Procedural materials authored in Adobe Substance 3D Designer, built to be adjusted rather than repainted.
Why procedural rather than painted
A painted texture is finished the moment it is exported. A substance is a set of rules, so the same material can produce a hundred variations: different wear, different scale, different colour, without going back to the source art. That matters most when a decision changes late, which it always does.
It also tends to be lighter. A substance ships as a small graph rather than a set of large texture maps, and resolves at the resolution the target platform can afford.
What we make
- Character and creature materials
- Environment and terrain surfaces
- Props and hard-surface assets
- Architectural surfaces for visualisation work
- Effects materials
Where it lands
Materials are delivered ready for Unreal Engine and Unity, and for Maya and 3ds Max where the work is destined for offline rendering rather than a game engine. Where a project needs the engine side as well, that is development work. Tell us the target before we start and we will author to it.
Upstream of the material
A material is only as good as the UV layout underneath it. Bad seams and wasted texel density cannot be fixed later in the graph, so we work across that part of the pipeline rather than picking the asset up at the end of it.
Where the standard workflow gets in the way, we build our own tooling. Our ZBrush to RizomUV bridge came out of exactly that, and we have released it free for anyone to use.
Commissioning work
Pricing depends on complexity and on how much parameter control you want exposed. Send a reference image or a description of the surface to info@dftgames.com and we will quote against it. Individual materials and complete environment sets are both normal requests.