Rich Diamant using Substance Designer
polycounter lvl 13
Anyone on the fence about SD should take a look. Such a tremendous tool.
[ame="
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROMRjbvGgxc"]Substance - Rich Diamant's showcase - YouTube[/ame]
[ame="
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROMRjbvGgxc"]Substance - Rich Diamant's showcase - YouTube[/ame]
Replies
Of course I should probably give it more of a chance to be fair, but it always struck me as a little gimmicky.
You can get some optimization when using automation in Photoshop, but you have to build an entirely new process everytime you tweak something. So it is only really useful for the final bit where you apply the same process on the 99 remaining characters.
Exactly. ^
Consistency output across very large projects becomes a huge issue. Unifying your shader properties and your texture process makes for a happy development team.
On a personal project level, you can also essentially save your texture creation process, and return to it at anytime without having to backtrack your creation process.
Project complexity is definitely getting to the point where offloading as many variables into automated processes is extremely time saving.
I'm looking forward to the future of development more and more as we can just spend more time making a kick ass complicated models without the exponential time consumption variables that goes with it.
Huzzah for tools!
One other benefit rarely mentioned is the plug into engine ability and how much texture memory you can save. UDK now has a substance rdy connection with proper use you can save a ton of memory.
I do not think this is one of those tools that will just disappear into existence... this is a tool to stay, and will most likely replace and or eliminate NDO, DDO, crazybump and all other photoshop texture helper programs. Testing it out on trail at home and so far it has almost completely replaced photoshop.
My regular tools of use for texture/shader work will be most likely be this.... now
-Zbrush (high poly sculpt)
-Xnormal for (Bake)
-Substance
-Photoshop (creating masks mostly for substance)
I also had my doubts, but once I really got into it I was like damn this crushes everything else.
Slight disagreement from me here - I'd say the biggest power is that you can tweak it in realtime.
Arbitrary number...I'll go with 35%.
an 8kb node graph generates a 16mb file at run time. that's a big deal.
(though you do need to be a bit technically inclined to make the most out of it)
Seeing how Unity-inspired the Unreal 4 UI looks, I'm hoping they also took some inspiration from that side of Unity.
wrong engine then?
Glad people are talking about this! Hope you all enjoyed the video.. let me know if you guys want any screenshots or anything..
I need to echo the positives here.. in addition to what was said in the video, its a ton of fun to work within substance.. I've honestly started to enjoy texturing again with just how cool and free it is.. its almost like playing a game while texturing!
One main feature you just dont get with other workflows is the consistency and speed when duplicating the same material types.. this was very evident with the skin node that I created.. it literally would take less than a minute to create a new skin with the node.. if i had to recreate every step i did within the node each time with PS, it would take hours.. Its such a win from that standpoint..
I'd advise to try it out.. its super powerful once you get into it and learn what it can do.. If anybody has any questions feel free to ask!
We'll be teaching this in the Game Character Academy Character course as well if anybody is interested!
-Rich
I have a small question :-) So far I've seen Substance being used for game art and in most cases fantasy and sci-fi with a little nudge the cartoony style.
How does substance handle itself in a VFX/High-end offline render environment where textures often reach 8k and models can easily use up to 8 maps in different UV spaces?. Can the substance viewport handle very high-detailed models and can the program itself output the large maps in a timely manner? I see the biggest contestant in that area would be The Foundry's Mari where you can 'easily' have 8x8k maps.
from the video it looks like there would be lot of texture seam issues around the UV borders. for example, if there was a organic shape that needed a grid like pattern to conform to the UV shell then there would be a problem. in photoshop i would just puppet ward the pattern to fit my UV and make sure it work around the uv seams. how do you handle that in SD ?
I will let Rich answer the workflow related questions, but I can answer this one.
4k output is the limit for now with Substance and you most probably won't use it for foreground and hero assets in VFX work indeed.
However, we have already quite a few VFX studios using it for speeding up creation of background and environment props, complex noises generation, batch map baking and such.
The viewport supports multi-millions triangles meshes with no issue though.
But it's more of a multi-purpose toolbox for VFX studios than a classic texturing package I would say., Mari still being the painting tool of choice for these guys (until now at least...)
not wierd at all!
i personally do a lot of hand painted work inside photoshop even for next-gen assets and even for assets that are using PBL shaders. i find hand-sculpting, hand-modeling and hand-painting to be more fun too.
if end result is all that mattered, then i could just go buy some 3d scans, use marvelous designer for all the cloths, do some auto retopo and do some auto-texture with ddo and call it a day.
even better, i could just pay someone to do all the work for me because i dont like making art...
