I have been getting a hang of understanding a procedural workflow in Substance Designer 5 as my current focus. I tried starting out with small goals like figuring out how to make subtle scratches, metallic reflective surface, and water spots on a spoon from my kitchen. Once I was able to figure out that, I moved onto using the wood floors of my apartment for reference.
The pipeline is pretty powerful, seeing that the resolution is always dynamic, file sizes are super small (KB instead of a 45MB PSD from saving tons of layers trying to be non destructive), and anything you tweak is not permanently lost by an undo history since all the parameters live in each node you play with. Pretty exciting stuff, authoring materials with experimentation and exercising creativity with a bit of logic.
This wood graph is pretty simple, but has helped me understand the process of procedural node flows more on a fundamental level thanks to watching some Wes McDermont videos. I wanted to start a PBR material from scratch with tile generators, then mixing different noise patterns and blends to achieve a wood board material.
