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 " -Jerc
"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.
Well, in this case, Quixel wins for small time developers. As they offer a discounted commercial version for indies. Versus the full commercial amount. I have not seen such for Substance. (I'm also in the middle of animating, so my demo ran out before I could touch it. Do'h!)
To be fair, Allegorithmic has dropped the price on the steam version off and on as of late, with the non commercial going on sale as low as $50 and the commercial as low as $250-299 if I remember correctly. The downside to quixel's current line up (which I do think is good) is that it requires a copy of photoshop for it to work, and a stand alone copy of photoshop is priced around the same point as Substance Designer is normally.
The non-commercial version of Substance Designer has gone as low as $34 on steam, and $166 for the commercial version. I'd also say Substance designer is more optimized for a commercial environment, a higher price for commercial makes sense.
@ jgreasley , sounds great thanks for the answer! one of the things I love in mari is the ability to use multiple versions of an asset and being able to swap between one and another... this is really useful in production for assets/characters that have different topologies, i.e clean, damaged, super damaged.. etc
Here are my thoughts about dDo and SD. I played around with both of them but in the end I bought just one.
1. dDo:
I liked the presets it came with. You can just apply them and get good looking results without much tweaking. Most of the tweaking I had to do is turn down each effect to avoid too much noise. Having two types of effects (per material and per scene) is limited but intuitive. The fact that dDo is able to avoid seams to some extent is a plus.
The main problem with dDo is that it is based on Photoshop scripts. There's a lot of potential for crashing if you interfere with the scripts while they run. There were cases when I tried to alt+tab away from PS to do something else while dDo was building a new "scene" and it crashed. Unfortunately this has negative effects when working with a lot of scenes and takes away a lot of brownie points as dDo should help developers quickly reuse presets for different assets.
On the long run dDo is at risk of become overused in game art if it gets popular. The fact that the presets are good is a bit of a disadvantage as beginners will tend to use them a lot. More advanced people will try to get away from this by doing more tweaking and adding new presets, but they will tend to keep them for themselves. As I will explain further down, this shouldn't be a problem for SD.
As a case study here's what I did with dDO's presets: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showpost.php?p=1994507&postcount=3
2. Substance Designer 4:
I loved it's versatility. I'm more technically inclined so working with it was nothing short of an epiphany. What it lacks in initial presets it more than makes up in versatility. It's a bit harder to get you going with it but once you understand it and somehow change the way you think textures through, it's a life saver. In my case, creating a 2048 texture set for a vehicle took about as much as it would have taken do do it straight in Photoshop, without any painted layers or masks, everything done with nodes in SD. The only external files I used were the low poly geometry and the normal map bake. I did all the other bakes in SD and used them as inputs. This means I can practically texture almost any vehicle with this template in a very short period of time. Not having presets means that beginners are somewhat forced to learn the ropes and build your own graphs or use graphs done by other people. Advanced people will most likely develop new types of nodes at a very low level and share these while keeping their most complex graphs for themselves. All in all I think the SD ecosystem of user-created stuff will be more healthy and provide stimulus for people to create their own graphs while the community will constantly provide new nodes that will speed up the process.
The way I see SD is like a graph based Photoshop. At the least it will help you reuse a lot of nodes, you can still paint each layer in Photoshop and keep the files linked in the SD graph. What I hated most in Photoshop was the fact that I had to duplicate the diffuse and edit each layer to create the specular and other maps. Each change I had to do after I finished the textures I had to do more than once, one for each map. In time I did change my workflow to use more masks and less direct editing so I could just duplicate the masks but the process is still painfully boring and repetitive. With SD this is history and I'm a happy camper!
One other advantage is that compared to dDo, I am not limited to two types of effects, I can for example control what layers will the dirt affect by linking it in a different place on the graph. Might be a bit harder to do but it's a lot more versatile.
Here's the first graph I did in SD. As you can see the results a bit more rough and noisy than dDo at first but I can quickly reuse the graph for similar assets. The brown Chevelle took about two days to texture including testing what almost every node in SD does while the Hemi Cuda took a couple of hours.
As far as pricing goes, I think SD is better. Considering it has some basic 2d painting and vector tools included, I can see it replacing Photoshop. On the other hand dDO's cost has to be realistically added up to the cost of Photoshop. I know most 3d artists already have Photoshop but that doesn't mean it's 0 even if Photoshop can be used on it's own for other projects so it's easier to recoup the price of its license.
PS: I'm did not post all the images here, that would make this post too long imo. The posts are from my sketchbook thread, the link is in my signature.
Nice write up, dDo is a really powerful yet also limiting program at the same time. That being said most people who use dDo don't even really use dDo they just use the stock standard version without ever getting deeper into the programs actual potential. Most of those type of people also are the same people who are saying dDo is potentially a problem because any new artist is going to pick it up and automate a texture and call it done. That is basically what you are doing if you are not digging deeper into the settings and creating your own presets.
