Heyhey, Substance community!
I am fairly new to Substance Designer and I'm trying to create a mask where spots/dots follow a somwhat swirly path - here's a couple pictures so it's easier to understand what I'm looking for:
It's the iridescent surface of a rose chafer's wing under a microscope. What I'm referring to here is the smaller, mostly green spots arranged in swirly paths in between the larger, brown notches. In the first couple pictures it looks like those rows/paths are more or less solid and not particularly broken up, and you can see the flow of those paths particularly well. In the third picture it's a bit more evident that those paths are broken up and consist of smaller dots, with some space between them, while in the last picture (which is actually a different beetle) you can mainly see the spots.
Now I'd like to ask... how would you go about creating this type of texture/mask? For the main paths/rows, I think I got a good base going:
At the selected node, it looks like this:
However, now I need to find a way to break this up into smaller spots that still follow those paths. I've tried ust blending it with different noises (with and without further nodes refining those noises), and the results are rather meh since they're not really breaking up the pattern in a very predictable, regular way. I'd need something that basically takes those white paths and turns them into an array of white dots.
I've tried it with the Mask To Paths node already, and while it feels like there has to be some way to make that work, the fact that those paths don't follow the white lines but rather outline them makes it so the pattern doesn't quite work in the end.
I've also tried using the Tile Sampler already, tiling a base shape along the normal map created by the swirly pattern via Vector Map input, but that didn't work, either. It sooomewhat followed the paths but always looked way too chaotic and not really like the pattern I'm trying to create. It is entirely possible that I just didn't tweak it right since I'm still pretty new to SD.
Something else I though of was basically somehow applying something like a sine wave to those white paths and only taking the peaks of that, if that is possible. But I'm not sure how I'd do that in Substance Designer.
How would you guys approach this? Am I approaching this from the wrong direction? Should I rather start with the cell/dot pattern and then somehow modify that to follow these non-uniform rows/paths? Do you know any material accessible online that I could use as a base for this?
Thanks in advance! :]
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