Website powered by

Data Server Material - 100% Substance Designer

Scrolling trough some morning news I had the idea to make a data server material only using substance designer and I wanted it to be a challenge.
So I went straight into the web and I rapidly found this picture of a data server with many interesting shapes from a random IT maintenance company, I really liked it because of the shapes amount so I went straight for it but only at the end of the day I realized that was a 3D render and I was practically done with the height map. I didn`t find any other similar server so i believe that is not so realistic as I thought but still the one with the most interesting shapes.

For this piece my main intention was to challenge me to work with height values and blending modes.
I believe this texture is not really useful for production purpose because it has so many custom transformation node that I can only expose a few parameters, but overall it has been a kind of fun to work with hard surface shapes on SD. Just when I started to work with text I realized of how many ADD operation I had to use and I didn`t want to spend much time on it, I`m sure I could just had made a bitmap in photoshop for the sake of speed and than apply the text in the rest of the maps but I wanted it to be 100% Substance designer, so I dowloaded online this pre-made multiblend grayscale to be faster and it helped a lot. I think I will make one similar custom node.

I started with the height by having all the element in one graph with the right positioning and than I reorganized them into subgraph exposing the element that I needed with the right positioning.
The Heightmap is clean mean that there are no noises applied, instead I went for applying the noises in the normal map, so it would give that painted metallic surface.
The last Picture is the Ref Board

Please critics are very welcome, as can only help me to get better.
Cheers!

Height Map | Breakdown

Height Map | Breakdown

Viewport Overview

Viewport Overview

Data Slot | Node Graph and Breakdown

Data Slot | Node Graph and Breakdown

USB Slot | Node Graph and Breakdown

USB Slot | Node Graph and Breakdown

Text | Node Graph and Breakdown

Text | Node Graph and Breakdown

Ethernet Entrance | Breakdown

Ethernet Entrance | Breakdown

References

References