Recreating Recycled Plastic (HDPE) Texture?

[Lukkee]

Hey SD Team!

I'm working on a high-end interior architecture project and specifying a recycled high-density polyethelyne (HDPE) material as a interior lining (pictures below). I was hoping to do some realistic renders using Blender to show the client, but have come up stuck on how to recreate the HDPE as a PBR material.

I had an initial go using Blender shader using the voronoi texture and a colour ramp, which looked okay from a distance, but wanted to see if I could use Substance Designer to recreate something much more realistic for close-up renders. I think specifically I'm after suggestions for achieving the subsurface fading effect that the material has (as the plastic pellets melt into and overlay over each other), rather than a voronoi which has solid chunks that a are blurred.

For context I'm new to Substance Designer, but have had a little experience with textures using Quixel Mixer (and not afraid to jump in and learn) Any suggestions/ideas/tutorials to look at would be greatly appreciated!

Cheers!

[Luca Giarrizzo · Accepted solution]

Hello,

The Cells 4 node can get you started quickly with scattering pellets. Then, the Diffusion nodes recently added into Designer may prove userful for the melted blending effect of plastic pellets.

I have attached a simple demonstration Substance 3D file (*.sbs) to this message. The demonstration outputs this result:

I hope this is helpful!