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Substance Designer - Master Thread

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  • punkvideo
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    punkvideo polycounter lvl 10
    ValN84
    Rust texture create mask, maybe the procedural. Because rusty metal must be in another place.
  • ValN84
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    ValN84 polycounter lvl 5
    I'm not sure what you meant to say, there's no rust layer in that graph yet.
  • punkvideo
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    punkvideo polycounter lvl 10
    No. You make rust metal graph procedural only down place. See photo сar old...
  • Rick Stirling
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    Rick Stirling polycounter lvl 18
    ValN84, thats some lovely stuff there.

    OK, I managed to get some spare time today to continue my wood studies, this time adding a paint layer.


    glossy_painted_wood.png


    This is still the basic paint layer, with no brush strokes or chipping/flaking paint, or undercoat (I'e got these all working in various graphs). I'm showing it this way to show how you build up a graph and link the various surface types.

    OK, step 1, add in some paint. It's very basic:

    simple_paint.png

    It's just blending a colour input (that I added a *tiny* bit of colour variation to with clouds, I'll probably remove that). The opacity of the paint is controlled by the Opacity Slider in the blend node.


    That's not a great way to control the opacity, so I've used the plank mask again with a Levels Node as in input to the paint blend.

    masked_levelled_paint.png

    By adjusting the levels I can mix the paint amount.

    mixed_paint.png


    Of course, that's just the diffuse. Painted wood will have different specular and normal values, so I've used the same Level node as a controlled mask to let me modify those:

    paint_control_to_spec.png

    paint_control_to_normal.png


    For the spec, I've added a second levels node before the final blend with the previous spec - this allows me to control the glossiness of the paint. Just after I took the grab I remembered to connect the wood/paint mix control to the mask of the final blend. That means that the paint glossiness control is only active when there is some paint.


    The normal blend is pretty obvious - I just mixed the non grain plank shapes with the previous normal map. As I add paint via the level mixer, the wood grain gets reduced. I added an extra level in there too, as I found that I could blend out the grain completely and that looked wrong. So, even with paint at 100% there is still a little grain left there. This levels node will be hooked up as Paint Thickness.

    So, it's uniform looking, but with a network like this you'd expose:
    Paint Colour
    Paint Mix
    Paint Thickness
    Paint Glossiness.



    Next up, I'll add the ability to weather the paint. It's really quite simple, all I need to do is blend in a LEVELLED weathering node with my Paint Mix Levels, and use the Paint Mix Levels as a mask for that.


    older_paint.png

    I used a directional noise, but it could have been anything, and I can layer up more effects. The levels on that work as a weathering intensifier, so I can blend it out to black (no paint), mid tone it with contrast for streaky chips, or make it almost white for new paint.

    This gets fed into the spec and normals automatically because of the previous network, but I also converted the levelled mask to a new normal map and overlaid it with the original normal map - this gives me some paint thickness.

    For added fun, I also converted that grunge mask into dirty noise and blended it with the paint colour. It's not great, but it's a start for the dirt. I should however make the noise work with the entire surface, not just the paint.
  • JedTheKrampus
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    JedTheKrampus polycounter lvl 8
    Its a good start, but it still looks very procedural - the same issues I've been having.

    I'm trying to replicate something more like these:

    bricks-texture-design1.jpg

    Here's a 100% procedural substance I made based on that image.

    fhCRHhE.png

    Substance download: https://mega.co.nz/#!VctFiBYA!ekVLByFMnIP0I0MmPqUTKgYfLqwiR4Vrm_hnxSGAj10

    It's still missing quite a bit of high-frequency detail... anyone got some tips?
  • Froyok
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    Froyok greentooth
    I see a lot of red nodes. :p

    If you plan to optimize your substances for realtime purpose, you need to know that each instance node is individual. Therefore to optimize computations it's better to put only one noise node (for example) and to connect everywhere you need it.
  • JedTheKrampus
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    JedTheKrampus polycounter lvl 8
    Since my preferred engine doesn't natively support Substances, I really couldn't care less. Besides, they aren't *all* grunge maps. 95% of the red nodes are fairly lightweight - Perlin noise 1, Brick generator, Moisture noise etc.
  • Froyok
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    Froyok greentooth
    Well, once you start working in 2K or even 4K it can be a bit heavy. ;)
    Otherwise yeah, for offline process it doesn't really mater.
  • Rick Stirling
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    Rick Stirling polycounter lvl 18

    It's still missing quite a bit of high-frequency detail... anyone got some tips?

