Creating a Tech-Inspired Door Hatch Material in Substance 3D

Introduction

Hi, my name is Dave Miragliotta. I’ve been in the game industry for 10+ years. I’ve worked at Respawn Entertainment as a Senior Environment Artist for the past 6 years. I’ve had the pleasure of working on two Star Wars titles, Jedi Fallen Order and Jedi Survivor.

I got into using the Substance 3D Designer about seven or eight years ago. I wanted to get into using Substance 3D because it seemed like it would be the next big thing in creating materials and textures. I started out by watching as many tutorials as possible. It was a big help to start understanding the nodes and what each node did. Daniel Thiger’s tutorials were where I learned the most. It was the foundation that I needed to progress with Designer. Experimenting with the different nodes can also help you understand what is possible.

The Workflow

For this material, I wanted to create a cool door or hatch with some wear and tear.

The first step was to make the frame for the door or hatch. I started with a basic square shape and rounded the edges. Then, I subtracted that shape out to make the cutout for the door. 

Once I had the shape of the door in, I wanted to start adding some detail. I first started with the vents in the middle. 

After the vents, I moved on to the rivets, cutout details, and wheel in the center of the door. I did the rivets using the Splatter Circular Grayscale node. The cutouts are a subtraction using a Gradient node and the wheel is straightforward. I combined some shapes together to create the wheel shape.

Next, I wanted to add some extrusions that would serve as a separation for the door. I made these with a simple shape plugged into a Curve node and then subtracted out some pill shapes. 

One of the last things to finish off the Height Map was the hinges for the door. These were made of a couple of different simple shapes put together. 

For the Albedo, I started off with some solid colors and some white paint accents. I used a “clouds 2” and Threshold node to subtract some parts of the paint stripe to give it some damage and variation.

I then wanted to accent some of the edges, so I decided to use the curvature smooth to do this.

After that, I wanted to add some edge wear to certain areas, so I used the Metal Edge Wear node. Applying a Metal Edge Wear node to the whole Height Map doesn’t necessarily work, so sometimes you’ll have to apply the edge wear to specific masked off areas like you’ll see in the screenshot. 

Finally, I added some dirt and grime. I started by using the dirt generator and then added a “grunge streaks” noise with a safe transform node to tile it a bit. I then added another layer of dirt on top to give a little extra dirt build-up. For this, I used an AO node to designate the areas for the dirt combined with a BnW Spots node that I set to subtract from the AO to give it some variation.

Dave Miragliotta, Senior Environment Artist