Creating Marble in Substance Designer

3D Environment and Texture Artist Enrico Tammekänd from Enthelity Studios talked about the way he created a neat marble floor texture. Hope you’ll find this useful.

Hope everyone finds it useful and lets dive right into that!

First of all, lets create our Marble Pattern. Before anything, we need some clean cracks to distort, so start off with a „Tile Sampler“, having the Pattern as „Square“ and X and Y amount around 32 to 64. Bump up the „Scale Random“ to 1, „Color Random“ and „Mask Random“ to around 0.9 to 9.8.

Then use Levels node and make the squares all white and plug them into a Distance node: Tile Sampler to „Source“ and the Levels node to „Mask“ and set the Maximum Distance very high (10k for me). After that use „Edge Detect“ node and done! We have ourselves some very decent cracks.

Now we need Clouds 2, copy-paste it and change the Random Seed to get some variation. Bottom image shows how the nodes are needed to be put together, but I’m going to explain them as well. Basically to get the Marble look, we need to do Directional Warp with the cracks and noises. I added the Directional Warp to our cracks with Clouds 2 as Intensity Input and made the whites not so white with Levels node by tweaking then with levels a bit. I did the same thing with a bit higher intensity on Directional Warp to the same cracks, but tiled them twice and used Safe Transform and rotated one of them to get more variation.

For the final step we will need Clouds 1 and Crystal 1, run a Directional Warp through them, with a lot higher intensity – 120, to get some noise to the background. For Clouds 1, I did the Directional Warp and then Inverted the result. Blended with „Add“ to what we had with 0.15 Intensity. For Crystals, I tiled it 2x with Tranasform2D, did the Directional Warp and again blended with „Add“ and 0.15 on Intensity. And that’s it! We now have the Marble Pattern and now lets move on to the tiles.

Now create a new Graph in the same project for the Tiles. Create a Square Shape, rotate 45 degrees and adjust the scale. Drag a Tile Generator in and feed the Square into that with tiling of 5×5, adjusting the Scale and do a Global Offset from X and Y, both 0.5.

Now create just a basic Tile Generator, again 5×5, for the pattern type select Square and adjust the scale to 0.96 to get some spaces between the tiles. Use Edge Detect for the diamond shapes we did and blend them together as seen from the image.

Duplicate the Shape and Tile Generator that we created and change the shape from Squre to Pyramid. Use a Blur HQ and Histogram Scan to create a expanded mask of the diamond shape from the first Tile Generator.

Create a mask from the bevel node using “Histogram Scan” and “Invert Grayscale”. It will be used to mask out the gold stripes and the main color later on.

Now to the Base Color. Drag two of our Marble Patterns in, changing ones Random Seed and inverting the other one. Also, do the same with a Tile Generator, having the Shape as Square, tiles 5×5 and increase Luminance Variation (leave the Size on 1). Do a Directional Warp to break up the pattern so the same lines won’t run all the same. For mask – that’s what is going to make our different shapes – again, create the same style Tile Generator, but Luminance Variation at 0 and use Checker Mask. To get some awesome shapes out of the pattern, expose Offset on the mask Tile Generator and set the „Step“ to 1. I also added a Symmetry node there and going to include that with the project file but for the sake of this tutorial being too long (as it is already), I’ll just do a explanation for that some other day.

Base Color is actually fairly simple. Just add a Uniform color for both the golden stripes in between the tiles and a dark color for the diamond shapes. Blend them with Clouds 2 with Multiply to get some very subtle variations. Note, that if you want to blend Grayscale with Color, add a „Gradient Map“ node before the Grayscale.

And now some final tweaks. Because gold is not „pure“ metal, if I may say so, it has its own properties/density (you can always google different types of materials) and therefore the metallic level for it is around 0.807, because the density of the gold is 19.30 g/cm3 to 17.31 g/cm3. I know, a bit too specific, but in order to have realistic looking textures, you will always need to do some research on what you are building. You can generate the metallic map from our mask from Bevel node, add Levels node to that and set the Level Out Low to 0.807. For roughness, do the same, but for Level Out Low, set that to 0.087. „Normal Intensity“ at 30, format „DirectX and „AO“ spread at 0.005.

For the final render, I made changed the Random Color on the Marble Pattern to 0.98, Edge Detect to 0.01 and the main veins Levels a bit more to the black and here is the final look:

You can always add all kinds of microdetails to push it even further to realism. Small details are what actually make The difference. Always do your research and try to stick to that. Substance Designer is so wide and you can do unlimited stuff in there, so always keep experimenting and see what awesome stuff you can make.

I really enjoyed creating this tutorial and hope everyone find it somehow useful. If anyone wants to see some of my other creations and learn from them, visit our Gumroad. Also the project files are included here.

Creating Marble in Substance Designer

3D Environment and Texture Artist Enrico Tammekänd from Enthelity Studios talked about the way he created a neat marble floor texture. Hope you’ll find this useful.

Enrico Tammekänd, CEO & Founder at Enthelity Studios

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