Old Road Material

Inspiration

I was walking my dog recently, and partially due to my love of materials I started studying the ground of the road I was on. I really liked how it looked, so I decided to create it in Substance Designer

What it does

This PBR material could be used on any 3D object (but probably a long plane) and has proper textures for color, roughness, normal, height, and AO to make it look like an old, worn autumn road.

How I built it

Using Substance Designer, I created the material from the ground up layer by layer. I started with a basic noise with a very small scale and followed it up by making a pebble generator. I made 3 sets of 3 pebbles, from very small to kinda small. I scattered them everywhere in the texture, but instead of having them sit on top, I lowered them into the ground so that it would look more like the "gravely" asphalt I wanted. I made the cracks using a heavily modified voronoi noise and made it so they would warp around the pebbles. For the street lines I took long rectangles and warped them using a low-scale noise, and then again with the height of the ground. I also masked out the cracks, figuring that any underlying pavement would never have received any paint. I used a pine needle from a previous project but made 3 variations, one singular, one in a cluster of two, and one in a cluster of 3, and scattered them, but instead of a uniform scatter across the whole plane, I made it so they would collect in some areas, similar to what I observed in real life. I did the same thing with the leaves using a height scan of an oak leaf. For the color map, I started with a noisy texture with shades of gray and blue to start. I took the masks of the rocks and put them into a random grayscale node which allowed me to replace that with my own color selections, noting to make them brighter than the asphalt. For the road I originally used yellow and white which felt like the natural choice, but looked way out of place so I decided to switch to dark orange and mid-gray respectively, which ended up being one of the greatest choices I made because it really cemented the feel of the road. I added in some dirt grunge, as well as some subtle tire tracks made with warped rectangles with a lot of masks, including those for tire treads, cracks, and random grunges. For the pine needles and leaves, I used a few random shades of mid-orange mixed with the curvature of the texture.

Built With

• node.js
• substance-designer