Mudbox Vs Substance Painter for Stylized Wow-esque Textures?
Hi,
I'm currently evaluating what tool to use for 3d painting of my low poly game models. I'm trying to figure out which would be better for what I need.
Looks like Substance has alot of really nice features which I may never use. Indie license is also 99 bucks.
However Mudbox integrates well with my copy of Maya LT and is 10 bucks a month.
AT the end of the day I'm looking for something that's going to feel as close to what I would be doing in photoshop for hand painting textures.
I've only scratched the surface of either program for this but would love to get some input from other people if they have used either for their work flows.
Thanks,
B
I'm currently evaluating what tool to use for 3d painting of my low poly game models. I'm trying to figure out which would be better for what I need.
Looks like Substance has alot of really nice features which I may never use. Indie license is also 99 bucks.
However Mudbox integrates well with my copy of Maya LT and is 10 bucks a month.
AT the end of the day I'm looking for something that's going to feel as close to what I would be doing in photoshop for hand painting textures.
I've only scratched the surface of either program for this but would love to get some input from other people if they have used either for their work flows.
Thanks,
B
Replies
Ultimately, so far as I am aware, both pieces of software have trial versions available, how about you set aside a couple of days to delve into each and figure it out yourself?
After you've had a good play, you can come back and ask specific questions about how to achieve the kinds of texture you want, and provide examples of your attempts so we can more accurately advise.
Good questions = good answers, give us more to work with.
Also, there are Blizzard artists on this board, maybe you could reach out to them and find out what they're doing!
I'm actually trying to finish a piece (Same piece) in both applications to see what feels and works better. Hoping I can get it all done before my trial runs out for mudbox
I will definitely post some examples and what not.
I have a friend at blizzard that recommended 3dcoat as well, however the price tag is above my budget right now.
That's why I was looking at the options of substance and mudbox. They are more in my range.
To that end, I think something like Substance Designer for baking out maps and masking in the base colors, and adding in some post effects would actually be best. Then use something like Photoshop to paint in the extra color detail and clean it up.
I don't know about Mudbox, but Substance Painter from my experience is not good for actually painting textures. Just for painting in photo-realistic details like water, rust, scratches, whatever. I would never use it to work on the base texture.
Much like ZBrush polypainting, it always seems to come out muddy.
https://vimeo.com/17231029
Substance painter comes into its own for realism and stylised realism and has the their great parametric substance effects, but so far as painterly-painting its really just personal preference for me to prefer photoshop.
Thanks everyone for the help.
Cheers.
If you ever switch over to Modo, you will find its painting side is also good for blizz style art as well.
(I'm just quoting you because you were the most recent person to say it, btw.)
with mudbox you can also export layers directly to photoshop, which is very nice.
not sure about SP because i haven't tried it a whole lot.
but personally i'd pick mudbox.
Things like Alpha and Stencil setups make Mudbox much easier to use, specially when it comes to loading reference image library's. When it comes to substance painter the process feels lacking.
For example, I wish that importing my assets and textures were as easy as going to file>import then into the scene. In addition to, I really like that Mudbox has a feature that allows the artist to snapshot their view port, or screen. That then goes to Photoshop to allow the artist to further refine any reference textures for color correction in, or any other means necessary.
I don't know, I feel like there is potential in this application. But knowing as the artist, I have to watch a video tutorial (or series) to understand how the software works just to get my assets into the application and to start painting. Now I am not against tutorials, but given the video requires a lot of explanation by its developer for the artists to understand its tool set. Then the design in my opinion, is suffering greatly and needs to be re-looked at. Z brush for example may have been a tough application that required tutorials to learn it, but out of the box that application spoke well for itself. Whereas substance painter does very little to speak for what the artist can actually do with it, and the various art styles that can be obtained with very little effort.
