Making an Stylized Wood Plank Texture in Substance Designer
This week I made this material in Substance Designer. It’s a tillable stylized wood planks pattern, with varied details and strong readability from a distance. This material is the first entry in my personal collection of portfolio materials. It will also be available for purchase and download at a very affordable price.
Pass 1: The original wood
First, I built a clean original wood pattern, the kind of wood the material would have been made from before aging. The idea was fine, humid, varnished wood. I achieved this starting from a custom base texture made from a paraboloid shape and a tile sampler. Then, I distorted it using directional warps and perlin noise patterns
Pass 2: Chips, Cracks, and Damage
Then I created two variation maps using a combination of noises, histograms, and blur. At this stage, based on the original pattern, I had already defined the base of the roughness map, which I like to keep simple for stylized materials.
Pass 3: Aging and Wear
I started the aging pass by building a pattern from a custom shape made with shapes and tile sampler grayscale. I randomized it using a vector warp (grayscale), and finally converted that same detail into a normal so I could generate a Curvature map that I used to color this variation.
And there you have it. There are still areas to improve, but I’m happy with the result.
Designing stylized wood can be easy, but I think a lot of materials still need that special detail, the bridge between stylized and realistic. A middle ground that screams intentionality in every chip you create.
As a next step, I want to polish two things: getting the low-frequency variation and the high-frequency detail more clearly separated so the material reads even better at a distance, and making the damage feel more intentional (less uniform and more “logical” based on the material’s story). I also want to refine the values on the height and the roughness so the wear feels more coherent without losing the stylized look. Overall, the goal is to add more character without turning it into a noisy pattern.