    If you install the samples, have a look at the brick wall. You can see how they've added in some pretty good noise on the bricks and the mortar, plus there is some really nice masking going on.
  • Rick Stirling
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    Rick Stirling polycounter lvl 18
    OK, I reckon I'll put this one to bed now. My final part is adding scuff along the edges of each plank.

    To do this, I already have a mask of the planks, so I need to take that, blur it to give me a wider plank border, then put on a few filters to warp that mask and add some noise.

    warped_plank_edges.png

    warped_plank_edges_noisy.png


    With the previous graph already pushing this mask into the diffuse, normal and spec channels, it now mean I have a edge wear effect that gets added to the previous grunge.

    After I'd taken the grab I realised that I'd hooked up the blend of this to the wrong place in the node graph - it should be added AFTER I blend the existing wear and tear over the mask. Never mind.

    OK, some shots of it in action.

    warped_plank_edges_diffuse.png

    warped_plank_edges_diffuse2.png

    warped_plank_edges_diffuse3.png
  • chrisavigni
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    chrisavigni polycounter lvl 12
    Hey Rick Stirling, great wood texture! Tks for the breakdown!
    Have you tried using a pattern generator instead of a bitmap?
  • Octo
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    Octo polycounter lvl 17
    Has anyone gotten opacity to work in the 3d viewport?
  • Froyok
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    Froyok greentooth
    Yep, you just have to change your shader, Relief doesn't do any alpha while the Tesselation shader can display it.
  • motionblur
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    motionblur polycounter lvl 11
    Is there a "curves" node or a way to use curves - not just the levels node?

    I guess a curves node might be on the expensive side but since I'm also just using it for offline and batching texturing purposes, so far I don't care about render times so much.
  • Rick Stirling
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    Rick Stirling polycounter lvl 18
    Hey Rick Stirling, great wood texture! Tks for the breakdown!
    Have you tried using a pattern generator instead of a bitmap?

    Yeah, I tried, but I simply couldn't get a pattern to come close to the quality of a photo.
  • Jerc
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    Jerc interpolator
    @motionblur There is no curve node unfortunately.

    BTW, we released the substance templates for the guns, Hotrod and Gunformer scenes we use in our gallery and tutorials.
    http://www.allegorithmic.com/products/substance-designer-4#templates
  • cman2k
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    cman2k polycounter lvl 17
    AWESOME - thanks man!
  • motionblur
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    motionblur polycounter lvl 11
    Jerc wrote: »
    @motionblur There is no curve node unfortunately.

    Thank you for the reply. Do you plan on adding curves some time?
    While the levels usually do a pretty good job I really miss curves from time to time.
  • Harrad
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    Harrad polycounter lvl 6
    Been having a little play around with SD today, thought i'd make something that would be a pain in the arse to texture by hand... so went for an oldschool divers helmet.

    I thought it would be a good exercise from a highpoly model down to baked textures (not bothered about realtime shaders at this point).

    Once i'd made the lowpoly cage I noticed a nice feature about SD, if you have the lowpoly model loaded in and then set up the AO and normal bakes, attaching the highpoly in the settings. If you jump back to max and make some changes to the lowpoly mesh and re-export, SD will auto-update the model in the viewport and then you can right click on the mesh in explore panel and click re-bake all from the menu. This then updates with in a few seconds. So I was able to just back and forth from SD and max tweaking my lowpoly mesh, adding in more detail where needed. This is the quickest way i've seen to get feedback on your normals from any application, this also works for UV's and smoothing groups as well... pretty handy for nailing the normal maps.

    So this is what I ended up with ...

    4r9s.jpg

    I really like that you can generate all your maps from the same nodes, rather than the tedious task of reworking your diffuse maps in photoshop to get your spec etc.. here the diffuse, normal, spec are all working together and can be tweaked. Also really like the workflow of taking the normal maps that is baked from the highpoly then layering up detail on top, i'd added scratches to the edges of the model, and also took inverted cell noise and blured it a bit to make the model look like it had been ding'd about... these details could then be dialed in a adjusted as i was working, don't think i'd been able to get this working in PS anywhere near as good as SD.

