Automotive Materials: Interior 1

Speaker Meshes

Speaker covers and grilles are graphic elements often composed of layered materials. Combined with complex patterns, they require heavy modeling resources.

We believe that designers should not have to craft form and materials separately.

Color and trim designers can now browse through a selection of speaker mesh patterns. Here, they have total control over the size and design of the patterns, as well as the material properties (metal, wood, plastic, paint) all in a single material file.

Making photorealistic visuals of the speaker design has become easier than ever. You can now focus on the design instead of worrying about the 3D. Variations of colors are only a click away!

And for the material freaks who want to go a step further in terms of realism, we’ve even added a loudspeaker material. Yes, you read that right! The image above is indeed a Substance material – there’s no complex 3D mesh involved, and no need to even model the profile of the speaker; just drag the material onto a tessellated plane, and you’ll get the same result. You just have to start playing with colors and glossiness.

Leathers

Of course, we couldn’t address interior texturing without talking about leather. To achieve a consistent library of leathers, we’ve partnered with professionals and gathered an extensive amount of physical samples of different skins. We’ve studied the work of interior visualization experts, as well as that of color and trim designers, and their constraints in reproducing complex leather assemblies.

Captured from high-quality samples in 4K, you’ll be able to choose from a selection of 12 types of skin, including procedural grains.

The color of the physical material sample doesn’t impose any limitations! Each leather base scan can be used as a hybrid material, so you’re free to change elements such as color and roughness.

Just go ahead and pick the color you need, and in a matter of minutes, you can create a personalized leather library using your own color palette.

Designers meet the same challenges, whether they need to recreate leather in the automotive sector, or in upholstery in general. Realism and perceived quality come from the craftsmanship invested in the assembly of leather pieces.

For instance, let’s take the example of a car seat. The leather is the outer envelope that holds the form of the seat. It helps contain generous padded areas for comfort, and it aesthetically emphasizes construction lines through colorful topstitches.

To deliver tools that can help designers and visualization experts to save time, we’ve decided to create several leather seam generator materials.

We wanted to get the best of both worlds, so we’ve combined the accuracy of scan capture with the flexibility of procedural techniques.

The result: high-quality scans of leather grains mixed with a procedural generator capable of creating several configurations of leather seams, topstitching, welts and sewn patterns.

And it will be available for each type of skin grain!

More precisely, you’ll be able to create a photorealistic reproduction of the bulges at the seam of two pieces of leather, so modelers don’t have to spend hours trying to simulate the tension in 3D. These elements can now be incorporated with only minor tweaks to the material parameters to adjust the tension of quilting, and the overlap of the seam and gathers.

Distinct parameters allow material specialists to simulate topstitching. These are: the number of stitches; their size, orientation, and color; roughness; metallic; puncture depth and spacing. These are all in your hands with endless possible variations.

But there’s still more.

We want to do more than provide precise control over material and color. We want to understand the lifecycle of materials inside the car, based on usage behaviors. This is critical when constructors need to make a thoughtful material decision at an early design stage.

Being able to reproduce accurate material aging in the cockpit is an absolute plus. This is how you can glimpse the evolution of your design over a number of years, and in various conditions.

Keeping this approach in mind, we’ve designed leathers with weathering parameters, which generate a gradual level of wear.

You can use this to create vintage leather for a video game, or to add just a few scratches to make a show car more lifelike. The parameters available allow a vast range of possibilities.

Gear Knobs

Are your gear knobs metal, plastic or both? Do you want to place a border around the gear speed indicator, or indent the labelling? Perhaps a simple print or a full-fledged backlit solution? Personalize the gearshift materials to reproduce your reference.

Alcantaras and Textiles

Alcantara microfibers may be the most common high-end textile finishes. We’ve also gathered a list of useful fabrics to texture what interior designers call “cabinetwork.” Ceiling, sun shades, seatbelts and the seats’ technical textiles are also included in this pack.

The fabrics of this collection are a mix of procedural and hybrid scan assets. Alcantaras and felts also have the seam procedural filter. This allows these materials to be improved with the creation of topstitched and reinforced sewn patterns, through the use of predefined parameters.

HMI and Screen Components

Following our experiments with rim materials in the previous release, we applied the same approach to interior elements. We noticed that a car interior could ultimately be composed of very complex models, with countless fine details of small parts that 3D modelers also have to create.

We wanted to help modelers focus on artistic tasks, and so, blending texturing and modeling in Substance material, we created a few examples of customizable buttons and knobs for A/C control.

The aim here is to increase productivity. The integration of detail in materials is a great opportunity to simplify the model. It is also meant to allow designers to try low-cost variations of a design.

Visualization experts and game artists can also go even further and animate the Substance material by switching modes and parameters in real-time for a better user immersion.

Screens are a hot topic in the automotive industry: designers and manufacturers are integrating more displays in the cockpit to create the next augmented driving experience.

Moreover, any designer or artist working on creating a device with a display (and there seem to be more and more of them every day) will find more flexibility with this new material. You’ll have the choice of definition. Just drag any bitmap or clip into it to create customized photorealistic displays.

Plastics

Plastic is another necessity in the field of design of manufactured products. Every designer tends to have a plastic grain roughness reference catalog on his or her desk. Right next to the color swatch.

A majority of the interior elements are made using plastic injection molding processes. Presenting these grains realistically is critical as every driver has their own experience with this material tactility.

Do you need to accurately reproduce an existing grain? Or do you need to tune the glossiness of the plastic to experiment with a new look and feel? We’ve created a collection of more than 50 different procedural grains – each based on physical references.

In this week’s selection, get a number of categories of grains, including organic patterns that reproduce leather, shagreen, and skin grains; sand, hail and droplet grains for a smoother haptic sensation; ultra-fine grains to create matte effects; geometric patterns for a graphic look and feel.

Get the Collection on Substance 3D Assets