Ddo or Substance designer
Hi
I am new in this and I have been watching videos about both programs.
but I can't understand the difference between both and which is best to start learning.
I am new in this and I have been watching videos about both programs.
but I can't understand the difference between both and which is best to start learning.
Replies
Ultimately, the main factor that will determine which tool you use will most likely be how comfortable you are using each tool. I watched a ton of videos on both dDo and SD and I've done a lot of experimenting and practice with both, but I just can't get used to the node based workflow of SD. I personally prefer dDo but once Substance Painter drops I'll likely change my mind.
Good luck picking a tool!
dDo / nDo are mostly just awesome PS plugins. Which gives you the ability to do a lot but is pretty restricted at times with the end results. I like some stuff in dDo and the quality it has shown for texture creation.
dDo is also far easier to learn since it is integrated with photoshop very well. It is a tool initially started as complex recorded actions inside photoshop and later got modified into an actual semi robust tool set.
I think it is a great side tool at times...
I have not gone back to dDo or nDo at all. I have even left crazybump forever in the dust and have not looked back.
Substance designer is a robust texturing program. That is why the price is high since it is a full on program to the likes of Zbrush, Maya, Nuke, and etc. With the soon added substance painter I can see Substance almost entirly replacing photoshop for me. My current workflow is using photoshop for saving files and initial input map clean up, like fixing seams or normal bake issues.
Substance designer helps me create my own tools my own presets. Instead of relying on the preset of a program like dDo for edge wear I can create my own which will give the specified look I want and propagate it to as many models as I want. If I was to spend some time I could easily duplicate all the same looks that dDo creates with its own presets inside substance designer. See Substance Designer is a program that lets you have no restrictions to the look you want. The biggest issue I have with substance designer is that as a package it becomes bare bones. So mostly people download it or buy it and expect some nice templates to work with and get disillusioned by a graph that spans multiple node structures and a lot of people just stop halted by how daunting it is. Yes it looks daunting but really Substance Designer is a broken in an array of actions in nodes. Everything you can do in photoshop (mostly) is in substance designer stock nodes. If you do not have the needed node you can create it.
Substance Designer is also far better as an in studio use. It was built for studios from the ground up the ability to batch and process multiple assets at once is the main power of Substance Designer. You could argue that dDo has batching but really it is not as robust as SD.
SD has been kind of sold to people as a technical artist program and I think that sure enough a technical artist will have a larger leverage with it. But honestly this program can be learned easily by anyone. It think the Node based system is cleaner than tons of layers in photoshop and easier to organize and read.
I can list tons of reasons why SD can not even compare to dDo. But dDo is pretty awesome I just do not like how assets feel too alike to each other and feel sort of dDo styled.
Substance Designer is one of those few programs that I feel will live long or even become a standard of some sort.
Before I started using it I was really skeptical about it, but that skepticism disappeared really fast.
As an Environment Artist I have found SD to decrease my time in the texture creation process... I have more time to sculpt and get the look right instead of guess work.
At the end it does depend on your workflow though. But again...
my old workflow looked like this
-maya (if I start my model in maya if not direct to ZB)
-zbrush
-xnormal
-photoshop
-crazybump
-dDo/nDo
New workflow is
-maya (if I start my model in maya if not direct to ZB)
-zbrush
-Photoshop (save and process files only)
-Substance (80% texture work here)
I prefer a simpler workflow and less file juggling.
Look out for flash sales for it because it was apparently 66% off recently
http://www.spiralgraphics.biz/gen2tour/index.htm
Im thinking about writing a comprehensive comparison on this topic in the coming month, when I'm home again.
I would agree with Xoliul. dDo is way more beginner friendly and has great presets. SD has a lot of power but you need to know how and what to do with all the power.
Also +1 to rogelio's new workflow. That's been the coolest thing about SD to me. I really hate the game art program hoop jumping so it's nice to have that reduced.
1. is everything really in 0-255 range? I know i'm very much in an "unreal" mindset but it really helps to think of images as 0-1 when multiplying, dividing, doing any math really. And it really helps when going outside of 0-1. Normal maps for instance are really -1 to 1.
