tell, the blending node is the most essential one in this repetitive process, together with the transform node:
Ultimately, we need to take a quick side step at this point to create the beads and the threading of the beads. This process consists of two blocks, one that defines the little thread and another that creates the bead itself before blending both shapes together so they can be repeated in an array:
The most important step now is not only blending all the different layers in the proper order together, but also translating the beads to an array around the existing shapes. This part used to be tricky, but with the still relatively new Spline and Path nodes, it now works like magic by using a "Mask to Paths" node, followed by a "Paths to Spline" one, and lastly a "Scatter on Spline Grayscale" node. The general order of blending can vary, but for the most part, I stick with the same process of layering the fabric in my head, which means the beads and threading come last:
Only after all of these (greyscale) elements are put in place I start exploring the colors and shading of each of the outputs (color, metallic, roughness, normal, height, AO and opacity). The coloring for this one has been a lot of fun. The "Color Base" section features a switch that allows users to switch between a multi-color and a simplified version of the base textile. The area to the right shows the coloring of the woven elements and masks out the beading as well:
If you're seeing something like this for the first time, it can feel a bit overwhelming, which is why I'll create a walkthrough soon, going through the process step by step and showing the different values of the nodes along the way.
If you're a beginner in 3D, especially with Substance, you may want to start with some of these tutorials. They have helped me either learn new skills or improve my existing ones:
Texture Maps Explained (in detail)
Texturing Helper Playlist (This is my personal collection of YouTube videos that have helped me along the way.)
Putting together the final renderings is still a whole different task from producing the texture maps in Substance Designer. For Sea Breeze, I created a simple scene that I felt fit the Nordic maritime vibe of the collection, designed by Laura (please check her TikTok for a bunch of entertaining and cool videos she creates around her excellent work).
I do my final renderings in Blender 3D, an open-source powerhouse of a software. What matters most for getting high-quality renderings are:
Good Lighting
I usually set up an HDRi for general lighting and use area and point lights for detail lighting in the area that matters most to my final shot.
High-Resolution Textures
For game applications, I would never export texture maps beyond 2 K resolution. However, for renderings, I make exceptions and use the 4 K export. 8k is way beyond the point of good and evil, and it slows down performance too much for a barely noticeable improvement online (most platforms have upload limitations, and the details won't show anyway).
Here are the final results of my favorite fabric from the collection, from different angles:
I enjoy rendering different shots because I usually like to have the option to choose between various options for the different applications or further content I create.
Here is the final animated version on TikTok showcasing No3 of Sea Breeze. Please like and follow if you enjoy this content.
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