How to Use the Substance Designer PBR Render Node

By design, they should visually be descriptive, unique, and feel collectible. And if you ask production they should be finished in two weeks, as we had to time constrain ourselves to a single sprint for this feature.

As badges themselves had no visual progression and they were only displayed as images – we decided we could remove unwrapping, texturing, most of the modeling effort and even rendering from the production process. Sounds great! Even though they have a 3D look we treated and generated them as 2D images. Everything else was “faked”.

In order to be able to fake it, we used our trusty friend – Substance Designer and one of its minions called the PBR Render node. The idea was to generate height maps for every badge, and its elements, and render everything in Substance Designer. That way we could have speed, consistency, fidelity, and flexibility – all in one.

The PBR Render node was a real life-saver. Basically, you plug in your material and your HDRI environment and you are good to go! Magic! To test out the idea, we made the first – proof of concept – a batch of background elements. Since we were dealing with height maps we realized we can do this in many ways: generate them completely procedurally, use the vast library of ZBrush alphas we have, or bake it out from any model.

Now that we had proof we could make this it was time to make some creative decisions. As our workflow was procedural and semi-automated we didn’t really have to make them right away but we wanted to experiment and set a clear path as early as possible. Iteration was super easy, barely an inconvenience. Thanks to the PBR node we could just plug in any HDRI image and immediately get a different light, rig, and mood. Alongside HDRIs we also tried building completely custom light rigs using the Substance Designer Light nodes but we opted for the HDRI approach as it was faster. In the end – the decision came to choosing the light setup which was most neutral and readable.

Selecting the right material was a bit more complicated, just because we liked them all. It was too easy to play with, we had the entire Substance Source library at our disposal and we could plug in any material. When the playtime was over we agreed we should keep it logical and tried out only some of the basic and clean materials, the ones that would even physically make sense.

After doing some in-game color variation tests, trying to figure out the looks of the badges, mainly shown in player compare screen and in really crowded space like leader-boards, it was clear that we should go simple – metal and gold.

The last thing we were uncertain of was how to combine the primary and secondary elements of the badge. Yes, there was a clear option of doing that in Substance Designer but at that point, we didn’t have the process of generating heightmaps nailed down. On top of that, we didn’t know what those elements would look like, how big they would be – aka what their height ranges would be. They might overlap in some way and we didn’t want to build systems to optimize and balance all of that. We went a bit old-school and just combined the elements in Photoshop. It was rather simple to build a Layer Style that would match the shadows of the PBR Render node.

Once the models started coming in we were extremely happy with the results and whoever saw these first outputs didn’t believe us that we haven’t “properly” rendered them. Victory!

For the secondary (background) elements we went all in and used everything we had – procedural, alpha library, some custom made ones and we even made a quick shield generator in Substance Designer that was used in more than half of them.

The substance graph itself was actually very simple, even with keeping everything in it – even the materials or HDRIs we didn’t use. Once we had all the height maps it was a bit troublesome to iterate at one point as we had to manually connect every one of them. I guess that using Substance Automation Toolkit would be a perfect use case for this but we didn’t have a developer to help us or the time to learn it ourselves. We had to cheat.

In order to batch process the inputs in Substance Designer the wrong way we tricked the tool into thinking we are working with UDIMs. We made a simple 3D mesh array of 10×10 planes where every plane had it’s UV’s placed in the respective UDIM tile – basically 1001-1010 and 1001-1101 ranges). After importing the mesh in Substance Designer we baked the Height Maps for that mesh. What we got were empty images as there was no height information but then we replaced those baked files on the hard drive with pre-baked Height Maps from Houdini and we were good to go! After applying the graph to all UDIMs we could batch export them. Another victory!

All of the rendered elements from Substance Designer were imported in Photoshop as smart objects so we could keep the process flexible. There we combined them, did some minor color adjustments, and exported them to the game.

For more renders, you can go to the Artstation.

The fun doesn’t have to stop there. Added to the latest Substance Designer release, the new PBR render node you can get even more physically accurate renders and get some nice promotional shots.

https://main--cc--adobecom.hlx.page/products/substance3d/magazine/fragments/HowToUseSubstanceDesignerPbrRenderNode/promos