    Heres the diffuse and normal that was exported out of SD (Right click on the graph in the explorer panel and click export outputs as bitmaps)

    wlf3.jpg

    Heres the graph for helmet, all just on one shader at the moment and I haven't broken anything out into sub-graphs yet...

    hbxx.jpg
  • ultramedia
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    ultramedia polycounter lvl 11
    God I love Polycount :)
  • almighty_gir
  • WipEout
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    WipEout polycounter lvl 15
    So I brought this up in the Steam SD4 community thread on Jerc's DOTA2 Character Creation Template guide, but I thought I'd field the question here where more experienced artists might catch it:

    It appears the Dota2_hero shader isn't working on my home computer. The substance and graph and example FBX all load fine, but the shader itself is greyed out in the 3D viewer, under the material drop-down. When I tried to load it again, I just get a small error window that simply says "Unknown Error."

    I tried again on my work PC, and it seems to work fine (though I just found out the light it stuck at world zero, can't move when I shift-right-click drag).

    The only difference I can think of is that my work PC runs a Nvidia 580GTX, and my home PC runs dual Radeon HD6970s. I've always had issues displaying stuff in Maya's High Quality viewport and Max's Nitrous when using AMD cards, so I'm wondering if that might be the source of the issue.

    Has anyone else come across this, and/or found a solution?

    Either way, my next home PC build won't be running AMD cards...
  • WipEout
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    WipEout polycounter lvl 15
    crazy weird double post.
  • Dashiva
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    Dashiva triangle
    WipEout wrote: »
    So I brought this up in the Steam SD4 community thread on Jerc's DOTA2 Character Creation Template guide, but I thought I'd field the question here where more experienced artists might catch it:

    It appears the Dota2_hero shader isn't working on my home computer. The substance and graph and example FBX all load fine, but the shader itself is greyed out in the 3D viewer, under the material drop-down. When I tried to load it again, I just get a small error window that simply says "Unknown Error."

    I tried again on my work PC, and it seems to work fine (though I just found out the light it stuck at world zero, can't move when I shift-right-click drag).

    The only difference I can think of is that my work PC runs a Nvidia 580GTX, and my home PC runs dual Radeon HD6970s. I've always had issues displaying stuff in Maya's High Quality viewport and Max's Nitrous when using AMD cards, so I'm wondering if that might be the source of the issue.

    Has anyone else come across this, and/or found a solution?

    Either way, my next home PC build won't be running AMD cards...

    I had something like this happen on my Radeon too. It's basically a problem with their DX9 renderer. If you go into options and change the renderer to DX10 it should fix it.
  • WipEout
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    WipEout polycounter lvl 15
    Oh rad! Thanks, I'll try that when I get home!
  • cman2k
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    cman2k polycounter lvl 17
    Hey guys,

    So I have been trying to figure something out. If I make a substance with an exposed parameter that I want to be grayscale - any time that I reference that substance, the exposed parameter shows up as RGB instead of grayscale.

    substance_exposed_parameter.jpg

    Does anyone know to make the exposed parameter be greyscale when the substance is referenced? I've tried various things like setting the Color Mode to a constant value - but I've had no luck so far. I have looked at Allegorithmics stuff to try and figure out how they did it but I had no luck there either. Is there some trick I'm missing?
  • cman2k
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    cman2k polycounter lvl 17
    Has anyone else noticed issues with the Physically based shading's roughness? It doesn't seem to behave like I think it should. Check out this animated gif of me moving roughness value between 0 and 1 on a 100% metallic material.

    substance_roughness_probs.gif

    gif compression aside, there is some weird stripey stuff happening, and I think there is a range of roughness values that I cannot achieve for some reason? If I want something to be just slightly rough, that doesn't seem possible.

    edit; I've tested this on actual meshes and not just the sphere. It's not a weird UV issue or anything.

    Also I tested with a different cubemap that I made myself and confirmed works in other engines - but it has the same issue.
  • Froyok
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    Froyok greentooth
    cman2k wrote: »
    Hey guys,

    So I have been trying to figure something out. If I make a substance with an exposed parameter that I want to be grayscale - any time that I reference that substance, the exposed parameter shows up as RGB instead of grayscale.

    [IMG*]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1441389/substance_exposed_parameter.jpg[/IMG]

    Does anyone know to make the exposed parameter be greyscale when the substance is referenced? I've tried various things like setting the Color Mode to a constant value - but I've had no luck so far. I have looked at Allegorithmics stuff to try and figure out how they did it but I had no luck there either. Is there some trick I'm missing?

    Is you input parameter correctly setup ? Because I don't have this problem here with the 4.0.2 version on Steam.

    By the way, how did you create the input ? By using the "expose" function or creating it from scratch ?
  • cman2k
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    cman2k polycounter lvl 17
    Ah, thanks Froyok that question helped me figure it out!

