ITS NODEVEMBER TIME, BABY

Howdy everyone!

Its that time of year again for all things procedural where the nodes start comin' and they don't stop comin' :)

The list of prompts this year for Nodevember 2022 are a great mix of structured and open-ended concepts to give artists the freedom to explore creative interpretations without being paralyzed by choice and ambiguity.

Concepting

We have already made it through DAY 1 of the month with a dedicated prompt of "Space Junkyard." I started my work off by first sketching up a concept and assembling my mood board and references in PureRef.

The UFO

Taking these refs and my original idea, I started playing around in Substance Designer to see what was feasible in the program and what I was most excited to tackle to push my own skills. I knew that my concept would heavily feature a UFO so I went about making a graph solely dedicated to creating a height map and accompanying masks for a ship. I was able to apply a Gradient Axial node to the main 'disk' of the ship to apply tilt to better tie the ship in with the "crash landing" ground.

After Getting a general UFO put together that I could come back to later, I started attempting to concept ground ideas. Sometimes if I am unclear on the direction I want to go, I will just throw a bunch of nodes on the page and try things until my spaghetti nodes are 'al dente' before starting with a fresh node graph and only importing or replicating the pieces that I like. I think that process worked successfully in this instance because you can see quite the improvement over my first attempt at the ground (left) and my second (right)!

The Ground

You can see that the rocks from the first version stuck around but I preferred more of a soily/sandy ground so that I could sell the effect of the ship crashing down and creating a divot in the earth.

To achieve the desired 'divot' effect I made use of Designer's 'RT Shadow' node, which allows you to place a light that casts shadows based on the height info of its input, to subtract the earth from behind the ship and add earth in front. I added some additional, subtle striations to the earth behind the ship to give an impression of directionality when it crashed.

The "Vines"

This little collection of nodes will allow you to draw custom shaped tubes, which I used to create a couple variations of shapes and scattered around to create the vines/branches overlaid on the ground and ship using a Shape Splatter node. The reason for opting for this node over a Tile Generator or Tile Sampler was because the Shape Splatter features unique tools for overlaying shapes together by having "conform to background" parameters that allow the vines to follow the contours of the ground and ship.

You could also arguably achieve the same look by using a Non-uniform Blur to blur the area under the vines and then use a Blend set to 'Add' to composite the vines on top. The blur will wipe out detail while giving you an average of the local height data which the vines can be set on top of to create the contoured effect.

Here was my final result at the end of Day 1

Day 2 to come...

And thats all the noteworthy things from my exploration and experimentation of Day 1! On Day 2, I hope to flesh out the concept further by adding more foliage like ivy and pine needles and moss as well as adding some procedural damage to the UFO (maybe even some nearby scattered debris from the crash.)

I'm hoping to get the chance to stream my work on Twitch a few times this month for Nodevember .Or, at the very least, get some videos posted on YouTube so if you're interested in seeing more, feel free to follow/subscribe on those platforms :)

STAY TUNED FOR MORE!