As an artist I think it is pretty pointless to say that you want to get rid of a program as powerful as Photoshop in your workflow. Most people and studios already have it yes. That is because the raw power of Photoshop is still un-matched. Programs like dDo and Substance Designer/Painter are always a nice addition to the weapons that you use to texture. But they should never be your end result. I see a common problem with people these days and that is the I NEED THIS TO BE DONE NOW AND FASTER AND FASTER AND DONE YESTERDAY AND AUTOMATED. That is a wrong mentality to get into when it comes to art. Most people who talk like this or feel this is a good habit to get into are new to the industry or have not been doing art for very long. Good art takes time and attention to detail.
The solution should not be how can I get from point A to point B really fast. The solution should be how can program A help me get the basic mind numbing tasks out of the way so that I can focus on the artistic elements of the piece. If you continue down the path of faster and more automated or copy paste graphs then you are only working yourself out of a job.
Fun Fact: dDo's performance problems do not come from the action scripts that it uses and nor does the crash's. The slow downs are purely coming from the viewer that dDo shipped with. Photoshop actually just uses the normal amount of memory as it would without dDo present or in use. That being said we understand that dDo is in need of some major love and has been in a weird state for awhile now. We have been listening and reading the forums and emails and have been working on something really different in terms of how you think dDo works. This should be unveiled in the near future and I would like to invite all of our old users and new users to give it another shot and see if it is something to add to your arsenal.
At the end of the day it comes down to your preferences when it comes to texturing. We all have a different style of how we work and texture and we need to find tools that work with our style to assist us in the ugly part of texturing so that we can get to the fun part of iterations and creating actual art. Both tools have some great uses in getting the job done and can help you finish the task at hand. It just comes down to your style and preference is all. I don't think there is a need for which is better then the other at the end of the day because it really just comes down to you the user and the way you the user textures.
really? how? Photoshop is tied in so deep into everybodies workflows, worldwide, indie or big fish production houses, thinking a new tool can just take it out of the equation is going to fail.
What makes mudbox, 3dcoat or the older deeppaint3d so powerful is that they incorporate Photoshop into their pipeline. No clue about Mari, it's made for different amount of data.
Thats like saying "i can see zBrush replacing Maya/3dsmax" it will not, not in a foreseable amount of time. It has the potential to replace parts of the workflows, but all of it? Come on, be realistic, as you said PS is bought already, people will not scrap their licenses because SD is now there.
I see a common problem with people these days and that is the I NEED THIS TO BE DONE NOW AND FASTER AND FASTER AND DONE YESTERDAY AND AUTOMATED. That is a wrong mentality to get into when it comes to art. Most people who talk like this or feel this is a good habit to get into are new to the industry or have not been doing art for very long. Good art takes time and attention to detail.
Well, yes and no. Good art takes time to create, but also you're often on tight deadlines and I think the faster you can get close to an end result where you have more time for refinement, the better. That said, I agree that trying to automate everything is a bad mindset to get into.
My main gripe with Ddo is what you mentioned, takes ages to get results and would rather use the traditional texturing workflow.
Maybe I should have added the fact that I work for an outsourcing company so my post is entirely from the perspective of someone that has to deal with the "we want everything perfect and we want it yesterday" mentality. Sadly for us artists, the best thing we can do is adapt to the times and automate as much as the process as possible to allow us to put that extra something that we want in the very limited time that we have.
Regarding going deeper into dDO, I found it to be too much of a chore to do so. I did notice you can create filters but I have to concede I did not go further into it as at that time I decided to also try SD.
Of course, nothing can replace Photoshop unless you can do the entire texture in SD and not start Photoshop at all. For dDO that's not an option.
I should have been a bit more detailed in my language, sorry about that. I'm not saying people will ditch Photoshop, I was tyring to say that SD can do a full texture without Photoshop while dDO can't.
One other thing is that the more work you can do in SD the less you'll need Photoshop for texturing and cheaper (or free) alternatives would start to look more tempting. That's how I see it.
One potential pipeline would be this:
A studio can outsource work and provide the SD graphs and ensure that all the textures that come back are at the desired level of quality and thus eliminate any differences between artists and/or studios. When putting together art from different sources this is HUGE, especially for environment and vehicle work.
For these types of games, automation will save a lot of art creation time and will become more and more popular as games grow bigger and bigger.
R* is already using it for the GTA series (it's in their credits) and I know a couple of other developers for which I've worked in the last two years that would have saved a lot of time and money by integrating Substance Designer. As an artist I would love to take my time and put love and care into every single asset I do but time is always a limiting factor. Any tool that will allow me to automate is welcome, it gives me more time to put in that extra into the finer details.
From my experience of using SD so far in studio for around 6 months now I have to say it has almost... not completly but almost replaced all my older workflows from photoshop.
Photoshop has become a cleanup tool to make sure my initial maps are of the right quality like seams, or making sure textures tile correctly before inputting into substance designer.
Soon my baking workflow will be replaced from x-normal to substance.
so my workflow will become like this in the future.
-substance (bake)
-photoshop (fix)
-substance (node based template creation for texture)
-photoshop (fix seams or added detail that has more of an artist touch)
and if I change anything from my high to lowres mesh I just do a all bake within a few mins all are baked connected with the proper inputs and automated texture of the same previous quality is instantly useable for game.
