Metal Retaining Wall Tutorial — VOL 06

A metal retaining wall — steel bars pinning back a rock face — is among the most reusable pieces of in-game environment dressing there is. It appears on roadsides, at quarry edges, in industrial yards and anywhere a level needs a change of height explained. Volume 06 of the Substance Designer series spends a hundred minutes building one as a single procedural material.

What you get

• ✓100 minutes of video at 1080 resolution
• ✓Two chapters: height and structure first, then colour, metallic and roughness

Chapter 01 — bars and rock

The metal bars are built and given their surface and additive detail, then the rock surface they are holding back is created using a different set of techniques. The chapter closes on the part that is easiest to get wrong, which is blending the two so the stone sits behind the metal rather than beside it.

Chapter 02 — colour, metallic and roughness

Colour comes from a gradient map fed with a few sampled colours and blended with grunge maps, and the metallic and roughness channels are then separated out. A graph holding metal and stone at once has to keep those two channels honest, or the rock picks up a sheen it has no business having.

The value is in the combination rather than in either surface alone. Holding two unrelated materials in one graph, with masks deciding where each one wins, is the technique that makes environment materials possible in Substance Designer at all, and a retaining wall is a good-natured place to learn it.

The level is intermediate and basic Substance Designer knowledge is expected. Nothing in this volume is narrated and no subtitles are supplied; you watch the nodes go down.