Chesterfield Leather Tutorial — VOL 10

Chesterfield tufting is expensive. Modelled honestly, the diamond pattern and the buttons pulling it in cost a serious vertex budget, and every sofa, headboard, car interior and padded door in the scene pays it again. Built procedurally as a material in Substance Designer, the same look costs a texture set and can be re-proportioned in seconds. Volume 10 is 125 minutes on precisely that: how the Chesterfield structure is assembled from nodes and made to behave like upholstered hide.

What you get

• ✓125 minutes of video at 1080 resolution
• ✓The project file, including the clean SBS graph to study
• ✓Two chapters covering height first, then colour and roughness

Chapter 01 — structure and surface

The basic Chesterfield pattern is built first, then the details that make it read as leather under tension: the wrinkles gathering towards each button, the buttons themselves, and the underlayer the tufted surface sits on. Several maps are generated separately and blended to arrive at the final height.

Chapter 02 — colour and roughness

The colour pass uses a gradient map driven from a small set of colours and blended with grunge to break up the flatness. Roughness is given a straightforward setup suited to leather, where the sheen is what tells a viewer how worn the hide is and how often it has been sat on.

The audience is product visualisation and games asset artists in particular, since those are the two places Chesterfield patterns turn up most and where the saved vertices matter most. The level is intermediate and basic Substance Designer knowledge is assumed; the SBS file requires version 11.3 or above. The videos carry no narration and no subtitles — the work is shown rather than described.