This gives me extra freedom to worry about my sculpts which at the end if you have a good foundation sculpt the texture will just become better.
I find myself going back to Zbrush sculpts more and more due to this freedom. I can worry about making the best assets. Speed in the texture process gives me more time to experimint where I want to experiment with the actual art.
no disrespect to any ddo or substance designer user, but i have yet not seen any single piece of game asset that looks decent and was completely done either ddo or SD.
if you think ddo or SD can replace photoshop then i am afraid you have not either used photoshop long enough or just not good at photoshop.
that being said, are tools like ddo or SD worth learning and using, absolutely! it may not be used to create hero assets but i definitely see it as a tool for mass production of generic game assets. may be in time when ddo or SD catch up with photoshop's painting capability it will be able to replace it.
Of course, nothing can replace Photoshop unless you can do the entire texture in SD and not start Photoshop at all. For dDO that's not an option.
I should have been a bit more detailed in my language, sorry about that. I'm not saying people will ditch Photoshop, I was tyring to say that SD can do a full texture without Photoshop while dDO can't.
how can SD do a full texture without photoshop if they dont ditch photoshop ? i dont get it...
Actually I would say DDo and Substance have shown great samples of good artists using it. Substance is being used in the industry and in many cases is not even mentioned being used which is a shame. DDo seems to get a lot of press and a good few artist have really used it to a high degree. Like anything Ddo and substance are far from... 1 button make art. If I was teaching a course of texturing I would avoid DDo and Substance all together... it is like people using roadkill and not really knowing how to uv correctly. At the end it is a tool to get to somewhere and many paths can lead to the same like quality it really all depends on the tool. Do not let Substance or photoshop use you... you use it.
I will concede to say for character artists I still think DDo and Substance are not capable of really getting that great detail that a good to great character artist can get from photoshop/mari/mudbox/3Dpaint etc. Characters is just an entirely other monster. I would say you could in theory get 50% the way or a bit more but after that it is still very much a detail hand painted or layering in photoshop method. I have run it through my head to make a template for characters and I just find myself saying.... A template for some characters especially skin heavy characters is just too much work to perfect when other tools are just sooo much more capable and faster to get to that result.
My main concern with ddo is the lack of response when there are issues with it working. The recent updates to photoshop cc have left ddo/ndo not working right. With no fix or a response on their forums from Quixel it is troubling. That being said I know that with substance designer that it being a stand alone program that if photoshop updates there is not an issue of SD working.
I will concede to say for character artists I still think DDo and Substance are not capable of really getting that great detail that a good to great character artist can get from photoshop/mari/mudbox/3Dpaint etc. Characters is just an entirely other monster. I would say you could in theory get 50% the way or a bit more but after that it is still very much a detail hand painted or layering in photoshop method. I have run it through my head to make a template for characters and I just find myself saying.... A template for some characters especially skin heavy characters is just too much work to perfect when other tools are just sooo much more capable and faster to get to that result.
understood.
what about vehicles and weapons then ? do you think these following works are possible with either ddo or SD ? i know a tool doesnt make great art, but i am asking is it capable of making great art like this that has LOTS of unique detailing on it ?
may be the developers of ddo and SD should hire Alan to create some demo assets for their tools to show off what is possible. i would really love to see that.
Those two are actually great samples of something that is very possible in substance to make templates of. the initial template will take time maybe more time than photoshop or other tools combined, but once you have it will be super easy to make it into modules to make other like guns or vehicles.
So the answer is yes it is capable has anyone done it yet.... not yet. like everyone I have yet to get deep enough to say I could get to this level myself. Again I started using it only 6 months now and I think I can get pretty far but not yet to this level, but I can run this through my head as a more technical artist and say yes I could see this as possible.
You could get most of the material definition and base details done in SD or ddo in a few minutes after the initial setup but you will still need to handpaint a bunch of details to get to that quality indeed (the texts, tags, small specific and localized paint chips etc).
I guess that's why we are creating Substance Painter, to fill that gap
Oh yeah let me rephrase same a Jerc you could get most of the way, but than for decals, Localized paint and chips etc than photoshop is still needed. I do not think photoshop will be entirely gone though, but the use for me has reduced drastically... but I am in a whole other spectrum of it I make tile-able textures mostly which leads to a workflow that can be broken down easily into steps or in this case nodes.
I do not foresee Photoshop disappearing anytime soon.
I think people look at it the wrong way a bit often. Like Substance will replace EVERYTHING and completely locks you down and forces a workflow on you. It can do as little or as much as you want; you can use it to only bake maps and curvature and stop after that, you can do a fast base-material set up and then blend masks painted in photoshop on top of those, or you can create insanely complex, 1-click Uber-templates that do everything for you.
The point is that it is such a powerful system with a lot of potential that can be molded to everyone's needs. If it doesn't achieve the quality you want or doesn't allow for a specific feature: just do it external and bring it into your graphs. SD is like the hub application, you can branch out and bring anything in from another application at any point. Just don't expect layered PSD's anymore if you want to use it properly.
