Substances - Tip for Working from Reference

When I first started out with Designer trying to make an albedo of a basic concrete, I had a tough time figuring out where to begin. Reference imagery was really daunting because there's just so much color to deal with.

A quick little trick that helped me out was to convert the image to index color and scroll through the color palette range. This effectively isolates the important grunge maps and their associated color which provided the way forward in Substance Designer. I find that most textures give the greatest information within 6-8 colors. Anything beyond that may be too subtle to notice.

The idea is to try to mimic the differences found in each color layer inside Substance Designer. It's almost like looking at the albedo as it's being developed. Once you have your noise maps, bring in that final saturation and localized color variance that's found in the original reference imagery.

Try this on your reference images!