Hi again, material and car lovers. Today we’re releasing the last batch of Substance Source materials dedicated to vehicle texturing. In this release, you’ll find more than 140 additional assets for interior automotive texturing. With the previous weeks’ Prototyping, Exterior 1, Exterior 2, Interior 1 batches, today’s release completes the full collection.
The Substance Source team’s technical artists worked tirelessly to create our biggest production ever, with 700 materials and more than 1500 presets.
Let’s look back at this month of materials releases, the introduction of new workflows for the industry and the introduction of the Substance concept car.
This automotive materials project started with a cross-user and market expectation study of the evolution of visualization pipelines, both in offline and real-time rendering. The idea is simple: create high-quality content for both the production of photorealistic visuals as well as the industrial design process itself.
We come from the game industry and understood very quickly that confronting this kind of challenge meant we needed to partner with industry professionals. We had to experience their constraints and standards to make sure our content would be useful.
That is why, alongside material creation, we decided to design a digital show car – with the same workflow car manufacturers use: sketch, 3D modeling and rendering (offline & real-time). The result is the X-TAON – Substance Showcar.
The X-TAON is an electric show-car designed by Takumi Yamamoto, modeled in Alias by Frederic Gasson and rendered by Lionel David and Guillaume Meyer. You discovered the first lines of this car last month at Substance Days London.
Today, we take a first look at the X-TAON’s interior design. The design team includes Arthur Coudert, interior car designer, and Maxime Daguet, 3D Alias modeler at Vintech. Of course, the X-TAON is entirely textured with the materials we created for the release.
And this is just the beginning! In the coming months, you’ll see more experiments and workflows with the tools we created during this project. But ultimately, what we most want to see is what you guys will create with it.
Car Interior Materials
Our materials are not limited to a single use. You’ll find in this pack several wood veneers, fabrics, leathers, woven composites and plastic grains that can be applied to a variety of different universes. From design objects to architectural scenes and beyond, simply pick the building blocks that you need.
In this new batch, you get more surfaces, patterns and combination options with more than 140 assets in 6 categories of matter – including new wood types.
As always, we aim to help you reach the texture you’re looking for. There are several ways to get there: simple and quick modification of the Substance material parameters will enable endless variations. However, if you need to get more specific effects, download the SBS file and add your procedural filter to the graph.
Patterned Leathers and Fabrics
Today, we add procedural filters to the leather library, as well as scanned skin grains. With these materials, you will be able to reproduce new effects within the leatherworks craftsmanship palette.
Customize the look and feel of each leather grain. Simulate weathering with scratches, cracks, and staining. The leather is fully bespoke because you can input your bitmaps from real-life measurements, or simply area-based ones, to define different levels of aging across the leather sample. In that way, no leather will look the same. And that makes the scattering assembly of multiple samples way easier.
Try this free worn leather on Substance Source to test this aging generator by yourself. And, the icing on the cake: since the material is procedural, the .sbs file is available too!
There is one more type of leather that is particularly useful in the field of car design: perforated leather. We adjusted the parameters list so that every asset can reproduce a wide range of different configurations. You’ll be able to customize the shape of the holes, their sizes and their number, as well as the density and distribution of the hole grid on each sample of leather.
Moreover, you’ll be able to show the thickness of the leather by controlling the depth of the punctures with the height range parameter.
We also give color and trim designers the ability to simulate new leather tanning and dyeing processes. By adding color within the wall of the hole, we can get a photorealistic reproduction of a “double-sided” dye, with the underside colorant appearing in the perforations.
Following the same approach, pattern quilted and embossed leather come along with new and fully customizable patterns.
Adding padding to the back of a seat does not require extra modeling resources. Color and trim designers, who used to design complex material assemblies in 2D, early in the design process, can now do it later – and in 3D.
Textiles are an essential part of the interior upholstery. In this realm, we find complex woven fabrics, technical knits with a combination of elaborate geometric structures and colorful visual effects.
To recreate examples of the most common textiles used in this industry, we used many techniques. On Substance Source, the simple monochromatic woven fabrics are entirely procedural, and the .sbs graphs are available. Want to learn how to make them? Well, you know where to look.
For the pieces with a higher degree of complexity, we chose to use scan techniques to capture all the meaningful details as accurately as possible.
But you can still tweak the parameters! This collection isn’t an exception to the rest of the materials. Hybrid scan materials are very present on Substance Source. These materials are based on scans, and we generated procedural masks from the scans to separate colors, threads, or other parameters. So, at the very least, you can modify the colors independently of one another.