Ddo on the other hand I feel just doesn't provide this; you can't branch out and try out a crazy new idea at any point, since it's still locked to the functionality of Photoshop. Because that's all Ddo does in the end; it automates things like layer creation and does the texturing effects by applying a sequence of Filters. It's a very nice and easy interface to the fixed and limited pipeline of Photoshop.
I know I sound negative here, but it just feels like a dead end to me; I just can't experiment and try new crazy things with it.
On the other hand I still do use Photoshop a bit, processing textures, making them tiling, cropping, clone-stamping. Also sometimes painting masks for SD that require a lot of brush finesse (though Painter should replace this aspect soon)
Great thread, I'm new to both dDO and Substance.
One thing I was surprised not to see here is Substances instability.
Even the substance tutorial graphs (pod racer, cymurai) start lagging and crashing the program every other minute. Granted that happens once I go into 4k or even 2k ranges but the crashes made the program too volatile for me to trust and the lagging is insuferable.
Am I the only one with those issues or am I just doing something wrong?
Great thread, I'm new to both dDO and Substance.
One thing I was surprised not to see here is Substances instability.
Even the substance tutorial graphs (pod racer, cymurai) start lagging and crashing the program every other minute. Granted that happens once I go into 4k or even 2k ranges but the crashes made the program too volatile for me to trust and the lagging is insuferable.
Am I the only one with those issues or am I just doing something wrong?
I have had crashes but a lot less than lets say a program like zbrush. Nothing out of the ordinary. It has been pretty rock solid for me overall.
Can you post your pc specs the substance guys pass around here from time to time maybe they can help you out on that.
This. I tried out SD and found it useful for quickly baking out high quality maps.
The problem I found with both Ddo and Substance is that I constantly wanted to abandon the framework of the plug-in/program and do stuff manually. I felt a distinct lack of control with both.
In a studio environment however, where similar assets have to be made en masse, be passed around, re-used and done to tight deadlines these programs are probably much more useful.
The crashes where occurring across multiple systems.
I think I may be just using it wrong.
I'm still using quite a few linked images to overlay and it's then when it starts getting unstable.
I think as I move away from photosourcing and more towards hand crafted maps it may get better.
speaking of ddo - i heard that quixel is rewriting everything from scratch and
will bring out a big update soon - maybe they make it standalone - switching from ndo to ddo by one click ? - it looks like they going more in the substance direction.
@ topic: both programs are great - at the end its all about efficiency and getting the visual work done you want to archive. Iam glad, that the development goes further and further - so that we all can save time and make cool art.
//edit: i also feel that quixel has done a "better" marketing - substance should bring out more tutorials and videos to show the capabilities of their tool!
I'd really love a source on Quixel rewriting their things. That could possibly explain their inactivity in addressing bugs and support requests, maybe make me hold on for a while before jumping ship I have the commercial ndo2 and personal ddo because they fit my budget, but I am heavily leaning towards buying SD just because they seem more professional and invested in what they do amongst all the other benefits of their system.
For those not aware Allegorithmic did come out with 3 1/2 hours of videos going over Substance Designer. I am through the first couple and they are quite good so far.
I'd really love a source on Quixel rewriting their things. That could possibly explain their inactivity in addressing bugs and support requests, maybe make me hold on for a while before jumping ship I have the commercial ndo2 and personal ddo because they fit my budget, but I am heavily leaning towards buying SD just because they seem more professional and invested in what they do amongst all the other benefits of their system.
Not really sure what I can say, but the new dDo looks awesome. This thread will get a bit more interesting when it drops.
Heres a couple assets I did that were textured almost entirely with dDo btw (only minor seam cleanup in PS):
Is the new ddo and ndo still dependent on photoshop ?
If so, I would choose SD at this point. I don't see a reason to pay for overpriced, photo manipulation software, that I will use only for two plugins, that can be easily replaced by Substance Designer and in future Substance Painter.
I wasn't really into SD, untill I really gave it an shot. Now I don't see reason to use anything else. It's super fast to work with and very easy to iterate over what are you doing. Non-destructive and fast workflow just make it superior.
What photo or painting I need to do, I can easily do in Krita or Blender. Moreover I'm much more sure that guy, who are working at Krita will actually consider my requests (hello photoshop and lack of mirror/symmetrical painting...)
Torch: It sure does
Really interested in the new version they are working on, they said a update would be coming out in late January, but not a single word from them yet... so yeah
Moreover I'm much more sure that guy, who are working at Krita will actually consider my requests (hello photoshop and lack of mirror/symmetrical painting...)
Same with Allegorithmic. It's such a pleasure to work with them, they've already implemented things I personally requested. What a stark contrast with Adobe, who would come by every year, take lots of feedback, and then do nothing.
I'm almost to the point now where i'm ready to just throw photoshop away, and there are some tools in development which will finally let me do that. so i can't fucking wait.
next up is 3dsmax, i'm switching to either blender or modo soon and i doubt i'll look back. tired of paying too much money to companies who do fuck all with the feedback they're given.