2. it's a bit annoying that math functions are not native and implemented via blends inside of macros.
It sounds like dDo and nDo are getting their own separate standalone app.
Using both programs means we don't have to use images anymore like in photoshop because the substance material?
Interesting, that might fix the terrible performance due to the Photoshop scripting interface. I still think their core idea is not the right one for a real technical professional though. It's easy and fast sure, but you're limited by whatever effects they provide (high quality ones though). While Substance allows you to create any effect you want, from scratch, and share it with others.
If they really want to compete with that, they have to completely change the way dDo works, since right now it is in essence just a fancy interface for a bunch of automated Photoshop actions.
Man if this is true, that would be awesome
Only thin stopping me from using dDo and nDo more often.
Xoliul: You do have a detail creator inside dDo where you can make completely new effects, but are of course limited to what photoshop has to offer.
If so thats some pretty good news.
On that note, I think Allegorithmic's products might end up becoming more of an industry standard tool and approach.
Add: went to the quixel forums to see for myself, this is their teaser,
They did. It's called Mari.
I mean, you only are paying $1000 more than Photoshop extended afterall.
To be fair, thats geared towards film and as such cost $2000 USD. Hardly a game artist equivalent of Photoshop.
Sure its distinct because your premise involved what they "became" or "could become" not what they used to be, which is not what was being discussed.
For example, Zac3D said he wondered why there wasnt a photoshop alternative geared towards game artist. You have Substance designer which is a tool built from the ground up to address the game development market, it doesnt mean it cant be used in film. Having tool be used in another industry doesnt necessarily make that other industry a primary target of that tool, but from the start it seemed to address the game development market first. We see this in both their pricing and approach.
The foundry charges high prices in part because their market, film, has a culture of paying a lot for the software used. Mari specializes in high rez 8k+ textures and part of its advertising was the use of p-tex. Thats clearly not targeting the game industry. It doesnt matter that it was used on some game that never game out, what does matter is that the studio behind it was tied to a film company (shocker right?).
This isnt to say that Mari is a bad tool, just I think its a bit of a stretch to say its a game focused alternative to photothop when its far from being that.
So with the premise of having a game focused alternative to photoshop, no one can really say Mari is that, because it is neither game focus or priced at a rate which is more normal within the game industry and those artist that use it.
I think a lot of it has to do with how the game industry was perceived. A lot has changed in such a short period of time and I think there are developers who are paying attention to the demands of the market. The one size fits all approach isnt necessarily best, nor in the best interest of the industry in my opinion.
Allegorithmic so far has impressed me due to the fact that I think they see the demands of the market, see Substance Painter for example.
As for current offerings, I would say 3d coat is one choice, though its clearly not specialized with just texture painting in mind, at the very least you can paint normal, spec and diffuse maps. Then there's Krita, an open source painting application which targets texture artist, matte painters and illustrators. Recently they added a feature that lets you paint in a tiled mode for tiling textures. Generally though this stuff isnt nearly as polished or focused, nor have the plugin support, and that kind of makes Photoshop such an important part of our pipeline even to this day.
I think Mari is a great tool. My wife who is in VFX uses it day to day. We have talked countless times about Mari and Substance to try to figure if the tools fit the workflow and just like we can not seem to see a real value for Substance in VFX yet does not mean some studio somewhere might end up using it effectively. Same as Mari in game art... In fact I have heard of several studios using it recently the read at dawn guys seem to be using it. I know before I entered ND some texture artists tested it out to see if would be useful for studio needs and even though it is an amazing program with vast flexibility it was just not built for game art use. The program was overkill.
The biggest differences between VFX and Games is the difference in number of content being made. My needs as an Environment artist in the game industry is too populate entire sections or world chunks in a speedy way while still hitting a good enough or awesome visual bar. So that means I will not likely be detailing assets as detailed as a vfx artist does so I could in essence batch textures via substance tools. Say I have an office with different office furniture I could make a template and batch all of them. They may not look amazing, but will be of a good equal quality all through out. While on a vfx studio you will only need to worry about that one shot... In that case a program like substance would be overkill and really just a waste of time in many vfx scenarios. Same could be said for Mari... Mari is overkill for my personal needs as a game artist.
