Broken Roof Tiles Tutorial — VOL 07

Roof tiles are an awkward material to author because they have to work at two distances at once — as an ordered, repeating pattern read from across the street, and as individually cracked, chipped and displaced pieces when the camera comes close. Volume 07 is 180 minutes on building exactly that in Substance Designer, taking the surface from clean and ordered through to properly damaged.

What you get

• ✓180 minutes of video at 1080 resolution
• ✓The project file, including the clean SBS graph
• ✓Two chapters: height and structure first, then colour and roughness

Chapter 01 — structure and damage

The build starts from Substance Designer's default nodes with a blockout of the tile layout, then adds detail in passes: the larger shape variation first, then micro detail such as cracks and broken tiles across the surface. Part of the chapter goes on building a surface noise maker and then using it inside the main graph, which is the more transferable lesson — a noise authored for the surface in front of you beats a stock one every time.

Chapter 02 — colour and roughness

Colour sampling is done with gradient nodes and the results blended for tile-to-tile variation, the thing that stops a roof reading as a repeating tile. Once the roughness data is in place, an atlas map from the Quixel library is blended over the tiles for the last layer of surface interest.

Because the material is parameterised rather than fixed, the same graph yields the clean roof over a wealthy district and the collapsing one on a ruin, which is the argument for building tiles rather than buying them.

The level is intermediate and a basic knowledge of Substance Designer is assumed; the included SBS needs version 11.3 or above. The videos are unnarrated throughout, with neither commentary nor subtitles.