Blog

My BCON24 talk is now available online

Ever since I first attended, the annual Blender Conference has been the highlight of my year. This year was extra exciting for me, as I found myself returning to the venue as a first time speaker.  My talk about vertex color usage in shaders took place on the second day at 2pm. I was super nervous and you can probably tell. Nevertheless I was happy to see that a lot of people were really interested on the topic. I had great conversations afterwards with my fellow artists too. For how common vertex painting is, the information on the topic is quite little and far between. I hope this presentation can act as a learning resource for any aspiring artist wanting to dig deeper.

Thank you Blender for having me!

SD practice: Metal plates with stripes

Another Substance Designer practice piece, a study of metal plates from nearby train station. Made with Substance Designer, rendered with Blender. The material has a bunch of parameters and can produce several types of different plates.

More material sketching in SD: Pavement with moss

I’m trying to start a habit of casually sketching materials in Substance Designer. There is this nice looking pavement on our yard that has sections of moss, thought I’d give that a go. I struggled a bit with the the moss and was not 100% happy with it, but overall the material mostly holds together nicely. I made two versions of the pavement: one with moss and one without it. This was probably my most complex material yet.

These images were rendered with Blender 4.2 and Eevee Next. I wanted to try the new realtime displacement, and was really impressed with it!


Splash Patrol: grass and rooftile materials

While working on Splash Patrol I had the chance to do some of the materials with Substance Designer. As I’m still learning the software, I was bit worried if it is possible to achieve a desired look within the schedule. The grass probably needs a second pass but the rooftiles came out pretty good. What you see after the outputs are Unity-specific texture packing nodes.


Assembly Gamedev Compo 2024: 3rd place 🥉

Me and my spouse Jaakko Lindvall made a game (as it is by now a tradition for us!) for the Assembly Summer Gamedev. Compo. We are pleased to tell you that out of 12 contestants, our entry took home the bronze medal. It was again an exciting race with many formidable competitors and we want to thank everyone who took the time to try out our game and support us.

Our entry this year was Splash Patrol. As we wanted to switch things up a bit, we made a VR game for the Meta Quest 3. In Splash Patrol a peaceful suburb is terrorized by graffiti painting vandals. The city has hired you to take down the tags. They were running a little low on the budget though, so armed with the ol’ trusty watergun you jump to the patrol car, hit the music and start blasting!

If you have a Meta Quest 3, you can download the game here.

Substance Designer: a material study

If you ever wonder why your artist friend is running late or is distracted, it’s only because they saw a good reference and had to take notes!

I’ve been frequenting this coffee house with a friend recently, and noticed that they had a really nice floor. I took some pictures of it and tried if I could replicate it in Substance Designer. I’m still learning the software, so it was really nice to see that all the information is starting to stack up.

I was quite happy with the result and could see myself using it in a project. You can change the tile colors, size and amount of dirt.

Final render

The node setup

Reference images

Trash cans by the alley: a new sketchfab scene

I did a smaller sample of the shopping small scene for sketchfab. As the trash can models came out pretty good, I thought It would be nice to make a little scene around them, giving them some extra attention.

Breakdown: How I did the vertex color shader

I got a couple questions about my vertex color shader when I posted the Old shopping mall scene. In case anyone is in need of something similar, here’s what I did:

The trick is to pull the roughness-, and metalness data from uv island locations. This is then combined with the vertex color data, giving us a mesh complete with colors, metallic and roughness without unwrapping or any texture usage. It is also possible to expand this and use the vertex alpha channel for additional data like emission. I found this setup really handy for small clutter items and I also used it for some of the large and narrow metal surfaces that were mostly defined by a gradient.

Note: The gamma correction is only necessary if your 3D package outputs the vertex colors in sRGB and your game engine uses linear colors like Unreal does. If your colors look washed out, this is most likely because of the mismatch. Power-node with value of 2,2 will fix this.

Here’s how the items look with the shader. Up left is Unreal blueprint view and down left are the uv coordinates in Blender.

Results of the shader in the scene. Chairs, plates and cups are all using it.

Substance Designer: more material practice

I completed another material tutorial, this time about a fabric. This tutorial was bit more advanced. Still trying to wrap my head around some of the concepts, but definitely learned some good tricks. It was really interesting to see how does one do very organic feeling shapes totally procedurally.

 

Disclaimer: cloth mesh and human mesh provided as part of tutorial (not selfmade)

Disclaimer: cloth mesh and human mesh provided as part of tutorial (not selfmade)

Learning Substance Designer: First steps

I’ve wanted to start learning Substance Designer for a while. Recently there has finally been time for it. I made this material following a tutorial. Getting pretty good understanding of the basics now. I’m thinking of doing a couple of more of these tutorials, and then maybe it’s time to try my hand at a personal project (already have one in mind!) It’s crazy how powerful this software is. Can’t wait to learn it better.