Recently I created this lake ice substance in Substance Designer. I have been doing a lot of these kinds of icy/snow surfaces recently. I miss Finland..

Material Blend node and especially Material Height Blend are very powerful tools for blending several materials.

For example in the lake ice material I was able to re-use my existing snow material. I didn’t have to go through the trouble of creating new snow from scratch, I just blend this with the lake surface material using a mask.

By hitting 3 in the keyboard we can enter the “green noodle mode” which allows us to connect material nodes with one line, no need to plug each channel individually. These can be masked, blended, manipulated transformed tiled and so forth. We can even use a great atlasmaker.sbs to create material atlases.

If you are Substance Designer artist and have not yet tried blending whole materials, I really recommend to give it a try. It is very powerful way to create new materials using existing graphs.

Check out my Youtube video about using Material Blend node.