Procedural Materials are materials that are developed either nearly, or fully procedurally using Substance Designer.
These are materials that are either fully conceptual or have performance requirements that limit their ability to be scanned.
JQD Space Dye Concept
This material was brought to me early on in the developmental phase. The original fabric looked similar to the final render but contained only three different colors of thread.
The ask for this concept was to develop a virtual material that gave variable control to the amount, size, color count, and colors of the threads at runtime.
Given I had an early prototype physical sample I was able to use the alpha scan below to create a tileable mask. This mask was used to dictate where the threads appeared, as well as served as a base for the normal and alpha maps.
Each color of the strands was individually generated on the left of the graph, and tiled to size before being warped.
The final material allowed for runtime control over the base color, thread color, thread amount, thread count, thread width, and the tension of the threads.
The material appeared in a crossbody bag released in 2023.
Trifecta Lenticular
This material is one of the more unique swatches I received, completely inverting in appeared color depending on the angle of viewing. This phenomenon is called the lenticular effect.
To achieve this on flat geometry a highly specific correlation between height and base color maps needs to be generated. The height map generates the sharp ridges, and the color map needs to invert along either side of these ridges.
The star pattern dictates where the color map inverts, creating the stark contrast at glancing angles.
This material is almost entirely procedurally created, with scans of the back of the material used to fill the gaps between ridges.
Superrep Gradient Foil
Procedural materials are not always the most complex and time intensive.
In this example, we received a physical swatch, but the extreme gloss and metallic nature of this material meant that it was not a good candidate for scanning.
This material was created completely procedurally, with four colors being used to generate the precise gradient of the sample. Noise / Grain was introduced at the end, being used in both the roughness and base color maps
