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Substance Designer - Bones on the floor

Making Of / 29 June 2020


I made this material for my Masters Capstone game, Wick, in which you play as a small candle bringing light and hope back to a darkened cathedral.

In the game, you are eventually thrown down into a catacombs, where we wanted to provide the player with some physics bones to interact with. That said, they alone didn't convey the amount of death that we wanted to, so I was tasked with making some materials to stand on.

I was influenced by the first step from 3dExvideo on Stylized Skulls: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yenlx9fdVpQ 

Where I sculpted some skulls, femur and tibia in ZBrush, and created some depth map renders of them at many different angles to pull into Substance Designer.


After that, adding some dirt and noise to the skulls and bones to make them a little more distinct. 

About halfway through making this, I realized that we already have a Tile Floor asset from an asset pack that we're using in the room, and that I needed to match the floor we had across all the rest of the catacombs. I was able to get the gist of it with just a tile generator and some cell warping, after which I height merged the tile floor  and the bones together.

All in all, it was a fun re-entrance back into Designer since I haven't been able to use it in a bit. Here's my whole node map just to show my almost cleanliness.