Creating Realistic Cliff Materials using Substance Designer by Vincent Dérozier

This 4-hour workshop by Vincent Dérozier is all about building believable cliff surfaces in Substance Designer without losing readability. It’s not just about piling on more detail — it’s about understanding how shapes, forms, and fine textures work together. You’ll construct a polished, production-ready cliff material from scratch, then turn it into a full collection of variations that work in games, cinematics, and real-time environments.

🎯 What you’ll learn

• Create macro shapes through broad elements
• Build realistic mid and small shapes while creating rhythm
• Develop highly detailed, readable colors
• Plan and construct working materials from the ground up
• Apply art fundamentals to material creation
• Create optimized graphs and scalable recipes

✅ Requirements

• Skills: Basic understanding of Substance Designer interface and core concepts
• Tools: Substance Designer, Unreal Engine
• Hardware: Computer capable of running Substance Designer and Unreal Engine

📝 Description

Vincent starts with the big picture: primary shapes and large-scale forms. From there, he breaks down secondary details like erosion patterns, chiseling, cracks, and porosity. Each layer of information gets its own place in a clean, readable graph structure. You’ll see exactly how to organize your nodes so the material stays manageable as complexity grows.

Color work gets two full lessons. Vincent shows how to move from a neutral base to rich, layered results using custom noises, gradient maps, temperature variation, and weathering. He emphasizes controlling what the viewer sees first, second, and third through shape hierarchy and rhythm. It’s a practical approach to making stone look natural, not just noisy.

The roughness lesson covers sediment flow patterns and thickness-driven variation. Then Vincent shifts to optimization — how to simplify node structures without sacrificing visual fidelity. The final lessons focus on reusability: adapting the base graph to generate alternative heightmaps and surface variations. You end up with a scalable material system, not just a single texture.

🧑‍🎓 Who this course is for

• Artists new to Substance Designer who want a clear, step-by-step material creation workflow
• Environment artists looking to improve their procedural texturing skills for games and real-time projects
• More experienced artists interested in production-focused approaches and industry insights

🧑‍🏫 About the Author

Vincent Dérozier studied Fine Arts at Émile Cohl in France, graduating with a Conceptor Draftsman degree. He started in the game industry in 2010 at Ubisoft Annecy as an Environment Artist. After moving to Canada, he worked on multiple Assassin’s Creed titles including Syndicate, Odyssey, and Shadows, plus For Honor and Immortals Fenyx Rising. He’s held roles from Material Artist to Principal Artist and is currently Senior Lead Content at Gearbox Studio Quebec.

🏁 Final Result

• A complete, production-ready cliff material with full texture maps
• A collection of cohesive material variations built from a single scalable graph
• A reusable material system you can adapt for future projects