Facade In Substance Designer Tutorial

An entire building facade with no modelling anywhere in the process: the windows, the mouldings, the string courses and the stonework are all nodes, blended. That is the subject of this 300-minute tutorial, and the reason to watch it is less the facade itself than the demonstration of how far a Substance Designer graph can be pushed before geometry becomes necessary.

What you get

• ✓300 minutes of video at 1080 resolution
• ✓The project file: the SBS graph and the Marmoset Toolbag scene
• ✓Three stages — height and normal, then the colour channels, then rendering

Height, normal and ambient occlusion

The overall shape of the facade is established first and then subdivided into detail: the large architectural masses before the mouldings and the surface break-up. Everything downstream depends on this stage being clean, and most of the running time sits here.

Base colour, roughness and metallic

With the form resolved, the colour channels are built on top of it — including the roughness variation that separates painted joinery from stone, and the metallic channel for the fixtures.

Export and render

The finished maps are exported and taken into Marmoset Toolbag, where the presentation shot is set up and rendered. The Marmoset scene is included, so the lighting can be examined rather than guessed at.

A working knowledge of Substance Designer and its node workflow is needed before starting; this is an intermediate tutorial moving at the pace of somebody building rather than teaching fundamentals. The technique generalises well past this one building — once an architectural elevation can be held in a single graph, shopfronts, boundary walls and interior panelling are the same problem at a different scale.

The five hours are unnarrated: no commentary track and no subtitles. Created by Mirage3Dart and Milad Kambari.