Heyhey, guys! :]
For a personal project, I am trying to replicate a european rose chafer's iridescent texture in UE5 as detailed and precisely as possible. I already got the entire logic for the iridescence and almost everything else set up in Unreal but there's one thing that's still missing - the proper micro surface texture. So far I am using just a texture with very small bumps that's blended with a swirly texture in the shader, and it works decently well but it's still not quite what I am looking for.
So, here's what I want to replicate:
The first 3 pictures show the dotted nature of the microsurface, while the last 2 show the swirly structure on a somewhat more macroscopic level. So I'm trying to create a somewhat regular array of dots that follows a swirly structure.
If you were to replicate that pattern with the described features accurately for your job, what would your approach look like?
I've had several thoughts about it but none really worked so far.
I've tried creating the swirly structure first in black and white and then breaking the white lines up into smaller dots, but I couldn't find a good way of doing that in a way that does distributes the dots somewhat regularly along the lines instead of breaking them up fairly randomly. Another approach of breaking the white lines up more regularly that crossed my mind was putting a sine wave onto them somehow that follows the curves and only taking the peaks, but I don't know if that's possible in Designer, and if it is, I don't know how.
I've also tried turning the black/white swirly texture into curves along which I distributed dots, but that didn't give me the desired result, either - probably because I'm not super experienced with curves (or Designer in general) yet, although it did seem at the time that there were some technical limitations to that approach that made it not work properly for this project.
Lastly, I know that you can use the tile generator to gnerate dots and distribute them along certain structures. I have a feeling that that's the most promising approach to get the regularly distributed dots I am looking for, but I don't know how to feedin the swirly structure and tell the generator to distribute them along the white lines.
Here's the swirly structure I got so far that soooomewhat resembles the swirly texture I want to replicate:
Am I generally thinking in the right direction already? Or do you have something completely different in mind?
I am still a bit of a noob at Substance Designer and this might either be a super simple task or something that's not even achievable as intended but I can't quite judge which of the two it really is. I'd legit even be willing to pay a small sum to anybody who can give me a solution that can accurately replicate this texture - it's been bothering me for a while that I can't find a satisfying solution.
Any help and advice is greatly appreciated and thank you in advance!
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Replies
Hello Tobias,
Interesting project you have here.
Indeed, you could use a Tile Sampler to scatter the Shape and make sure it is only visible when the Shape intersect with your Pattern.
A different approach I can think of using Splines :
Plug your Pattern in a Mask to Paths, than a Path to Spline and finally a Scatter on Splines grayscale. By duplicating the number of Splines, you should get something like this :
Which is already a bit closer to what you're looking for.
Good luck with your project!
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