Monday, July 11th, 2022 Posted by Jim Thacker

Free feather and hair nodes for Substance 3D Designer


3D character artist ‘shining1‘ has released two handy-looking free Substance 3D Designer nodes for generating hair and feather textures for use in games and real-time applications.

The tools generate textures for use in card-based fur or feathers, including flow and ID maps.

Generate feather textures with flow and normal maps
The newer of the two tools is the feather node, which the developer – who also uses the username ‘guang‘ on ArtStation – released yesterday.

Users can control the shape of the blade and central shaft directly by pulling control points around on-screen, with slider controls to adjust the distribution of and spacing of the barbs.

The node is based on IE Curve Toolbox For Substance Designer, game developer Igor Elovikov’s free add-on, modified with additional features for generating textures.

It supports surface colour – you can apply a simple colour gradient to the feather – and can generate flow maps and normal maps.



Generate hair textures with flow, alpha, root and id maps, including hair braids
The hair node, which was released last year, uses a similar workflow, providing 10 control points that can be moved around to control the shape of a tuft of hair.

The form of the tuft, spacing of individual hairs, and colour can be adjusted with slider controls.

As well as diffuse textures, the tool generates flow, alpha, root and id maps. You can see its output rendered inside Unreal Engine on the developer’s ArtStation gallery.

The free version provides Substance .sbsar files corresponding to two separate tuft shapes, and one for generating braided hair; a $5 commercial version includes additional tuft shapes.

Pricing and system requirements
The feather node is entirely free; the hair node is free for non-commercial use, or $5 for commercial use.

Both are compatible with Substance 3D Designer. The free version of the hair node includes three separate .sbsar files; the feather node is provided in both .sbsar and .sbs format.

Download the free feather and hair nodes for Substance 3D Designer from shining1’s Gumroad store