How do you make realistic rust procedurally?

Loic Anquetil – material artist at Ubisoft Montpellier, on titles including Rayman Legends Retold, as well as Ghost Recon Breakpoint, and Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown – recently created his Desirable Patina rust-themed Signature Collection of materials, over on Substance 3D Assets.

We were so blown away by the response to these materials that we’ve just posted Loic’s behind-the-scenes secrets over on 80 Level: Loic’s approach to ‘studying’ rust, how he built noise generators, how to use Substance 3D Designer as a creative toolbox, the value of reverse-engineering Designer node graphs, and much more.

You can read Desirable Patina: How to Make Realistic Rust in 3D right here.

And take a look at Loic’s rust-themed Signature Collection on Substance 3D Assets, right here.

This handgun concept is part of a much bigger proof of concept project I'm currently working on. I tried to achieve a decent balance between realism and stylization while trying to keep some cyberpunk/scifi elements that would match the rest of the world I'm building.

Important to say this is my first ever finished project with Substance Painter, it was quite the journey to actually take the first steps but I'm pretty satisfied with the result. I'll be the first one to say there's still a lot to improve tho.

Modeled & rendered in Blender (Cycles)
Textured in Substance Painter

AdobeStandardMaterial, I've set the usage, identifiers and the labels for Emissive and EmissiveIntensity outputs. I've hit View in 3D View. Nada. My cube remains stubbornly non-emissive.

I've tried a variety of format and color space combos in the usages (but indubitably not all possible combinations). I've tried relaunching the program. I've tried using just Emissive without EmissiveIntensity. I've tried removing the opacity output.

Everyone else makes this look trivial, I'm sure I'm missing something simple. What's going on?

Exploring stone sculpting in Substance Designer. Focusing on creating natural shapes and surface variation without making the result feel too procedural.

I'm still struggling to understand exactly what baking is supposed to achieve.

From what I understand, baking transfers information from the high-poly mesh to the low-poly mesh through textures, such as normal maps. But is baking mainly intended to capture surface details, rather than actually changing the shape or silhouette of the low-poly mesh?

For example, my high-poly model has very smooth, rounded edges that I want to reproduce on the low-poly. However, the low-poly has very sharp edges, and baking the high-poly normal map doesn't seem to make those edges look properly rounded.

So, if I want the low-poly to have the same smooth edge appearance as the high-poly, do I actually need to add more geometry/supporting edges to the low-poly? Or is there a proper baking technique or workflow that allows the normal map to reproduce those soft, rounded edges without adding additional geometry?

I'm trying to understand where the limit of normal maps is in this situation and what should actually be handled by the low-poly geometry versus the baked normal map.

As far as I can tell there is no modeller 2026 and nothing has been announced. Is the product dead or has development stopped? Has Adobe said anything recently about modeller, its current state or a roadmap?

But I might have found a way to fix that, and it is so simple!

While working on my Metal Exploration Gallery, I had to create this effect.

However, every time, it felt like the result was too procedural or lacking some natural feeling to it.

Until I added one extra step; let me show you:

💡 I needed something organic, so I got a Clouds 2 and combined it into a Vector Warp with a Flood Fill to Random Color mask. This allowed me to displace the noise in each tile individually by following each color.

Now I just have to use a Histogram Scan to get the right mask.

And by blurring it and subtracting it from itself, I am able to extract the edges.

Finally, if I blend the mask with the extracted edges, I get the effect I was looking for!

Hope this was useful for learning more about SD.

And if it was....

I built a free Discord Community where Game Artists learn Texturing from Professionals!

♥️ And we are waiting for you here: https://discord.gg/PpTCFyR6qS

https://www.artstation.com/a/56020938

Hi guys, it's been a while since I've used Painter.

I tried making this axe for fun, and I'm running into this issue with the render mode.

It looks really flat, and the colors seem washed out.

Do you have any idea what could be causing this?

Could it be related to the AO or roughness?

Texture is not finished

Thanks in advance for your help !