I've heard good things about Blender, the retopo/texture tools actually look pretty ace. Right now I usually model in Maya, retopo in 3D coat and texture in something like Mudbox, to be able to do all that in just one app would be pretty sweet!
If you're a beginner and you want something fast DDO is probably your best bet. If you want something that's more technical with a bit more control then Sub Designer is the way to go.
Ddo is like Designer I'd say. Intended as a system to do the base of your textures, perhaps even all of it.
Painter is a different thing, you could potentially start a texture in Ddo (or Designer) and then finish it in Painter.
I just got painter and it's cool but it needs more work. My masks won't save. You can't bucket fill layers with materials. I find painting multi textures kinda tedious. No 2D texturing editor. I can go on. I know it's beta but hopefully these fixes will come soon.
I appreciate the power of Photoshop, but as a game/level designer, I always hated its linear and limited workflow.
You can have a solid, non-destructive workflow with PS if you know it well enough. Personally for me its the opposite, never really liked the node-based workflow, always preferred layers as it seems simpler. Would be interesting to know how SD deals with the PBR workflow though
You can have a solid, non-destructive workflow with PS if you know it well enough. Personally for me its the opposite, never really liked the node-based workflow, always preferred layers as it seems simpler. Would be interesting to know how SD deals with the PBR workflow though
It isn't really much different to what came before... and pretty much everybody has standardised input texture types for PBR shading anyway (albedo/ RGB spec colour/ roughness / normals / metallic mask)
Hey Hermit, I agree with you man. Though I do think dDo or nDo aren't really intended to get things to look better per se, they're also mainly intended to work smarter and faster, just in a different way. Having seen the new dDo and talked with Teddy a bit, it's clear it's just about taking a different approach. You trade in non-destructability and a lot of the ability to truly customize your workflow (creating your own nodes), for a more familiar, traditional working environment. It's just that some people (like Torch for example) have trouble dealing with tecnical workflows like nodes.
Torch: sure, but it's still just a fraction of what Designer or Painter do. Things like down and upsizing without quality loss, or driving different channels by one input with instant feedback is not possible in Photoshop no matter what.
I'm curious to see how this discussions goes when the new Quixel Suite drops. Its looking really good and the stand-alone license is quite cheap. That being said, I'm also interested in trying Substance, and comments on this thread made me a lot more intrigued. I also agree that the community using Substance/marketing/videos seems very secretive/lacking, but I hope this changes soon. How would Quixel Megascans fit into the discussion?
I'm not sure I understand the desire to eliminate Photoshop from the pipeline. Even if I were able to remove it from my 3D workflow, I would still keep it for 2D drawing and painting. It would arguably behoove all of us to practice our drawing/painting skills, and it's hard to ignore how a purely technical workflow might provide an excuse not to address these skills.
I enjoy painting, so dealing with layers is far more intuitive than dealing with nodes. I think this is why Substance Painter has a layer system instead of adopting the Substance Designer nodes. When painting, layers just make more sense.
I don't think anyone expresses a desire to eliminate PS from the workflow completely. But there are some parts of that workflow that have simply evolved too much to still tackle them efficiently with good ol' Photoshop, which hasn't evolved a bit in years, or at least not in our direction.
It's more about finding the best tools for the job than purely to eliminate a piece of software from the pipeline.
After seeing the power of Ddo I have to say I am dropping SD all together. Ddo is just that much better. It pains me to say this, but SD has let me down.
After seeing the power of Ddo I have to say I am dropping SD all together. Ddo is just that much better. It pains me to say this, but SD has let me down.
I will say it looks exciting but I'd personally rather reserve judgement before saying how awesome it is. The last version chugged pretty bad in PS and most of the time I felt it was easier just to texture the traditional PS/Photosource route. Still looking forward to seeing how it turns out
After seeing the power of Ddo I have to say I am dropping SD all together. Ddo is just that much better. It pains me to say this, but SD has let me down.
April Fools? You were doing some cool stuff with SD so not sure if serious....(especially today)
After seeing the power of Ddo I have to say I am dropping SD all together. Ddo is just that much better. It pains me to say this, but SD has let me down.
How has SD let you down? I'm just curious. I've used the first Ddo quite a bit, but I've only messed around with the tutorials for SD, so I don't have an informed opinion on it.
Well here is the deal Substance has some amazing stuff, but it really takes long to get things to work correctly. With Ddo I almost have a button make art button and I like how easy it is to select materials either made or placed using ids with direct selection. Megascans library is an amazing tool set to use for quick reference or quick prototyping of stuff with substance it takes too long to get the results. Ddo new structure which helps it be less destructive is really well throughout. It was a needed thing and to me has sold me in the idea that Ddo are in the right track. For the last few months using SD I have been trying to emulate how Ddo does some of the functionality and I just can not seem to get that look. So I called it quites and moved to Ddo. Of course one program is not do all be all, but atm Ddo works best for my workflow.
Replies
Well, in this case, Quixel wins for small time developers. As they offer a discounted commercial version for indies. Versus the full commercial amount. I have not seen such for Substance. (I'm also in the middle of animating, so my demo ran out before I could touch it. Do'h!)
