Substance Designer • Signed Distance Fields Vol.1

About
Signed Distance Functions (SDF), return the shortest distance between a point and an implicit curve (or surface when working in 3D space). The sign of the distance indicates whether the point falls inside or outside the curve.

The collection of nodes for Substance Designer (v.2021.2.x) in this bundle allow to easily create and manipulate SDF in order to create virtually any 2D shape. These SDF nodes have multiple advantages over 'traditional' shape nodes in Substance Designer, notably the fact that they allow smooth blending between shapes, the ability to easily anti-alias them and the ability to generate very clean normals from the result. This makes them very powerful, and ideal for "height map modeling". Includes Source Files

Contents

1. Shape Nodes

This package contains 16 SDF Shape nodes that output a Signed Distance Field, all with custom parameters to control the way they look. They range from simple geometric shapes (circle, rectangle, triangles, regular polygons, etc.) to more complex shapes (bezier curve, vesica, cross, etc.).

• Circle
• Line
• Rectangle
• Rhombus
• Equilateral Triangle
• Isoceles Triangle
• Triangle
• Uneven Capsule
• Pentagon
• Hexagon
• Octogon
• Isoceles Trapezoid
• Ellipse
• Vesica
• Cross
• Bezier (Quadratic)

2. SDF Tools Nodes

In order to really get the most out of the SDF Shape nodes, this bundle also contains a set of nodes used to draw,  combine, visualize and transform SDF.

SDF Draw
Typically this node would be placed at the end of a series of SDF nodes in order to render it out as a grayscale shape.

SDF Combine
In order to create more complex shapes, this node offers different options to combine SDF together, as well as different transitions between distance fields.

Operations:

• Union (A ⋃ B)
• Subtraction (A – B)
• Intersection (A ⋂ B)
• Interpolate (A → B)
  

Transitions:

• No Transition
• Chamfer
• Smooth
• Steps

SDF Transform
This node allows to modify an input SDF in multiple different ways create even more interesting effects.

• Push, Offset and “Annularize”
• Offset and Rotation
• Wobble Effect

SDF Visualize
This node is also used to visualize a SDF, but unlike the SDF Draw node, it is mostly useful in order to “debug” a SDF as it give more information about it (inside/outside, distance “steps”, etc.). It is also possible to use this node creatively and generate some nice effects !