You know we’re barely keeping our hoarding in check. We’re a team of collectors at large. We believe that anywhere in the world you look, you can feast your eyes on exceptional materials. Of course, we wanted to share, so we’ve been working on gathering samples from all over the world and bringing them right inside your computer.
That’s a total of 720 new photorealistic materials. Let’s take a stroll in Substance Source’s new collections of materials of the world!
Chapter 1: the collection
Dirt doesn’t look the same everywhere! There’s sand, rocks, leaves, and mud and even among these categories the variations are immeasurable. And despite the fact that we tried, you can’t scan everything. But we were still dead set on giving you extremely adaptable materials, useful assets that will match your needs. That is why this new collection combines the precision and detail of scanning with the flexibility of procedural assets.
In practice, this means that level and environment artists can texture an infinite number of biomes with this unified catalog of 720 surfaces scanned from all over the world. Each PBR material is parametric, seamlessly tileable, goes up to 8k in resolution, and has an average size of 2m2.
Let’s dip our head in the spice bag for a space journey through the earth biomes… Organized into collections on Substance Source.
Natural surfaces
We collected natural samples in several regions. From the shores of East Coast North America to the deserts of Utah, from the colorful dirts of the Indian mainland, the forests of Eastern Europe, to the Brazilian jungle and South Pacific beaches.
Beach and Coastal landscapes (sand, pebbles, rocks)
Forests (forest grounds and tree barks)
Mountains (rocky trails and rock faces)
In addition to this diversity of environments, we have captured several true variations of each terrain.
By combining several patches together, this allows to cover larger areas with significantly different textures. It prevents visible repetitions on large-scale areas and brings true randomness to the terrain with a wider range of medium scale details.
Man-made surfaces
From the same regions, we also captured urban materials. Deserted building of Eastern Europe to Mediterranean village rubble stone walls, countless road asphalts and concrete surfaces. We captured floors, walls and even rooftops of various cities on several continents.
Walls (stone, metal, plaster)
Roads and sidewalks (streets of all kinds)
Abandoned buildings (old and crumbling)
Don’t take our word for it! Ride the trails yourself, with this selection of 10 free assets from the new collection available here. And remember: this collection comprises only the first elements of our ever-growing catalogue of scan captures.
Chapter 2: Creating procedural landscapes
All of these elements come together when you want to create a full landscape. You can, for instance, model a scene in Medium, then mix materials in Substance Alchemist, and finally add the textures in Substance Painter. We gave it a try; see here:
Chapter 3: 50 shades of grounds
Combine the best of both worlds as each asset of the library includes parameters to tweak attributes of the surface. Free yourself from the constraints of the original surface! The color and roughness are only variables that can be modified without boundaries: from the real world, you can come up with extraterrestrial landscapes.
The embedded presets in each material extend to more than almost 3000 unique ready-to-use textures at the tip of your finger. Here’s what it can mean for one single texture file:
And to go one step further, mix materials together with Substance Alchemist and the amount of variations you will be able to create has no limits.
Today’s early 2021 collection complements the toolbox of natural materials already available on Substance Source. We are processing scans from all over the world on a daily basis now, so expect more from us in the coming months.
