Welcome to our Digital Leather Workshop!

What do a car, a gladiator, and a sports shoe have in common? You’ll need leather to texture them. And if you are so inclined, we have good news: April is the month of leather on Substance Source. So, into the world of tanned hides we go.

You might have explored the 200 leathers already on the platform. Today, we add over 840 new materials to the collection. But this time, they are all fully procedural! A lightweight solution that is completely customizable yet remains photorealistic in every detail.

It’s a real leather digital shop from which you can pick materials to texture luggage, upholstery, and apparel products with:

• 30 different types of leathers, common and exotic
• 9 processing finishes specific to the treatment of the leather
• 19 stitching patterns
• 10 punching patterns
• 5 braiding patterns
• 10 perforation patterns

See the materials on Substance 3D Assets

And even better, no animals were hurt in the creation of this collection. Follow us through the rabbit hole – or rather the eye of the needle – into a new material exploration from the largest library of procedural materials available today.

Most of the leathers on the market are so-called corrected or modified. This is a finish that is achieved by rolling the leather pieces under a press. The press molds have different grain sizes depending on the desired surface finish. This ensures that the grain is evenly distributed over the entire surface of the hide.

This process is also used creatively by some of the top luxury houses to apply exclusive grain patterns that are not found in nature.

Finally, the leathers can be dyed using various techniques to obtain metallic, pearl, iridescent, and even fluorescent effects.

Leathers in product design

By analyzing the different visual effects of these processes on each type of skin, we have created photorealistic and parametric digital replicas of these grains and finishes.

Our basic objective is to provide designers with a way to visualize their creations as close as possible to the final result before the product goes into production.

But it doesn’t stop there! Parametric digital materials are design tools on their own. We propose to do CMF design at the digital level. This means defining colors, finishes, and even grain details upstream of the product design process.

Defining the grain procedurally is an opportunity to control the skin pattern in the finest detail. A designer can use the normal and height maps to draw the depressions and bumps to be engraved on the grinding presses to print the desired pattern on the hides. No more need to reverse-engineer existing skins.

Above all, it is the promise of unbridled creativity that frees us from the technical limitations of analogue processes.

Procedural materials are a starting point, but it is in the Substance tools that they really come into their own. The nodal graphs (.SBS) available on Substance Source are just waiting to be mixed, customized and improved according to your creativity.

https://video.tv.adobe.com/v/3418836

This collection adds 10 additional finishes to your creative toolkit to create the surface you want. We have assembled the grains, finishes and patterns for you in a ready-to-use package.

Drag and drop the desired asset onto your 3D model for a photorealistic result. All you have to do is customize the parameters to your liking.

We have grouped here both “new” leather finishes and noble aging effects such as patina. Also, alteration styles, such as the addition of cracks or wrinkles to obtain a “devoré” effect.

https://video.tv.adobe.com/v/3418838

Another opportunity for digital materials is their use in rapid prototyping. In the industrial design process, prototyping is used to validate formal, technical and CMF choices before production.

The new techniques of rapid prototyping through 3D printing make it possible to reproduce the smallest details of form more and more faithfully. Thanks to the increased precision of the printers, it is now possible to add the details of the substrate. In this case, an accurate reproduction of the “touch” of the leather (haptics).

The complete interior of a luxury car can use up to ten different cows!

Most often, the seat bottoms are stitched to create graphic patterns. We opted to give you a range of choices there, too: today’s collection completes our leather library with 20 fully procedural stitching patterns.

Everything is customizable: the stitching layout, the density of the pattern, the intensity of the quilting, the color and diameter of the thread, and of course all the visual aspects of the leather base.

Automotive upholstery designers and digital modelers are true digital craftsmen and also force workers. A 3D class A model requires the sculpting of every stitch in the assembly. To get a realistic visualization from the 3D model, it must also contain all the details of borders and edges such as the folded seam, the double seam or piping.

Weeks of work are needed to create a seat and days for a steering wheel. This cumbersome process severely limits creative iterations as any change means starting again from scratch.

Substance Painter is a simple way to paint these assembly lines directly onto the 3D model. This is both fast and versatile as all seam and border information belongs to the texture and not the model.

Changing the design is as easy as a “control z”.

It means the assurance of testing all the possibilities before launching into manpower-heavy final modeling. In Substance Painter, a preset tool is available to create twenty different types of stitches.

All that’s missing is the smell of leather to make the experience complete. Unfortunately, we haven’t found a way to digitize it yet.

Share your creations with us using #madewithsubstance.