Backyard Slice - Designer Materials

 Backyard Slice - Designer Materials

Now that the project is in its final stages, I want to breakdown the full catalogue of designer textures I created during this project. I want to preface that before this project I had extremely limited designer experience from only my pumpkin project weeks before, but I have grown to love and prefer designer to create textures. I especially love the publishing feature that lets me send my textures to substance painter, which proved really useful when texturing my shrine to be consistent with the rest of my scene by applying the tiling materials to it. 

Using the isometric drawing of the scene I made at its beginning, I began collecting reference for what types of materials I might need in the scene. 

Original Material Plan

Obviously, aspects of the scene were changed such as the door becoming a shutter, so this plan became more of an adaptive idea. The initial materials I knew I wanted to make were a black brick texture, a road surface texture, a wood planks texture and some form of white plaster texture was required from the brief.

Black Bricks Texture:

This texture took a lot of iterations to create, but in the end I think I produced a semi stylised brick texture that was black but could still be seen. Most of the issues I had with this material was that it was meant to be black, so I was struggling with the value of the bricks. This was something that was even brought up in my formative presentation and an older, darker version can even be seen in screenshots of that version. I found that I could go substantially lighter in value than I first thought, and so created this final texture.

Black Bricks Material in Designer

Black Bricks Node Set up

Road Surface:

This material also had a LOT of iterations - my original idea was to create a black tarmac texture but it looked very lazy, and after looking at references of Tokyo backstreets I found that a lot of them are block paved, so I began making a floor brick texture. I eventually also made an alternative texture, as can be seen below, which became the vertex painting option to reduce the obvious tiling quality of the scene and to add some grunge and wear.

Road Surface Nodes

Road Surface Material in Designer

Alternative Road Nodes

Alternative Road Surface in Designer

Wood Texture:

I got a lot of assistance and advice from Pat about this material, since wood is notoriously difficult to get right. Its a material that requires enough surface information to infer that it has grain and splinters, but too much noise especially in the normal map results in a messy, chaotic material that looks over produced. I got to the final stage here after a lot of trial and error, and this became a material that I put onto my final trim sheet.

Wood Planks Nodes

Wood Planks Material in Designer

White Plaster:

This was ultimately a really simple material that was a result of just a few blends of noises to create the texture. I took extra care into adding detail that looked like splatters and application patterns, but with a material that ultimately just became a white and rough noise map it was hard to make it extraordinary. I had to create this material however to fulfil the brief, and I am happy with the final result.

Plaster Material in Designer

Plaster Material Nodes

Smooth Stone:

This was a very simple material similar to the plaster, but this time I wanted to make sure I had extremely controlled normal and roughness values so as to not create a noisy surface. This material was going to be used sparingly - mostly as a new base to my fox statues and as a base to the shrine. It also became a part of my trim sheet so that I could use it for other assets, although it turned out to not be particularly useful there.

Smooth Stone Nodes

Smooth Stone Material in Designer

Roof tiles:

This was quite a complex material to make, and I used a lot of references of japanese tiled rooves to find a shape that worked. I also initially made the material much too dark, which resulted in it being hard to read in the scene. By making the base colour lighter it meant that the rooves were less of a focal point when contrasted with the white in the plaster.

To make the shape, I used the curve node in combination with many overlaid tiling gradients to create the individual tiles. Each tile also had a incline to make it look like the tiles were overlaying each other in the right pattern.

Roof Tiles Node

Roof Tiles Material in Designer

Trim Sheet:

This was a culmination of 3 materials; The wood planks, roof tiles and the smooth stone. The graph was basically just a masking set up to make sure that all the materials fit right, and I also rotated the wood grain so that it might be better used by my thinner beams. I think my use of the trim sheet was not optimal, but it did save a couple of extra tiling textures being used when I unwrapped. 

Trim Sheet Nodes

Trim Sheet Material in Designer

Shutters:

This was a material that I made quite late, but overall it is a very simple tiled gradient with a curve node attached to get that specific shape per individual shutter slat. Some variation was added through a simple slope blur that was used sparingly, and I think it produced quite a convincing material.

Shutter Material Nodes

Shutter Material in Designer

Foliage:

My final material was this foliage that I set up. I wanted to create a easily adjustable material for my central branch, so I created a simple leaf from reference of the "Japanese Snowball Bush" plant in google, and then created a symmetrical branch. I added some warping to it for variation, and then started building up the branches to produce a final bush cross section. I also created a flower from using a splatter circular node on a single flower shape, and created the flower centre with a shape splatter node. I also created a simple stem from making a shape, transforming it and putting it in the corner of the sheet. Overall I think this produced a great result that became very versatile and adaptable, and in my final scene I think it looked great.

Foliage Nodes

Foliage Material in Designer