Biomass – Material Breakdown – Adam Sharp

Introduction

Hi, my name is Adam Sharp and I’m an Environment/Material Artist at Electric Square. I started in the film/animation industry, working on numerous productions over the years, ranging from film, TV, and music industries. I made the jump to game development 2 years ago.

I wanted to create a Biomass material for set dressing use in an upcoming environment. Inspired by the thing, the last of us and several other disgusting effects.

I used Substance designer to create my Disgusting Biomass material. Its fully procedural, so making variations of the material can be quickly iterated on.

Creating the Height and Normals.

I gave the result a slight blur to help push the shapes together for a more natural look.

I added some micro-details by warping and blurring grunge maps together to break up and add surface detail.

Next, I added the Veins using the Scratches generator and warping this with the base shape to get the veins to follow the underlying shapes. Then blended this over the base shapes using Max Lighten.

Next was the underlying Muscle. This was created with a clouds 2 warped and sloped blurred to give it a more organic look. This was then height blended.
The height blend gave me a handy mask to use later on in the albedo process.

Next, I added some Muscle sinue by warping a cells 2 pattern and bevelling slightly.
This was also blended using a Height blend, again creating a mask for the albedo later.

Creating the Albedo

I start creating two colour gradients based on the base shapes and blend them together using the height map mask mentioned earlier.

Next I created a gradient map using a grunge texture and adding a levels to chop out some of the information, this is then blended using multiply and the height mask to give some deeper, richer colours to the base of the texture.

I then created another colour gradient based on two clouds nodes warped, then a levels node to give the colour some fatty tissue and blend them together with the height map mask.

Next, I created a colour gradient based on the veins shapes and blurred the slightly so they look like they are under the “skin” This is blended together, again using the height blend mask.

Finally, I created another colour gradient based on the Muscle sinue shapes and blended them in with the second height blend mask

The end result should be something quite disgusting.

Thank you for reading.

If you would like to see more of work please visit my Artstation.