Substance Materialize

The Substance Materialize node allows you to easily create realistic material textures based on your own image inputs. When you add a Substance Materialize node to the Action schematic, you'll notice the familiar Substance tree of maps and shaders. Simply specify your input image, as well as optional Details, Grunge, and Relief maps, and use the menu settings to fine-tune the results.

Substance Materialize is compatible with Allegorithmic's Bitmap2Material (B2M) version 2.2.

Initial sphere geometry

Input image: Single-frame .tif photo of rusty screws in a wall.

Result after applying inputs and various Substance settings.

Note: If you access Action as a Timeline FX, you are limited to one front/matte media, and therefore may not get the desired result. In this case, you can access Action from Batch or Batch FX, or from the Tools tab.

Substance Materialize Usage Tips

• A Bitmap_Diffuse map is added to the schematic tree when creating a Substance Materialize. By default, this uses the same input as your input image, but you can change it.
• Three other optional inputs are available in the schematic tree for a Substance Materialize:
  • Bitmap_Details_Optional: an input image file allowing you to specify fine details in your result.
  • Bitmap_Relief_Optional: an optional grayscale image file you can use to enhance elevation. Black represents the lowest elevation on the map, while white represents the highest.
  • Bitmap_Grunge_Optional: allows you to alter the look of your material, mainly by adding some dust and cracks on it. You can either chose one the 15 grunge maps embedded into the Substance Materialize node (see the Grunge parameter settings in the Substance node menu), or use your own image in this input. You can see the 15 grunge maps on the B2M Help site.
    Note: Make sure that you set a Diffuse Opacity other than 0 in the Grunge settings to be able to see the effect of the grunge map.
• For each input, you also can use the Input menu (as with Substance Textures with inputs), and the Object view (F8). The Object view lets you visualize changes that you make to the Input menu settings. In the Object view, you can also interactively align the perspective of the area you want to include in the input image.
• The Substance menu is somewhat different than if you added a Substance Texture preset. The Texture tab is similar, but the Parameters drop-down list allows you apply settings in a number of different areas.
  • Specular
  • Shape Recognition
  • Relief
  • Lighting
  • Grunge
  • Global
  • Diffuse
  • Detail
  • AO

  See the tooltips (or the B2M Help site) for help with each setting.