I discovered Adobe Substance 3D Designer back before it was acquired by Adobe and instantly fell in love with the application. Procedurally based content has been an interest of mine for a long time, and applying it to textures struck me as a brilliant idea. The product itself was fairly easy to learn and it was getting updated rapidly with new features.

While working at NetBurner, I  saw an opportunity to use Substance Designer to potentially create new logo variations that could be used for newsletters, the website, marketing materials, etc. After digging in and experimenting some, I created a node graph that could take any black and white logo, and create a rendering of that logo using different materials.

To me, this seemed like something that other companies might be able to leverage as well, and I decided to stand up a website that would allow me to create and sell these renderings. We had recently converted the NetBurner’s site to use WordPress, and I decided to do the same for this endeavor.

I was able to get the site up and running in a couple of months in my spare time. However, as I quickly found out, it takes more than a site to exist for it to get traffic and usage. After about a year or so of running the service with little success, I decided to retire it. Overall, it was a great experience, and I learned several valuable lessons that I would carry over to my next endeavor, MiniHoarder.com.