As you might know from my portfolio substances and blog posts i love working with mirror and symmetry nodes in Substance Designer to create interesting shapes and patterns. One thing that i was missing in my workflow was a good way to extrude shapes for that purpose. It's possible to use the shape extruder or to use the distance node with a mask but these solutions can be slow or result in artifacts and gradients that don't mirror well.

So i made my own custom node that allows me to mirror and shape inputs while doing extrusions either in the middle along the mirror axis or in just one direction.

I'm quite happy with how well this turned out. I'm using pixel processor so it's fast and having multiple of the Mirror Plus nodes in the graph is no problem.

As you can see above it's possible to create interesting and complex sci-fi elements from a simple shape input in just a few steps.  

It works well for making ornamental stuff aswell.

Demonstration of extrude mode.

Or it can be used to get a lot more mileage easily out of bitmaps such as this hard surface alpha from Jonas Ronnegard.

The node can be purchased from my artstation store for 1.99$ (Sbsar only) or 4.99$ (Sbsar+sbs+examples) here.