While a program like Mudbox or even zbrush paint tools with photoshop are enough for my needs If I want pixel accuracy. With substance I can get most of the way done with textures I need and batch them out and make variations on the fly. Imagine that same office and my art director asks me to change the wood table areas to metal. I would scream like hell before, but now I could literally do it in a few clicks and I am done... batch them in and build my level to show my art director.
With Substance I can focus on making great scenes vs working on one asset forever.
Substance is one of those few programs that has impressed me so much that it has become a valued asset for my art tool arsenal.
I saw someone mentioning how substance does not have a comprehensive tutorial. I agree. Allegorithmic needs better tutorials and also needs more artists to show work online. The community is very secretive. Unlike the dDo guys... they have insane awesome examples that look great and a lot of artist see that and end up going towards that.
Just go to Allegorithmic and dDo site and check out the eye candy gallery. dDo wins on eye candy alone... but Allegorthmic is the better program. I think Allegorthmic needs great samples and a more active community.
Part of the effort is on us though
awesome I will actually work on some nodes on my end soon to do that.
If you or anyone using substance is looking for a specific tool or idea I can try to get it functional within substance just let me know on the substance thread linked below.
Here is my SD thread link I started for anyone interested in downloading some general tests and stuff I made. Nothing eyecandy worthy yet, but soon ill get some stuff up that will be done entirely in substance trying to kind of rebuild my foundation nodes first.
For sure! Its kind of funny you say that though, my GF works in VFX as well and she (at the request of her vfx house) was going through the same process of checking out Substance Designer for that line of work. Since they use Nuke heavily and pretty much anything from the Foundry, Substance Designer looked appealing at first glance.
At the latest Allegorithmic meetup (@gnomon), you really got the impression that they want to deliver the next generation of tools for game artist, and I believe it was mentioned that they are more or less "math guys" who are using their talents to make these kinds of tools for us.
Because of that, you are spot on. Its up to the artist then to really push it to the point where it is able to be full of eye candy, to develop and share all those little extras that enhance the pipeline. We definitely need more pro-active users like yourself creating useful substances for us to work with.
I'll admit, I'm still getting the hang of SD but so far its been an amazing tool. I can see it becoming an industry standard application in no time.
Anyways, Cheers!
I agree on that. But you have to consider that not everyone have inclination to creating effect from scratch by connecting nodes. It is just harder to get nice looking end result in SD than id ddo.
But once, you master SD, you won't really need to fire up photoshop and ddo ever again. Especially with Painter coming up.
I disagree about changing anything in ddo. Makig it standalone is of coruse needed change, but chaniging it how it works ? No. dDO is just for different task. For achieving good results, quickly, without spending few hours on tweaking and creating function networks.
Hello guys,
We are aware of the tutorial/eye candy asset issue and this will be one of our main focus early next year.
Thanks for the reminder though
Games is a big focus for Mari in 2014.
We've been working with numerous games companies to update Mari's feature set for next generation titles.
Our next release in the new year will have several games related features based directly on feedback from companies using Mari in games and lots of time reading feedback on these forums.
We understand that Mari's background in VFX has some different requirements from games, but we've seen how Mari can dramatically speed up games production and think we've got some very powerful tools.
We recognize that the sheer volume of assets required for next gen titles along with physically plausible shaders means that workflows are changing. Exciting times.
I wonder though, is it truly a faster workflow, or does it allow you to detail and paint things in a way you wouldn't have been able to realistically do before?
There's a difference between speeding up what we're already doing, and enabling new workflows/methods that would not be plausible without the tool (but still take more time in total due to more possibilities).
Like being able to paint an intricate material mask across UV-seams just not being viable without Mari. I'd think it would still take longer to paint something intricate like that, especially when you get the tools to control it in such fine detail.
