Substance Crystals

This week's round of 2D assets was mainly visual effects stuff but since our tech artist is here and we don't have enough time to get into a really serious 3d sculpt I decided to get into Substance Texturing.  Truth be told I'm not a very experienced Substance user, and I was hoping to take this opportunity to get a bit more advanced with the things you can do with stuff like Curvature mapping.  Jackson sent me a really great Marmoset Toolbag tutorial to get refraction and a bunch of neat effects but unfortunately I'm not a proficient enough Substance user yet to really get to where he got so much of the night was spent googling and experimenting.

To start I added a simple fill layer with about the color I was hoping to have in the center of the crystal.

 Next was to add some shine to the crystal to try to sell that polished surface

Next a gradient to give the tips of the crystals some pop and set a darker color to the tops of the crystals so they'd be more homogynous at the ceiling.

 Adding a bit of edge lighting was the next step.  I got this subtle effect by adding a curvature bitmap mask to a pink fill layer. This emphasized the edges of the crystal without me having to manually paint them in.  It's still a bit clunky for my tastes but on larger projects like a crystal ceiling pieces with individual crystals it would be very efficient.

Finally I added an emissive channel and 3D gradient to the bottom of the crystal so that it could be toned down and used to create a glow effect in the scene once ported to unreal.