Skip to content

Substance Designer

Summary

This YouTube tutorial demonstrates how to import and optimize Substance Designer materials within the Maverick render engine. It covers importing procedures, adjusting displacement quality for optimal performance and visual appeal, and utilizing features like adaptive subdivision and camera-dependent rendering to enhance efficiency. The video also showcases various material examples and techniques for manipulating lighting and creating turntable animations. The presenters encourage viewers to utilize resources like the Substance Source material repository and explore the cited artists' work. Finally, the tutorial highlights post-processing tools for enhancing the final render.

Maverick Render Product Viz Adobe Substance Designer Workflow

F.A.Q.

  • How do I import Substance Designer materials into Maverick? To import Substance Designer materials into Maverick, locate the Substance Designer button in the main toolbar. Double-click on any texture file from your Substance Designer material set. The importer will then prompt you to select an ambience, which provides initial lighting conditions for the material. After selecting your ambience, the material will import, including any displacement settings, using default parameters. You can further customize these settings as needed.

  • What is the importance of displacement when importing Substance Designer materials? Displacement is crucial when importing Substance Designer materials because it controls the 3D geometry deformation based on texture information, which adds depth and realism to your rendered materials. The displacement height can be adjusted in the object properties to create stronger or weaker elevation effects. By enabling displacement, you are converting texture data into physical 3D detail for your render.

  • How can I improve the quality of displacement in Maverick? The displacement quality can be improved by reducing the maximum edge length parameter in the render panel. This increases the level of subdivision on your geometry, making displacement effects more precise. You can further refine the quality by using adaptive displacement, which subdivides areas with more detail more intensely while leaving flat areas with less subdivision, optimizing performance.

  • What is adaptive displacement and how does it benefit my renders? Adaptive displacement is a technique that dynamically adjusts the subdivision level of a 3D object based on the complexity of the underlying texture. Areas with high surface detail, like edges and crevices, receive more subdivisions, while flat areas receive fewer. This ensures high quality in areas where it is most needed while saving on computation time and GPU memory usage, allowing for higher overall subdivision quality without over-subdividing flat areas.

  • How can I optimize memory usage and performance when using displacement? To optimize memory usage and performance when using displacement, take advantage of the "cull hidden" and "cull backside" toggles in the render panel. "Cull hidden" ignores objects that are not visible to the camera, preventing unnecessary subdivision of hidden objects. "Cull backside" reduces subdivision on the back facing parts of an object that aren't visible, concentrating subdivision on the visible side and also saving on resources.

  • How can I change the lighting and ambience of my imported materials in Maverick? Maverick allows easy adjustment of the lighting environment through its library of ambiences. From the lighting library, you can access an ambiences tab and drag and drop ambiences onto your material. You can also further manipulate the lighting interactively using the light mixer tool, allowing for real time changes to individual light source intensity without the need to re-render your scene each time. Additionally you can rotate the environment holding the ctrl and shift keys and using the right mouse button.

  • How do wireframe materials help when setting up displacement? Wireframe materials are essential for visualizing mesh quality when working with displacement. Applying a wireframe material allows you to see the actual polygons and triangles generated by the displacement, helping you understand where the geometry is being subdivided. This visualization aids in adjusting the displacement quality parameters for the best possible balance between quality and performance by allowing you to see the effects of different levels of subdivision.

  • How can I achieve a high-quality close-up view of my materials? To achieve a high-quality close-up view, create a new camera and adjust your framing. Utilize the "cull hidden" and "cull backside" toggles to limit subdivision to the visible camera view, conserving memory and resources allowing you to increase the displacement quality even further. After this is accomplished you can reload the subdivision to take effect. To control the focal point and add depth of field, use the ctrl and shift keys and left mouse button, or the quad menu auto-focus options. The aperture of the camera can also be modified to get the precise depth of field effect desired.