I created this fully procedural Seaside Rocks Substance. (The source file (.sbs) is now available in Gumroad)

It was quite fun to explore different techniques to create the basic rock shapes and then use tile generator and various techniques to tile them and blend them together.

I was then able to use the same rock I created to cut interesting shapes on top of the rocks to look like they are weathered.

I am quite happy how this turned out except the cracks which need some more work. I am still trying to figure out the most efficient workflow on making those things.

Adding water was really fun and I really like how it added sparkle and additional detail to the material.

In Substance Designer it’s easy to implement more detail to this such as leaves, small debris from sea and really go to town with micro detail. I also think about improving the graph by creating more rock variation, it’s possible to derive them from same base and just change them in graph. Being able to reuse nodes is so nice.

By the way, does anyone know how to split link? I know how to add those split points to make lines flow cleaner but it would be so nice if we could just draw a new line from those split points, so there would be one main line. Making y-like split into a link would be so good for organization sake.

Substance Designer iRay makes substances like these look really, really good. It’s quite easy to forget that actually what we are looking is actually a height map. Even when viewing from perspective, rocks and things like that look almost like they are real rocks with undercuts and bottom, especially when rendered with shadows. Then in game it looks just quite perfect and if real 3D objects are placed on it, the illusion is perfect.

I will make Substance with fully tweakable parameters soon. Also Youtube breakdown of the material is coming soon.

If you want to take a look at the substance I created, grab it from Gumroad now.

Also I recommend these Youtube series by Allegorithmic.