In this tutorial, we will look at a basic technique that allows us to reduce, at least to some extent, the tiled appearance that results from using repeating Materials across large surfaces, such as a floor or pavement.
Video Transcript
Hello everyone. In this tutorial, we will look at a basic technique that allows us to reduce, at least to some extent, the tiled appearance that results from using repeating Materials across large surfaces, such as a floor or pavement.
The problem we want to solve is this: when we apply a Material to a very large surface and need to repeat it multiple times, those repetitions become far too obvious. A good example is the Substance Material "Cobblestones Small Grey", which I am applying here to a simple plane. When the scale is set to 1, the Material looks fine and shows no visible repetition. However, when the scale is increased to 8 or higher, for example when texturing a road or a plaza, although this can also happen with walls and other surfaces depending on the Material, the pattern starts to reveal noticeable repetitions.
A very simple and quick, yet fairly effective, way to address this issue is to add a Fill Layer and multiply the Material by another layer that uses a non-repeating, or minimally repeating, random map. Multiplying a color by a grayscale value darkens the original color, and will even turn it completely black when multiplied by black, since the color is being multiplied by a value between 1.0 and 0.0.
Let's proceed as follows:
Add a Fill Layer and place it above the base Material. The new layer will completely cover the Material underneath.
Disable all Fill Layer channels except Color.
Change the layer blending mode to Multiply. As explained earlier, the entire original Material will now appear darker.
Right-click the Fill Layer and choose "Add bitmap mask". Then type, for example, "Clouds" into the search box that appears and select a map. In my case, I am choosing "Clouds 2".
The mask will apply the gray layer only in specific areas, introducing some randomness into the original pattern.
"Clouds 2" is a native Substance Painter map and can be found, along with many other maps, in the "Procedurals" section of the Shelf. These are procedural masks generated through algorithms, and they can be modified by adjusting their parameters in the Properties panel.
We can quickly replace "Clouds 2" with another procedural map by dragging it from the Shelf into the "Grayscale" section of the mask's Fill Layer, as I am showing on screen.
To make the final result darker or lighter, we can adjust the grayscale value of the Fill Layer's Base Color. However, that's not all. We can also control the strength of the multiplication using the numeric slider located below "Multiply", and we can add Levels to the noise texture in order to work directly on its histogram, modifying the texture's brightness and contrast if needed.
So far, I have shown you how to darken the base color using the Multiply mode, but we can also change the Fill Layer blending mode. Be careful not to confuse this with the noise texture's blending mode. For example, we can switch to Saturation or Color. In the latter case, we can assign an actual color, rather than a grayscale value, to the Fill Layer's Color channel. Substance Painter provides several blending modes for Fill Layers, allowing us to affect different components of an object's color.
Applying a noise texture as a layer mask can be repeated with additional Fill Layers, using different noise textures each time to introduce even more variation into the base Material. We can use the same blending mode repeatedly, darkening the Material through multiple layers of multiplication, or use different blending modes to affect different types of information. In this way, we can build a stack of masks that progressively modify the original Material. However, we are not done with our observations yet.
Up to this point, we have examined the effects of the Fill Layer on the Base Color information channel, but we can also use this layer with other channels, such as Roughness. In that case, the final Roughness will be modulated by the noise texture above it.
To show you the effect at a glance, I will enable the Roughness channel on the upper Fill Layer and switch the 3D view to Roughness display mode.
I will disable the Fill Layer to inspect the Roughness map of the original Material and better understand the impact of the upper layer. Then I will enable the Fill Layer again and adjust its Roughness value. As you can see, values close to 0 make the original map darker following the Clouds pattern, while values close to 1 make the original map lighter, again following the Clouds pattern of the Fill Layer.
It is worth noting that the Fill Layer blending mode affects the Base Color, as we saw earlier with Saturation and Color, but it does not affect the Roughness channel by itself. For Roughness, the behavior is always the same: values closer to 0 make the surface less rough, while values closer to 1 make it rougher, always according to the pattern defined by the layer mask.
Finally, we can add a Material on top and define its areas of influence using brushes, covering the Material underneath with freehand painting to introduce an additional layer of randomness.
For example, I will add the "Mud Brown" Material, which is essentially mud, using Normal blending mode. I will then assign a completely black layer mask and choose a brush that is not too uniform, such as "Dirt 1". I can then start painting, keeping in mind that, because of the way this grayscale brush works, the brush strokes will accumulate over one another, making it possible to increase or decrease the visibility of the effect.
Since this is only the mask for the "Mud Brown" Material, I can still modify the scale, mapping, color, and other parameters of that Material at any time through its Properties panel.
Well, that concludes this tutorial. See you next time!