1. dDo:
I liked the presets it came with. You can just apply them and get good looking results without much tweaking. Most of the tweaking I had to do is turn down each effect to avoid too much noise. Having two types of effects (per material and per scene) is limited but intuitive. The fact that dDo is able to avoid seams to some extent is a plus.
The main problem with dDo is that it is based on Photoshop scripts. There's a lot of potential for crashing if you interfere with the scripts while they run. There were cases when I tried to alt+tab away from PS to do something else while dDo was building a new "scene" and it crashed. Unfortunately this has negative effects when working with a lot of scenes and takes away a lot of brownie points as dDo should help developers quickly reuse presets for different assets.
On the long run dDo is at risk of become overused in game art if it gets popular. The fact that the presets are good is a bit of a disadvantage as beginners will tend to use them a lot. More advanced people will try to get away from this by doing more tweaking and adding new presets, but they will tend to keep them for themselves. As I will explain further down, this shouldn't be a problem for SD.
As a case study here's what I did with dDO's presets:
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showpost.php?p=1994507&postcount=3
2. Substance Designer 4:
I loved it's versatility. I'm more technically inclined so working with it was nothing short of an epiphany. What it lacks in initial presets it more than makes up in versatility. It's a bit harder to get you going with it but once you understand it and somehow change the way you think textures through, it's a life saver. In my case, creating a 2048 texture set for a vehicle took about as much as it would have taken do do it straight in Photoshop, without any painted layers or masks, everything done with nodes in SD. The only external files I used were the low poly geometry and the normal map bake. I did all the other bakes in SD and used them as inputs. This means I can practically texture almost any vehicle with this template in a very short period of time. Not having presets means that beginners are somewhat forced to learn the ropes and build your own graphs or use graphs done by other people. Advanced people will most likely develop new types of nodes at a very low level and share these while keeping their most complex graphs for themselves. All in all I think the SD ecosystem of user-created stuff will be more healthy and provide stimulus for people to create their own graphs while the community will constantly provide new nodes that will speed up the process.
The way I see SD is like a graph based Photoshop. At the least it will help you reuse a lot of nodes, you can still paint each layer in Photoshop and keep the files linked in the SD graph. What I hated most in Photoshop was the fact that I had to duplicate the diffuse and edit each layer to create the specular and other maps. Each change I had to do after I finished the textures I had to do more than once, one for each map. In time I did change my workflow to use more masks and less direct editing so I could just duplicate the masks but the process is still painfully boring and repetitive. With SD this is history and I'm a happy camper!
One other advantage is that compared to dDo, I am not limited to two types of effects, I can for example control what layers will the dirt affect by linking it in a different place on the graph. Might be a bit harder to do but it's a lot more versatile.
Here's the first graph I did in SD. As you can see the results a bit more rough and noisy than dDo at first but I can quickly reuse the graph for similar assets. The brown Chevelle took about two days to texture including testing what almost every node in SD does while the Hemi Cuda took a couple of hours.
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showpost.php?p=1994511&postcount=4
As far as pricing goes, I think SD is better. Considering it has some basic 2d painting and vector tools included, I can see it replacing Photoshop. On the other hand dDO's cost has to be realistically added up to the cost of Photoshop. I know most 3d artists already have Photoshop but that doesn't mean it's 0 even if Photoshop can be used on it's own for other projects so it's easier to recoup the price of its license.
PS: I'm did not post all the images here, that would make this post too long imo. The posts are from my sketchbook thread, the link is in my signature.
As an artist I think it is pretty pointless to say that you want to get rid of a program as powerful as Photoshop in your workflow. Most people and studios already have it yes. That is because the raw power of Photoshop is still un-matched. Programs like dDo and Substance Designer/Painter are always a nice addition to the weapons that you use to texture. But they should never be your end result. I see a common problem with people these days and that is the I NEED THIS TO BE DONE NOW AND FASTER AND FASTER AND DONE YESTERDAY AND AUTOMATED. That is a wrong mentality to get into when it comes to art. Most people who talk like this or feel this is a good habit to get into are new to the industry or have not been doing art for very long. Good art takes time and attention to detail.
The solution should not be how can I get from point A to point B really fast. The solution should be how can program A help me get the basic mind numbing tasks out of the way so that I can focus on the artistic elements of the piece. If you continue down the path of faster and more automated or copy paste graphs then you are only working yourself out of a job.
Fun Fact: dDo's performance problems do not come from the action scripts that it uses and nor does the crash's. The slow downs are purely coming from the viewer that dDo shipped with. Photoshop actually just uses the normal amount of memory as it would without dDo present or in use. That being said we understand that dDo is in need of some major love and has been in a weird state for awhile now. We have been listening and reading the forums and emails and have been working on something really different in terms of how you think dDo works. This should be unveiled in the near future and I would like to invite all of our old users and new users to give it another shot and see if it is something to add to your arsenal.