As opposed to a generated mask along with some quick manual control mask and exposed parameters like you'd do in Substance. Especially when you have to repeat this a lot the Mari workflow would seems really slow to me ?
There's very different requirements for hero (character) art and environment art, but we all know where the biggest volume of work needs to be done.
But of course the hero assets and characters are always going to need more attention and hand done detials.
Probably that's why there is Substance Painter in the works.
As for above Marii discussion. No matter how awesome features it might have, it's simply way to expensive. At least from my point of view.
In any case it will be interesting to compare Painter to Marii, once it will be released especially in terms gameart functionality/price.
That's it, pretty much. At the current price structure, I know there's a guaranteed 0% chance of our company picking up even a single license. I'd get laughed out of the AD's office
But obviously bigger companies have other means.
Conversely, programs like Mudbox or 3DCoat have all you need to paint detail and fix seams non-destructively, but you wind up paying for a sculpting suite where ZBrush is already the industry standard for that. (I know, that's debatable.)
In terms of the original topic, I tend to prefer SD only because I have an easier time navigating node graphs than a dDo PSD, but that's entirely my preference. Standalone dDo would probably make that choice much more difficult.
NDo however, is still pivotal in my workflow with no alternative in sight. I always chose nDo over a sculpt whenever possible.
Yep I agree if Substance Painter ends up being as robust as mudbox or mari, but specific for game art this will be a killer. The only thing I am sort of in odds is that it is a completely separate program to SD... I almost wish SD and Painter were one in the same. But I guess ill wait later to see
As for NDo I agree NDo is a really great compact app for normal map creation. Even for making quick hardsurface stuff it is insanely versatile. That is kind of in my todo list to see if I can mimic what NDo does with beveling and many nice tools inside substance designer... I know substance can totally do it just need to tinker.
Where did you hear about this?
I've checked out the Quixel site and I'm not finding any info.
Yes but substance site or anywhere else does not really have a library to dowload from I have some nodes on my thread http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=128595
Ill add more soon
Yes please.
Does that mean that we'll get some sort of look dev tools to match a renderer's output somehow or at least something close? because I dont see the point of shaders in mari if they dont get close to my render engine ones... right now for me the shaders in mari serve more to test displacement and bump values... but that is pretty much it, as my shader network is build on the renderer itself. It'll be cool to have some sort of look development tools that offer more flexibility on this aspect... but regardless of that Mari rocks! can't imagine doing textures without it anymore
Well price wise these are the only hints dropped so far:
"I can already tell you it won't be in the Mari price range
"there is going to be a commercial license and non commercial license, and we will offer bundle/discounted price for those who already own Substance Designer 4." -iskandar80
Substance Designer has a huge gap between the price for a commercial and non-commercial license ($590 vs $100), so I'd assume the price for a non-commercial painter license will also be quite reasonable.
This is exactly the workflow we support and see games users adopting. We've made it very easy to add custom shaders to Mari that work seamlessly with the existing layering system.
With one line of Python you can register your own, in game, shader and can then paint while that shader is running. You can also ad your own layer types, adjustments and procedural effects if we don't ship with a particular effect you need.
Once you have painted and look Dev'd it is pretty trivial to export the shader parameter values and the masks to your chosen engine.
With about half a days effort you can be viewing and painting assets pretty much pixel for pixel in Mari.
Normal map bakes are very good overall. You can get really good bakes even without a cage.
The cage process is through any 3D program you use. You create your cages inside Maya and export them and use them in the normal bake properties within substance. You do need to explode your mesh at times to get the best results. I am still more used to X-normal, but honestly the Substance designer baker is really... really good overall and fast. The only problem I see so far is the AO bakes. Those are kind of bad compared to Maya or X-normal AO bakes but I can live with that.
Exporting stuff with fbx with named groups will also make it easier to do bakes.
In general I would just give it a try and see if you like it.
As a side note, Substance Designer 4.1 (release target Feb/March 2014) will include a new AO baker which will be on par with X-normal quality wise (and much faster
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