Day 6 - 🛠️ Behind the process - Approaching Material Creation

General / 07 May 2026

How I Approach Material Creation

How to approach material creation depends on whether it’s for personal work or a professional setting.

Personal vs. Professional

The goal shifts completely depending on context. For personal work, you’re trying to demonstrate your range and knowledge — you get to choose the subject matter, push yourself into unfamiliar territory, and show what you’re capable of. For professional work, the asset needs to serve the project first. If I’ve never worked on organic materials and want to explore them, a sci-fi corridor game is not the place to try it for the first time.

How Briefs Come In

I’ve worked from all kinds of starting points. Sometimes it’s a clear-cut piece of concept art with well-defined shapes, values, and a material breakdown already implied. Other times it’s a real-world reference that needs to be pushed toward the project’s visual language. The hardest and slowest is when the brief is open to interpretation. Multiple iterations, trying to translate someone else’s vision onto the canvas, until you land somewhere that feels right. If you can reduce ambiguity early, do it.

Starting Point: Alignment and Reference

On a professional project, my first step is always to align with the art director on their vision for the asset, prop, or environment piece. I don’t start building anything until that conversation has happened.

From there: gather a large pool of reference images. More than you think you need. Bring them to art direction and start culling: decide what stays, what goes, and what elements you’re specifically trying to hit. Reference isn’t decoration; it’s your contract with the team about what the final thing should feel like.

Art Direction

There is some unknown territory depending on whether you are the first artist on a project or joining one that already has a defined look. If you join an arena shooter that has existed for five years, you know that is the style you have to match - your job is to fit into an established system, not reinterpret it in your own way. Look-dev is mostly the time on a new project when a material artist and the art director will try to define the art style together and produce benchmark assets that set the example for the rest of production. In practice that means matching existing roughness ranges, staying within the established palette, and using the same base tiling rates as surrounding assets. The creative challenge shifts from "what should this look like" to "how do I get there within these rules."

For a personal project you are the art director, so you will have to figure out what look you're going for. That can be building toward a specific game company you'd love to work for, or simply setting yourself a new challenge.

I've never had to fully redo a material, but there have been moments where you have to reassess whether the direction you're heading is right for the intended look. A material can look very good in isolation, but in context it becomes too distracting. It might be a great portfolio piece on its own but it's also about striking a balance that best serves the project. That's not always easy.

Splitting It Up

Before diving in, it’s worth asking: is this one material, or a combination of materials and shading effects working together to produce the result? A wall might have a base plaster material, a damage decal layer, and a wetness mask, each is a separate concern. Getting that decomposition right early saves significant rework.

The choice usually comes down to this: a layered material approach gives you flexibility at runtime; think a slick oil layer on top of an asset that needs to shift over time, or a burn effect that sits on top of everything and is controlled by a placement mask. A single material is your typical export directly from Designer or Painter, but you need to account upfront for things like shader-driven tint, detail map blending, or any other parameters that need to be controlled at the engine level. Neither is always the right answer, it depends on how the asset will be used, how often it needs to vary, and what the shader budget allows.

The Actual Process

Set your texel density first. Figure out the tiling rate and set the real-world measurements in Substance Designer or Painter before you start building. This ensures that anything derived from your height map (normals, ambient occlusion, curvature) is physically grounded and PBR-compliant, and that your material sits consistently alongside everything else in the project at the same real-world scale.

Compartmentalize reusable features. If your project has rocks appearing across multiple surfaces — cliff faces, rubble piles, ground scatter; build a rock generator node once and share it across all materials that need it. The same goes for any recurring detail: pine needles, cracks, edge wear. You get visual consistency across the project and a single point to update when something needs to change.

Settle on a naming convention early. Your materials, resources, and shared nodes need to be findable: by you six months from now, and by whoever else is working in the same library. Whatever convention you pick, document it and stick to it.

Closing Thought

What works for one person doesn’t always translate to another’s workflow, so don’t be afraid to experiment and adapt. That said, on a professional project, you often don’t have the bandwidth to rethink your process mid-stream. Build the habits in personal work, so they’re second nature when it counts.