At the end of the day it comes down to your preferences when it comes to texturing. We all have a different style of how we work and texture and we need to find tools that work with our style to assist us in the ugly part of texturing so that we can get to the fun part of iterations and creating actual art. Both tools have some great uses in getting the job done and can help you finish the task at hand. It just comes down to your style and preference is all. I don't think there is a need for which is better then the other at the end of the day because it really just comes down to you the user and the way you the user textures.
really? how? Photoshop is tied in so deep into everybodies workflows, worldwide, indie or big fish production houses, thinking a new tool can just take it out of the equation is going to fail.
What makes mudbox, 3dcoat or the older deeppaint3d so powerful is that they incorporate Photoshop into their pipeline. No clue about Mari, it's made for different amount of data.
Thats like saying "i can see zBrush replacing Maya/3dsmax" it will not, not in a foreseable amount of time. It has the potential to replace parts of the workflows, but all of it? Come on, be realistic, as you said PS is bought already, people will not scrap their licenses because SD is now there.
Well, yes and no. Good art takes time to create, but also you're often on tight deadlines and I think the faster you can get close to an end result where you have more time for refinement, the better. That said, I agree that trying to automate everything is a bad mindset to get into.
My main gripe with Ddo is what you mentioned, takes ages to get results and would rather use the traditional texturing workflow.
Regarding going deeper into dDO, I found it to be too much of a chore to do so. I did notice you can create filters but I have to concede I did not go further into it as at that time I decided to also try SD.
Of course, nothing can replace Photoshop unless you can do the entire texture in SD and not start Photoshop at all. For dDO that's not an option.
I should have been a bit more detailed in my language, sorry about that. I'm not saying people will ditch Photoshop, I was tyring to say that SD can do a full texture without Photoshop while dDO can't.
One other thing is that the more work you can do in SD the less you'll need Photoshop for texturing and cheaper (or free) alternatives would start to look more tempting. That's how I see it.
One potential pipeline would be this:
A studio can outsource work and provide the SD graphs and ensure that all the textures that come back are at the desired level of quality and thus eliminate any differences between artists and/or studios. When putting together art from different sources this is HUGE, especially for environment and vehicle work.
For these types of games, automation will save a lot of art creation time and will become more and more popular as games grow bigger and bigger.
R* is already using it for the GTA series (it's in their credits) and I know a couple of other developers for which I've worked in the last two years that would have saved a lot of time and money by integrating Substance Designer. As an artist I would love to take my time and put love and care into every single asset I do but time is always a limiting factor. Any tool that will allow me to automate is welcome, it gives me more time to put in that extra into the finer details.
From my experience of using SD so far in studio for around 6 months now I have to say it has almost... not completly but almost replaced all my older workflows from photoshop.
Photoshop has become a cleanup tool to make sure my initial maps are of the right quality like seams, or making sure textures tile correctly before inputting into substance designer.
Soon my baking workflow will be replaced from x-normal to substance.
so my workflow will become like this in the future.
-substance (bake)
-photoshop (fix)
-substance (node based template creation for texture)
-photoshop (fix seams or added detail that has more of an artist touch)
and if I change anything from my high to lowres mesh I just do a all bake within a few mins all are baked connected with the proper inputs and automated texture of the same previous quality is instantly useable for game.
This gives me extra freedom to worry about my sculpts which at the end if you have a good foundation sculpt the texture will just become better.
I find myself going back to Zbrush sculpts more and more due to this freedom. I can worry about making the best assets. Speed in the texture process gives me more time to experimint where I want to experiment with the actual art.
if you think ddo or SD can replace photoshop then i am afraid you have not either used photoshop long enough or just not good at photoshop.
that being said, are tools like ddo or SD worth learning and using, absolutely! it may not be used to create hero assets but i definitely see it as a tool for mass production of generic game assets. may be in time when ddo or SD catch up with photoshop's painting capability it will be able to replace it.
how can SD do a full texture without photoshop if they dont ditch photoshop ? i dont get it...
I will concede to say for character artists I still think DDo and Substance are not capable of really getting that great detail that a good to great character artist can get from photoshop/mari/mudbox/3Dpaint etc. Characters is just an entirely other monster. I would say you could in theory get 50% the way or a bit more but after that it is still very much a detail hand painted or layering in photoshop method. I have run it through my head to make a template for characters and I just find myself saying.... A template for some characters especially skin heavy characters is just too much work to perfect when other tools are just sooo much more capable and faster to get to that result.
understood.
what about vehicles and weapons then ? do you think these following works are possible with either ddo or SD ? i know a tool doesnt make great art, but i am asking is it capable of making great art like this that has LOTS of unique detailing on it ?
may be the developers of ddo and SD should hire Alan to create some demo assets for their tools to show off what is possible. i would really love to see that.
art by Alan Van Ryzin (polygoo.com)
So the answer is yes it is capable has anyone done it yet.... not yet. like everyone I have yet to get deep enough to say I could get to this level myself. Again I started using it only 6 months now and I think I can get pretty far but not yet to this level, but I can run this through my head as a more technical artist and say yes I could see this as possible.
I guess that's why we are creating Substance Painter, to fill that gap
I do not foresee Photoshop disappearing anytime soon.