MM - I didn't have any texture seams.. the reason I didn't have any texture seams is because everything was based off of the model. So the curvature, lightmap, ao, were all bakes.. which create no seams.. where seams would be a problem, for instance, is if I overlayed a grunge map, I would isolate the map node in SD, export that out as an image, bring it into mudbox, and paint the seams away.. then save that back out and bring it back in to SD.. I would have to do the same thing in PS.. so that workflow is no different. You could do the puppet warp in PS if that works too..
Im getting the impression that with all these concerns that there is a common theme... people might be under the impression that you will stop using PS or Mudbox or Mari and do everything in SD.. that would be awesome if that was the case! hopefully one day! The truth is, I am still heavily in Mudbox for painting on my model. I'll even still use PS for certain brushes that I like to make sure that base color pass is exactly what I want.. The only different here is that instead of doing tons of layers to overlay and build up a PS file for the final output, I do that step in Substance.
No matter what I would assume you guys will use your maps to your advantage.. I dont imagine anybody hand painting an AO map in PS.. or a curvature map in PS.. you tend to use those maps as either overlays, or whatever on top of your base layer that you painted.. So SD is not getting rid of painting where its needed.. its just changing the workflow from doing the layers in PS to doing it in SD with a ton more flexibility, reuse, and tricks that make certain things pretty easy...
As with any program.. it is a tool. it doesn't have to fully replace anything.. if it helps, then awesome.. and substance has some pretty awesome stuff in it that just makes life easier.. and honestly, like some other stated.. its really fun to use! I dont own the company.. so its not like I'm doing a pitch here to make money
ddo, ndo, substance designer, qremesher, etc. saves a lot of time, and effort.
at least for me maybe for characters it is different, I think ill test it out more later to get more of a grasp on it learning is good
One thing that happens and eventually you start to figure this out is that you keep doing the same steps over and over again in photoshop to make textures. I have my layers with masks,occ, normals, cavity, and all the good stuff to do my composites in photoshop this is something I could either make a action in photoshop to fake a composting program or use Substance with graphs that do all this work super easy and fast plus the look of each texture will remain alike and cleaner in the end. I did not really feel like the artistic side was taken away since really what substance does for texturing is make all the redundant steps you do over and over again in photoshop instantly if you build a good node library, In this case I can concentrate on making the texture better than concentrate on the step per step process. I will most likely still use NDO and crazybump for some stuff... but it will become much less for me for sure.
Substance is a great tool that can be super daunting, but once you build some node structures with modularity in mind you can get tons of textures done in a short time.
and yes I would like a convert to psd file option also this would be nice. Although atm I do not see that much of a reason besides wanting to edit layers quicker with the great paint tools in photoshop. The other reason is you can import this into other paint programs with your layers setup already.
Someone higher up said it saves texture memory, does that mean SD textures don't use texture sample slots in shaders (in UDK)?
I'm working on cramming as many textures as I can into a landscape material at the moment, it'd be great if SD would let me bust through the 12 texture sample ceiling.
on the hard-drive/etc they are smaller, but in RAM they're the usual size.
sorry if I wasn't clear.
It's a substance designer's script ?
I'm not sure what you are asking exactly.. are you asking about the script I wrote in Maya?
It's seem to be a script for Baking, with turtle, there is also a Substance Tab, a grey interface, and Yes, it's certainly a script you wrote in Maya
Like RTT-assist to 3DSmax. I use many such tools like this, it's seem to be usefull...
Have you planned to distribute this tool ?
Thanks !
EDIT- Talking specifically about environment textures. Not sure from the video if Rich is using procedural noise textures for dirt or custom images.
Here are a few assets I've been working on recently. It's good to keep in mind that noises are not everything and SD allows you to bake maps and edit vector, which is at least as useful.
In most of these textures, the noises are used as a last step on top of baked maps and phto sources, or to create the base materials that will then be composited together like on the gun for example.
The graphs for those textures range from about 5 nodes for the crystal, to a few dozens using custom sugraphs for the gun.
As for tileable environment textures, I don't have any to show right now but keep in mind that if you have a height map or a normal, you can do everything from just that and a few noises. I'll try to come up with a good simple example and post it here.
that column is all height-map, its just a plain cylinder with dx11 magic
It can indeed be intimidating at first. When you realize how fast those graphs get built, less so.
Just bought it on steam for $50.
VERY happy.