The Substance Designer Insanity Awards are back! It’s that time of year when the Substance Designer team look back over the materials created in Designer over the previous 12 months, and consider which ones struck them as being… just a little bit bonkers. Above all, the Substance Designer Insanity Awards recognize materials that are technically outstanding – but that also have an element of, ‘What on Earth am I looking at? How did this artist create this? Why did they create this?’ Are all of these materials 100% final and production-ready? Probably not. Are they mind-expandingly out there? Quite possibly. 

This year’s winner is Marco Vitale, for his brain-boggling Substance Designer neural network. Marco is a lighting designer for theater, as well as a passionate enthusiast of 3D. For the month of Nodevember, Marco challenged himself to create a convolutional neural network within Designer, capable of image recognition – and created a quite astonishing, and perhaps confounding, technical marvel.

Marco was also helpful enough to write up a detailed breakdown of how he accomplished this feat. The brilliance and craziness of Marco’s accomplishment here make him 2023’s first-place winner. He also recently discussed his work the team's own Vincent Gault!

I’m going to make a confession here: I love, love, love a full 3D scene created procedurally inside Substance Designer. Raouf Bejaoui is a Senior Technical Director at Naughty Dog. His Fully Procedural Clicker is a personal project created over about 5 months; the technical excellence on display here grabs Raouf second place for this year’s Insanity Awards.

Niki Marinov is a Material Artist at Frontier Developments. This wonderfully evocative material combines a range of different surfaces, bringing everything together to create a remarkable result. Outstanding. The cobwebs are a particularly lovely touch (even for an arachnophobe like me).

Have you ever wanted to create a giant architectural marvel in 3D – without any modeling, purely as a single texture? Well, this is what Pablo Blanes, a Texture Artist at Ubisoft Montreal, decided to do. The result is astonishing. Pablo even wrote up a breakdown for 80 Level discussing how he did it.

Receipts – those little scraps of paper that we puck up all over the place; for Max Kutsenko, a Texture Artist at Ubisoft Barcelona, they inspired a work of procedural art. You want to know how Max created this? Check your receipt. 

In 3D just as in real life, buildings need doors. And it can be a chore to model and texture them. So why not follow the approach used here by Dave Miragliotta, Senior Environment Artist II at Respawn Entertainment – just make the door itself a procedural material. And the fact that Dave is able to give his door material a certain personality, and make it feel so lived-in, is just… well, insane.

Depending on where you live in the world, it may be too cold to head out to the nearest beach right now. Don’t worry – Technical Environment Artist Oday Abuzaeed has you covered! His fantastically detailed material is all you need to conjure up warm sand and cool waves.

The first Substance Designer Insanity Awards took place in 2018; Jonathan Benainous, who recently joined Lightspeed LA as a Principal Environment Artist, appeared in that list, and has featured pretty regularly since. Here, Jonathan has created a stunning range of stained glass textures as part of his work on The Last of Us Part I. Delving further into his work on this game, Jonathan has also given a talk at GDC and written up a breakdown of how he created some of the other assets used to create this terrifying world. 

Yue Zhang is a Lighting-Environment Technical Director and Generalist; here, what started out as a little practice of an embroidery material resulted in something absolutely extraordinary.

Smell the musty wisdom in the air, the centuries of knowledge surely accumulated in these stylized tomes. Michael Di Lonardo, a 3D Generalist at Vanishing Vestige, has created a wonderfully characterful procedural bookshelf material here (awesome node graph, too!).

When you’re looking for a strange combination of gruesome and aspirational, you’ll find what you’re after in this personal project by Enrico Tammekänd, Senior Material Artist at CD Projekt Red. ‘Try Harder’ indeed – or just be happy with these results, which are fantastic. And a bit scary.

You can kind of spot when a piece of artwork is by Technical Designer and freelancer Cem Tezcan – there’s that distinctive retro vibe, and his frequent habit of using texture-driven height map modeling, using Substance Designer as a procedural modeling tool. Here, his subject is the Multisonic Paw, a chunky handheld gaming console straight from Cem’s own imagination. I want one.

And let's conclude with an honorable mention: we skipped the Insanity Awards last year – but if we’d run it, then Kelly Rocco’s Lion King with Substance Designer would probably have won. You should absolutely click right here to go check it out. Your eyeballs will thank you.