Metal Railway Tutorial — VOL 08

A stretch of railway is four materials pretending to be one: timber sleepers, steel rail, the metal fixings that hold the two together, and the pebble ballast underneath. Volume 08 is 170 minutes on combining height data from those separate surfaces and keeping control of the result, which is the skill the material is really there to teach.

What you get

• ✓170 minutes of video at 1080 resolution
• ✓The project file, including the clean SBS graph
• ✓Height built across two parts, then colour, roughness and metallic

Building the height

The wood planks come first as a blockout of the structure, then the rails and the metal connections fixing them to the timber are added on top. The ground is built last, and here it is pebbles — a ballast bed whose scale and packing have to be judged against the sleepers above it, or the whole thing reads as a model railway.

Colour, roughness and metallic

Colour sampling runs through gradient nodes and is blended to reach the result, then further colour detail is layered in and the metallic channel prepared separately, so that rail heads polished by use sit differently from the rusted fixings around them.

The reason to work through this one is the stacking. Most environment materials in Substance Designer are several unrelated surfaces sharing a graph, and railway is a good teaching case because its four elements are visually distinct, physically layered and impossible to fake with a single height map.

The level is intermediate and basic Substance Designer knowledge is assumed; the SBS file requires version 11.3 or above. No part of this volume is narrated and no subtitles are included.