I have created this step-by-step tutorial on how to create aged wood material in Substance Designer. I have got a lot of feedback from my Youtube audience to create a tutorial where I show the actual graph creation process, so this is exactly it. This is about two hours in length and shows the whole process of starting with broad shapes to the final rendering phase in Marmoset Toolbag.
The skills you learn in this tutorial can be applied to variety of materials, not only wood. Having skills to quickly create efficient and variety of materials is a must have for environment artist.
For example, I show usage of slope blur grayscale node, which I am using to create wood damage details. This node is very useful in many cases, where ever you need weathering effects or such. The node can even be used to create rust leaks and such.
Creating PBR materials in procedural way has many benefits over image conversion. I know there are many tools out there including offerings from ex Allegorithmic, Materialize and such, but in my experience these have always produced more or less inaccurate results.
Doing it from scratch procedurally creates clean effect where you have full control on how the details propagate to diffuse, roughness and normal maps.
Also the ability expose certain nodes will allow great flexibility when using the substance in host applications. You could for example decide how many wood planks or metal bands you want. This type of functionality is only a couple of clicks way in Substance Designer.
Optimization is also important. In this tutorial I show you couple of tricks that help you to make your substance graphs execute faster.
The tutorial is about two hours length and is available in both Gumroad and Cubebrush sites.
Please also check my popular Wood Floor in Substance Designer tutorial.
