Art Dump #3 - Getting started in substance designer!

Recently I have been making it a little goal of mine to start getting used to more and more programs and techniques, my current feeling doing a long project such as FMP or Off The Map is that it really takes away the opportunity to learn and try and new things as you are forced to work under pressure. (Also the fact that I am using UE4 for 90% of this project makes me just want to try something else to break routine.)

So I have decided to focus my extra time on learning two programs that I am yet to feel comfortable with: Zbrush and Substance Designer. I have used both programs occasionally before but I don't know enough about them to do anything of any complexity but I know that they would be extremely useful for my workflow.

Learning to create some more complicated objects inside Zbrush that I could in UE4 is my goal, with the potential to use substance materials on them as material functions, this follows a similar workflow used in games like The Order:1886 which uses substance materials masked onto areas of a model.

So my first steps mainly consist of watching a load of tutorials and absorbing everything I can about both programs, so here is a rock sculpt as well as a simple substance material I created from a tutorial:





I am following this thread on Polycount where a new reference image is uploaded every week and you have to create a new substance from it. A great way to learn the program as a lot of people upload their sbs files to show how they are made. The goal is to try and create a substance without using any imported images or maps so it really forces you to learn how to create textures completely procedurally,