    Apparently there are multiple ways to expose parameters. I was right-clicking on the node in the graph view and using "Expose Parameters".

    Instead, I used "Expose" under the function drop down in the right panel. This functioned more how I expected.
  • Froyok
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    Froyok greentooth
    cman2k wrote: »
    Apparently there are multiple ways to expose parameters. I was right-clicking on the node in the graph view and using "Expose Parameters".
    It's a bug, I reported it. :)
    Mainwhile you can stick to the "expose" function in the dropdown menu.

    cman2k wrote: »
    Has anyone else noticed issues with the Physically based shading's roughness? It doesn't seem to behave like I think it should. Check out this animated gif of me moving roughness value between 0 and 1 on a 100% metallic material.

    [IMG*]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1441389/substance_roughness_probs.gif[/IMG]

    gif compression aside, there is some weird stripey stuff happening, and I think there is a range of roughness values that I cannot achieve for some reason? If I want something to be just slightly rough, that doesn't seem possible.

    edit; I've tested this on actual meshes and not just the sphere. It's not a weird UV issue or anything.

    Also I tested with a different cubemap that I made myself and confirmed works in other engines - but it has the same issue.

    1- The "jump" that you see is just the shader refreshing, that's normal.

    2- Regarding the other artifact, a quite simple in fact : this happen when your normal map is a zero vector (by default the shader as a default blue color, but using the "view outputs in 3d view" will send your normal map node output a black image). You can "fix" this simply by connecting a normal map node or by disabling the normal map in the shader (go uncheck 3D View > Material > Default > Channels > Normal).
  • NicolasW
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    NicolasW polycounter lvl 13
    1- The "jump" that you see is just the shader refreshing, that's normal.

    Well that's not normal ;) It's a bug and it's already in our backlog. Hopefully it'll be fixed in SD 4.1.
  • Neox
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    Neox veteran polycounter
    Hey guys,

    so i started playing with substance designer, have to say i need to watch more tutorials to understand whats going on, however i have a couple of questions

    1. what tangentbase is SD synched with? MikkT? Maya, Max? definitely not unity, the normalmaps for unity look super crap in substance ^^

    2. i have a very annoying lag when i click a node, even an empty node, it takes at least a second to refresh before i can move around again
  • Octo
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    Octo polycounter lvl 17
    I think 3.7 was synced with unity...not sure if that changed..have you tried to switch between displaying directx/opengl in SD?
  • Neox
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    Neox veteran polycounter
    if you mean switching the rendering engine, i can switch betweent Direct3d 10, D3d9 and SSE2, no open GL option.
    Switching doesn't change a thing, and what i see is definitely not the tangentbase of Unity, in unity the normalmaps are flawless, here they are completely broken. :|

    substance.jpg

    on the bottom is what the normalmaps look like in unity

    weird, after restarting it works, tho the greenchannel needs to be flipped?

    the second problem still remains, i have a super nasty lag when clicking on a node
  • Froyok
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    Froyok greentooth
    Some little things to notes :

    -The tangent space is set to Unity by default, but if you bake with designer while keeping the tangent/binormals of your FBX file, those will override the default tangent space. Therefore you will not get a synced result.

    -If you export to unity your substance (as an sbar), note that when you will import your substance in Unity the green channel of the normal will be automatically flipped (to match Y+, as Designer works by default with Y-).
    NicolasW wrote: »
    Well that's not normal ;) It's a bug and it's already in our backlog. Hopefully it'll be fixed in SD 4.1.
    Ha sorry, good to know ! :)
  • Xoliul
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    Xoliul polycounter lvl 14
    Neox wrote: »
    Hey guys,

    so i started playing with substance designer, have to say i need to watch more tutorials to understand whats going on, however i have a couple of questions

    1. what tangentbase is SD synched with? MikkT? Maya, Max? definitely not unity, the normalmaps for unity look super crap in substance ^^

    2. i have a very annoying lag when i click a node, even an empty node, it takes at least a second to refresh before i can move around again

    Hey Neox: Substance uses whatever normals are inside the mesh, so "explicit" like they are in UDK. You can tell it to override though. On your screenshot it looks like you just need to flip green though (they call it DirectX <> OpenGL normals).

