His Bark Materials…
This year I’m going to try and blog every month. I was doing well for a while but got busier last year and didn’t get to it as often. So, here’s the first post of 2018, some material work. Specifically, phone captured scans of real world tree bark, conformed to be seamless, tileable and usable arbitrarily on game world models. There is some amazing material work being done in Substance Designer these days, and I’d like to incorporate that into my workflow at some point. The bark material below is a proof of concept, a number of 2k textures extracted from a 16k source image and a 20 million polygon model. These were derived from photos taken on my phone and processed in Reality Capture. Textures were baked in Toolbag 3, apart from the albedo which was baked in 3DSMax. Here is the high poly model, the bark was splintered and raised away in places and it captured well for the most part. There is a lot of potential in this capture and I think a really good use case to give Artomatix a proper try.
Here is a breakdown of the textures, eyeballed for metalness PBR:
Here is the result when applied to a sphere in Toolbag 3
Pete Mc Nally's Blog 
As always, amazing quality. I talked to the CEO and chief dev TD at Algorithmic when I was writing about technology (2015-ish), and did a puff piece for them on Substance. As you say, a cornucopia of great tools. Are they doing the animated particle shaders yet? If not, that’s on the way, dripping oil, seeping blood, progression every time you pass in the game. Etc, lots there…
Hey Rory, yes those particle based brushes are in there now, I haven’t had much cause to use them though. Very useful for cloning across multiple textures simultaneously.
It’s Really helpful