Tutorial: create cliff materials in Substance 3D Designer
The Gnomon Workshop has released Creating Realistic Cliff Materials using Substance Designer, a guide to environment art workflows recorded by Gearbox Studio’s Vincent Dérozier.
The workshop provides 4.5 hours of video training in Substance 3D Designer and Unreal Engine.
Create reusable procedural materials for games and cinematics in Substance 3D Designer
In the workshop, Dérozier sets out how to create realistic cliff surfaces in Substance 3D Designer and transform them into a set of cohesive variants suitable for use in real-time environments.
The training emphasizes the need to balance detail with clear visual readability, breaking up primary shapes with secondary forms, erosion patterns, and fine surface detailing.
Dérozier explores how to identify these different layers of information, construct them procedurally, and organize them within a clean, readable graph structure.
The workshop also covers developing color and roughness, balancing textures, and graph optimization, to ensure materials remain both visually rich and production-friendly.
About the artist
Vincent Dérozier is Senior Lead Content Artist at Gearbox Studio Québec.
He began his career in the game industry in 2010 at Ubisoft Annecy, later moving to Canada to work on multiple Assassin’s Creed titles, For Honor and Immortals Fenyx Rising.
Price and availability
Creating Realistic Cliff Materials using Substance Designer is available via a subscription to The Gnomon Workshop, which provides access to over 300 tutorials.
Subscriptions cost $57/month or $499/year. Free trials are available.
Read more about Creating Realistic Cliff Materials using Substance Designer
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