    Also, you're talking about switching engine, keep in mind that is NOT the viewport driver. Viewport 3D view is always OpenGL. The "Engine" is what is being used to generate the textures. That can be done on GPU (DX10) or CPU (SSE).
  • Neox
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    Neox veteran polycounter
    i tried flipping green and this was actually the flipped green, better version the other one was even worse, after restarting it ate the normalmap just as it should.
    where do i find this option? in general i feel like i'm lacking option, if i click a node or a map, i have a couple of parameters on the right, but none of the described ones.
  • Xoliul
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    Xoliul polycounter lvl 14
    What option? To override mesh normals? Tools > Preferences > Editors. Scroll down to Mesh. "Always Recompute Tangent frames". I wouldn't recommend using it though, normals from the file is a much better solution.

    Also you can access shader settings through the Materials > Default (or whatever name your material has) > Edit. in the 3D view top menus. Nodes' settings only show you settings related to that node, which makes sense imo.

    I've heard of someone else who had your issue too though, where the bake was horrible and then when they wanted to show me it was perfect all of a sudden. I've never seen it myself though. Keep in mind Autodesk's FBX export from Max is actually slightly broken (figures, their own format). I found Collada/DAE to be more reliable when it came to mirrored UV's and so.
  • Torch
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    Torch interpolator
    Hey guys, have been following the Cymourai SD tutorial and enjoying it so far, only had a problem with the blend nodes with it comes to overlaying 'base elements' using the curvature map in tutorial 5.

    65ooJfE.jpg

    He uses a blend with a multiply mode - his version (on the left) blends or masks the details quite nicely, while when I try to do the same (image on the right) it just shows black spots all over the model. Anything I could be doing wrong? Thanks :)
  • opatetn
    Torch wrote: »
    Hey guys, have been following the Cymourai SD tutorial and enjoying it so far, only had a problem with the blend nodes with it comes to overlaying 'base elements' using the curvature map in tutorial 5.

    65ooJfE.jpg

    He uses a blend with a multiply mode - his version (on the left) blends or masks the details quite nicely, while when I try to do the same (image on the right) it just shows black spots all over the model. Anything I could be doing wrong? Thanks :)

    His blending node is set to subtract and the opacity is set to 0.51, while yours is set to multiply and 1.
  • Torch
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    Torch interpolator
    Hey, sorry should have said I tried lowering opacity and using subtract as well and still got similar results XO
  • ValN84
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    ValN84 polycounter lvl 5
    Theres another difference: that levels node. The one in the tutorial looks a bit darker and with less contrast, that's why the B&W Spots node looks darker and has less contrast. Try playing around with those levels.
  • final_fight
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    final_fight polycounter lvl 9
    Can somebody please tell me why DOTA2 hero shader doesn't work in Substance Designer 4.0.2?
  • Jerc
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    Jerc interpolator
    What are your specs? We have issues with the shaders sometimes not compiling on low end Macs or with some AMD cards on PC. We are working on it.
  • final_fight
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    final_fight polycounter lvl 9
    Jerc wrote: »
    What are your specs? We have issues with the shaders sometimes not compiling on low end Macs or with some AMD cards on PC. We are working on it.

    Specs, I think, are OK because other shaders are working flawlessly. I'm on Win 7 x64 with AMD Radeon HD 7950 - maybe that's the problem?
  • Stromberg90
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    Stromberg90 polycounter lvl 11
    Are you guys thinking about adding a option to bake from a highpoly texture?
    Cause that's how I setup my material mask since vertex colors on a highpoly is just to slow for me/blender.

    Great program btw, hoping to upgrade to the commercial edition one time :)
  • Jerc
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    Jerc interpolator
    Specs, I think, are OK because other shaders are working flawlessly. I'm on Win 7 x64 with AMD Radeon HD 7950 - maybe that's the problem?
    I just realized it doesn't work either on my computer. I have a R9 280, which is pretty much the same card as you, so it seems to be an AMD thing indeed.

    @Stromberg90 I'll check if this is something we can add easily.
  • poopipe
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    poopipe grand marshal polycounter
    Since the last update (non steam version) I'm not seeing labels for input images on nodes unless I fill in the description field - at which point it takes an age to bring up the tooltip.
    it's affecting everything - not just my own creations

    is this affecting anyone else or does substance just hate me?
  • Jerc
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    Jerc interpolator
    Hmm this seems to work for me. Are you sure the Display Connector Name option is still active? (through the little "i" icon on top of the graph)
  • Bruno Afonseca
    I've been playing around with it and having quite good results, super happy! Is there a way to export .DDS straight from it? I can't find anything so I need to go through Photoshop to be able to do so.
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