Stylized Plaster Wall Tutorial — VOL 04

Volume 04 is where the Substance Designer series turns to stylized work, and the shift matters more than it sounds. A stylized wall is not a realistic wall with the detail turned down; it is a wall whose shapes have been deliberately simplified and exaggerated so that they still read from across a room. A hundred minutes here on a plaster wall over brick, with two different wooden structures crossing it.

What you get

• ✓100 minutes of video at 1080 resolution
• ✓The clean SBS graph, so the finished network can be opened and studied
• ✓Two chapters: height and structure, then colour and roughness

Chapter 01 — surfaces and structure

Three surfaces are built and combined. Bricks come first and are modified until they read the way a stylized brick should, then a plaster cover is created and blended over them so the brick shows through where the plaster has broken away. Last, the wooden structure is built and added to the wall.

Chapter 02 — colour and roughness

The colour pass runs through a gradient map with colours sampled from reference images and blended together, which is a faster route to a coherent stylized palette than picking swatches by hand. Roughness is kept simple and effective, as it should be on stylized work, where the shapes are doing more of the storytelling than the surface response is.

Blending a broken cover over a structural layer underneath is the reusable idea in this volume — the same graph shape gives you stone under stucco, tiles under a screed, or paint over panelling. Learning it on a stylized wall has the advantage that you can see exactly what the masks are doing.

The level is intermediate and basic knowledge of Substance Designer is assumed. Both videos run unnarrated, without commentary or subtitles.