Hex Grid Sci-Fi Material: Substance Designer

SEPTEMBER 2022

As part of our course at Visual Magic, we have now entered into the realms of Substance Designer for a 2 week intoduction course. This current piece forms part of my third assignment.

To try and challenge myself, I thought I would follow a reference image, rather than just come up with something in my head. I felt this would force me to follow a set path and build-in challenges along the way. This caused numerous headaches but I'm pretty happy with how it turned out during the 5 day assignment period.

My point of reference was a Glowing Hexagonal Grid by the very talented Eric Gajnak. His material can be seen here: https://www.artstation.com/serinkarg

I liked how Eric had used a combination of small square tiles, as a base layer, with random hexagonal patterns scattered across the top. The additonal elements of wear and tear, combined with the emissive cells, really stood out and I liked the challenge it presented. Having compared the overview of my Substance Designer grid to Erics', mine is probably double the size but I'm hoping I can become more efficient as time goes on.

To add to my learning, I also decided to tryout Marmoset Toolbag 4 for my final render, in addition to looking into and using Substance Designers' PBR Render node. I've uploaded both renders for comparison and I'll definitely be using Marmoset again!

Overall, this has been quite an assignment for learning new software, nodes, and rendering techniques. I now look forward to building upon these skills for future assignments.