Meters
Meters may be considered a detail compared to other functioning parts of the car. But they are an essential element of the vehicle. Critical to the driving experience for security as well as comfort, meters are becoming more and more present in the cockpit. Their style and design convey so much information about the personality of the car!
Our team has created a selection of more than 20 meters generators. These meters are in two categories: mechanic and digital. In these categories, you can find an array of speed dials both in Kms and Mph, tachometers, temperature and fuel gauges in 6 different designs.
We demonstrated that designers could iterate with materials and shapes at the same time to create rims in one of our previous releases. Now, HMI (Human/Machine Interface) designers can do the same with meters and screen materials.
This particular kind of designer specializes in the study and design of the driving experience. From how the information is transmitted or displayed to the driver, to how users trigger their commands to the vehicle, they are the experts who make driving delightful.
We believe that using Substance materials to design these elements provide more granularity to designers and artists. Being able to see the final result without having to wait for modeling or prototyping is, of course, a considerable time gain. But now you also can animate content and tweak the materials, making it simpler to simulate real-time use conditions within AR/VR experiences or games.
The meter materials, entirely procedurally made, come with parameters enabling full customization, from the colors and materials used for the dial to the layout of the metrics, the position, and color of the hand.
Dashboard Woods
New wood species are coming to Substance Source! They are not simple wood: they combine several elements that you can customize to achieve the finish you seek. The team created a selection of 7 kinds of wood from mundane oak and birch to the more exotic koto and ebony.
We pushed the details of these procedural materials to the absolute maximum. We reproduced the veins and delicate fibers of wood veneer without sacrificing your ability to customize it for your own needs. Indeed, each wood has dedicated parameters letting you create “raw” finish or simulate thick varnished wood parts – all in a single mouse click.
Don’t just believe what we say: have a look! The following image is a split view of the digital material and a photograph of the physical reference sample.
But why stop there? We created two procedural filters to enable new effects: laser cutting and quilting.
You may not have seen these kinds of materials very often – mostly because of the complexity of designing these kinds of assemblies. No more excuses! Designers and suppliers can now use Substance materials to create new patterns. Everything you need is within reach on Substance Source. (Yes! The .sbs graphs as well! Again!)
Laser-cut patterns enable the creation of rich patterns in layered assemblies for articulated assemblies, like speaker meshes, covers, and more. We even reproduced the slight burn effect of the laser on the edges of the cuts – and yes you can also apply changes to that!
Speaker Meshes
Working with the Substance tools has become seamless. Browse through the library and select the materials you need directly within Substance Painter, or other software, with a Substance Source integration. Start tweaking, mixing, painting your assets.
Speaker mesh is an exciting example of the time-saving and simplification that are available to you for the design phase of products. No need to model complex patterns on weirdly curved surfaces. Just replace the heavy modeling work with procedural texture maps.
If you need to produce the geometry anyway in preparation for manufacturing, don’t sweat more than necessary by starting from scratch. You can use the maps from the materials to drive the topography of a 3D mesh that you can use either as-is or as a help in Alias or any other CAD modeling software.
In addition to last week’s pack, today we’re releasing more speaker mesh and grilles patterns on either metal, plastic or wood. They behave like the previous assets. Tweak the size, amount, and spacing to generate bespoke grids for speakers or others.
Composites
In addition to natural materials, like wood and animal skin, you have access to more complex manufactured materials with woven composites.
On top of the carbon materials already available on Substance Source, we added Kevlar-based materials with several types of weaving and parameters to simulate encapsulation of the fibers into a plastic resin.
You are now able to change properties of the composite fabric like the size of strands, the orientation of the cloth, the color of dye as well as the gloss level of the resin.
We also extended the library of plastic grains with new categories such as geometric grids, microbead sanded grains, and ridged and brushed textures. These fine grains are the building blocks of any injection, molding-based part, or product CMF design. Designers can specify custom variations of grain by modifying the parameters in the .sbsar or directly into the .sbs graph.
Even the design of a natural grain becomes easier. No need to involve complex micro-surface scanning or multiple 2D artworks to define your design intention. The different maps from the material graph can be used to drive discussion and execution with mold texture manufacturers.
This concludes this month of Substance Source releases dedicated to automotive manufacturing materials. In total, you now have 700 more assets. We can’t wait to see what you’ll create with it – automotive-related or not. We love to be surprised! Don’t hesitate to share your work with Substance Source; it would make us so proud 😉
Now it’s time for the team to get back to their computers and cameras for another asset production project. New and different content will come again this summer. See you soon!
We asked you which of the two materials was procedural, and which was the reference: the procedural material is the one on the left and the reference is the image on the right. Did you guess right?
