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I wanted to try out a way to create complex looking scene with Stager in a way which isn’t taking too much resources from your PC and making your scene really heavy and hard to work with.

So instead of using complex models and textures including displacement, I used base image and created opacity out of it and applied those two into a plane.

I set up my scene by placing four planes vertically and using the vines texture on them, and two on the ground using the waterlily texture. I finalized the scene with a plane which is using metallic surface mimicking still water surface, and some depth of field focus on the sphere.

As you can see, the result is quite good even when I just used simple planes with image and a opacity map on them, this could be quite useful trick if you need to make a scene/mockup in a quick timeline, or if your PC’s struggling when using textures with displacement and high-poly models.

Adobe’s Documentation: https://substance3d.adobe.com/documentation/sg/material-displacement-238059934.html

With material displacement you can create details, bumps and other surface information onto your model with a grayscale image called a height map. When creating or using existing height map, take a note that the black/darker areas are lowered and white/lighter areas are raised.

If you want to use your height map in Stager, go to the Properties panel → Material → Height section where you apply the height map, then go to Object tab → enable displacement.

Height map options

Next thing to do is adjust your height scale/level.

Normally I only adjust the scale, and leave level to 0.5, more information about the height level on Adobe’s Documentation page.

Height scale represents the distance of the displacement, so in plain language the higher value will set the displacement/reach of the height more further away from the object.

Height scales from 1. to 3.

Displacement tessellation options

Once you’re in the Object/Displacement panel, you need to enable Displacement and decide which Tesselation mode you want to use. I’ve been mainly working with per-triangle-fixed mode, here’s a take from Adobe’s documentation explaining the tesselation modes;

“Tessellation is a system which takes the original shape of the model and adds more geometry detail to it. Displacement works by offsetting the geometry surface, so if the model doesn’t have enough detail the displacement effect can appear coarse with artifacts and stretching.”

• Uniform (per-triangle fixed) will equally take every triangle on the underlying model and split it into new face. Each subdivision will increase the number of faces again.
• Uniform (total face budget) will also equally divide faces, but will stop once a maximum number of faces are created.

https://substance3d.adobe.com/documentation/sg/material-displacement-238059934.html

Per-triangle fixed subdivision set from 2. to 12.

As you can see, higher the per-triangle fixed subdivision value is, more detail you can get. But since each subdivision will increase the number of faces, the more your PC will use resources and your scene can get quite heavy so start adjusting it from lower values at first and see how high you can get.

If you have any questions about this or anything else, contact me or check out Adobe’s Stager Documentation page!

Today I’m going to showcase bit of my texturing workflow. In the past I’ve been using lots of textures from various sources and edited them on my own.

This year I decided to step up and try to make textures by all my own using Substance Sampler.

Workflow

It all starts with taking photos from outdoors; rocks, ground, forest floor etc. what ever you would want to create a texture from.

Nowadays you can simply use your smart phone to take photos with, quality of the photographs is good enough at least for my use.

I’ve found that flat and “clean” surfaces with not too many tiny details work the best, but you can capture more detailed ones too like you can see from the photograph above. If there’s too much going on, it can get too messy when working with height displacement.

I usually clean up my raw photograph a bit in Photoshop/Affinity Photo, and after that I open it up in Substance Sampler.

Importing photograph into Sampler.

In Sampler, I simply drag & drop the photograph in, and use the “Image to Material (AI Powered)” tool to generate 3D texture from it. It’s almost good enough as it is but once again, I clean it up a bit with “Make It Tile” tool to make it look more seamless and after that I’m ready to go!

Before/After using “Make It Tile” tool in Substance Sampler.

I export the texture from Sampler and apply it into my models in Stager and usually tweak the displacement strenght to get it look nice as possible. I’ve been really suprised how easy this has been and how good looking textures you can create out of the photos you took with your phone!

Using the texture in Substance Stager.

Thanks for reading, check out my Behance for artwork where I’ve been using this technique.