The point is that it is such a powerful system with a lot of potential that can be molded to everyone's needs. If it doesn't achieve the quality you want or doesn't allow for a specific feature: just do it external and bring it into your graphs. SD is like the hub application, you can branch out and bring anything in from another application at any point. Just don't expect layered PSD's anymore if you want to use it properly.
Ddo on the other hand I feel just doesn't provide this; you can't branch out and try out a crazy new idea at any point, since it's still locked to the functionality of Photoshop. Because that's all Ddo does in the end; it automates things like layer creation and does the texturing effects by applying a sequence of Filters. It's a very nice and easy interface to the fixed and limited pipeline of Photoshop.
I know I sound negative here, but it just feels like a dead end to me; I just can't experiment and try new crazy things with it.
On the other hand I still do use Photoshop a bit, processing textures, making them tiling, cropping, clone-stamping. Also sometimes painting masks for SD that require a lot of brush finesse (though Painter should replace this aspect soon)
One thing I was surprised not to see here is Substances instability.
Even the substance tutorial graphs (pod racer, cymurai) start lagging and crashing the program every other minute. Granted that happens once I go into 4k or even 2k ranges but the crashes made the program too volatile for me to trust and the lagging is insuferable.
Am I the only one with those issues or am I just doing something wrong?
I have had crashes but a lot less than lets say a program like zbrush. Nothing out of the ordinary. It has been pretty rock solid for me overall.
Can you post your pc specs the substance guys pass around here from time to time maybe they can help you out on that.
This. I tried out SD and found it useful for quickly baking out high quality maps.
The problem I found with both Ddo and Substance is that I constantly wanted to abandon the framework of the plug-in/program and do stuff manually. I felt a distinct lack of control with both.
In a studio environment however, where similar assets have to be made en masse, be passed around, re-used and done to tight deadlines these programs are probably much more useful.
I think I may be just using it wrong.
I'm still using quite a few linked images to overlay and it's then when it starts getting unstable.
I think as I move away from photosourcing and more towards hand crafted maps it may get better.
will bring out a big update soon - maybe they make it standalone - switching from ndo to ddo by one click ? - it looks like they going more in the substance direction.
@ topic: both programs are great - at the end its all about efficiency and getting the visual work done you want to archive. Iam glad, that the development goes further and further - so that we all can save time and make cool art.
//edit: i also feel that quixel has done a "better" marketing - substance should bring out more tutorials and videos to show the capabilities of their tool!
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB0wXHrWAmCwLRTzdb-RxadGk_xBBQKar
Not really sure what I can say, but the new dDo looks awesome. This thread will get a bit more interesting when it drops.
Heres a couple assets I did that were textured almost entirely with dDo btw (only minor seam cleanup in PS):
If so, I would choose SD at this point. I don't see a reason to pay for overpriced, photo manipulation software, that I will use only for two plugins, that can be easily replaced by Substance Designer and in future Substance Painter.
I wasn't really into SD, untill I really gave it an shot. Now I don't see reason to use anything else. It's super fast to work with and very easy to iterate over what are you doing. Non-destructive and fast workflow just make it superior.
What photo or painting I need to do, I can easily do in Krita or Blender. Moreover I'm much more sure that guy, who are working at Krita will actually consider my requests (hello photoshop and lack of mirror/symmetrical painting...)
Really interested in the new version they are working on, they said a update would be coming out in late January, but not a single word from them yet... so yeah
Same with Allegorithmic. It's such a pleasure to work with them, they've already implemented things I personally requested. What a stark contrast with Adobe, who would come by every year, take lots of feedback, and then do nothing.
next up is 3dsmax, i'm switching to either blender or modo soon and i doubt i'll look back. tired of paying too much money to companies who do fuck all with the feedback they're given.
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Painter is a different thing, you could potentially start a texture in Ddo (or Designer) and then finish it in Painter.
You can have a solid, non-destructive workflow with PS if you know it well enough. Personally for me its the opposite, never really liked the node-based workflow, always preferred layers as it seems simpler. Would be interesting to know how SD deals with the PBR workflow though
It isn't really much different to what came before... and pretty much everybody has standardised input texture types for PBR shading anyway (albedo/ RGB spec colour/ roughness / normals / metallic mask)
Torch: sure, but it's still just a fraction of what Designer or Painter do. Things like down and upsizing without quality loss, or driving different channels by one input with instant feedback is not possible in Photoshop no matter what.
I enjoy painting, so dealing with layers is far more intuitive than dealing with nodes. I think this is why Substance Painter has a layer system instead of adopting the Substance Designer nodes. When painting, layers just make more sense.
It's more about finding the best tools for the job than purely to eliminate a piece of software from the pipeline.
I will say it looks exciting but I'd personally rather reserve judgement before saying how awesome it is. The last version chugged pretty bad in PS and most of the time I felt it was easier just to texture the traditional PS/Photosource route. Still looking forward to seeing how it turns out
April Fools? You were doing some cool stuff with SD so not sure if serious....(especially today)
How has SD let you down? I'm just curious. I've used the first Ddo quite a bit, but I've only messed around with the tutorials for SD, so I don't have an informed opinion on it.