I don't mean to sound bashing on the algorithmic product's here. But the lacking in good presentation on algorithmic's part has hurt their products more than I care to elaborate further with. As I have their products, but at the same time. I'm an artist and I like to put my tools to use with my fingers as fast as I can. Painter isn't really a painter as I find. The particle brushes speak well for themselves and the product. But I have yet to feel comfortable to just paint my albedo's a lone with photo-realistic results on human like subjects to say this app has my vote.
It's all well and good to say mudbox is better, it may very well be and I think personally mudbox is a cool thing.
But SP's no pushover man, I haven't had a whole lot experience myself, but I've seen and read enough to know it can do what mudbox can and even more so.
Mainly cause like Torch said people there (and other stylized places)use it.
https://gumroad.com/turpedo
Haha, good response. Its possible to get a hand painted texture out of SP, but its also possible paint a house with a toothbrush. Its just not something one would normally do if they are trying to get the best results with the least amount of stress and time wasted. I have found it extremely difficult to blend with SP, where as with say 3d coat, just grabbing the color with one hotkey and using another to blur makes it much easier.
I do think that Substance Painter might eventually get around it covering that particular art style but its certainly not something that I would argue SP put priority on. Its very PBR/substance centric.
Besides, I simply can't use 3d coat for personal reasons and I have SP. Now is as good of a time as any to find that awesome workflow! I suppose a smart first step will be to get cracking on some appropriate substances.
However, at my new job we dont have it, so I have to find a substitute as well, mudbox being one ofthe apps they DO have. So I might chime in with my pov on this later.
thanks for all the feedback and input. I just wrapped up my first pass of my Golem that I've been working on, did the texture in Mudbox:
http://brianhall3d.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/sample.jpg
I would have probably gone with 3dCoat if I had a few hundred bucks laying around, unfortunately I don't and so I went with the 10$/month subscription. So far I've really enjoyed using it, they have a nice "blur" when you hit shift when you paint - there have been a few bugs I've found but Autodesk has been good about feedback when I report them, so hopefully they get fixed next version.
At the end of the day, like with any tool I think it comes down to preference and that's why I reached out to see what people preferred. This is also a tool I can use at my day job (mudbox) as we have a license for it and I won't have to ask for new software. Mudbox was very straight forward for me and it was very reminiscent of just making a texture in photoshop. You can also export layers, etc to photoshop to do some editing there.
Would love to see a side by side, mode to paint on the uvs like substance has but otherwise it'll work for what I need!
Cheers,
B.
Example.
I'd like to know how it compares to other options, if anyone's tried it.
We can hope...
As for Blender, the built-in compositor and baking, while they aren't the best in the industry, actually give you quite a bit of flexibility when it comes to texture authoring. Haven't used it for textures in a while but it's been getting seriously updated.
You pretty much have to create your own, since it lacks even something so basic as a hard circle/ellipse.
It just has the soft circle, and then some highly specific stuff like splatter or scratches meant more for stamping than painting.
In Painter, another pretty large issue I've noticed that gets in the way of it working for hand painting is that it doesn't handle geometry very well. It tends to warp around steep edges in very awkward ways.
And while the 2D view is amazingly useful in theory, in practice it behaves very strangely as well. because it warps when painting on it according to geometry.
Now while this would also be good in theory to prevent distortion and seams, it tends to actually get in the way of the things 2D is most often used for. Like painting over a specific island to avoid bleeding between materials.
If it's not there already, it needs an option to easily toggle that behavior so it acts like a normal 2D image.
Is there a way to ahve hue\sat\value randomization per stroke like in ps and coat? Those are the two main ones for me.
Oh, and a curve or soemthing to control the drybrush how far ir reaches ?
Also, you were right about the UV Space setting, thanks.
It did introduce a new problem though, in which it no longer paints well across UV seams.
I have no idea, I'll have to mess around and try.
Here is a simple diffuse+normal map shader with a bit of a fresnel effect.
It will be integrated by default in the next update. Please let me know if you think it's missing options or if it doesn't look right!
Can it paint just in cavities/concavities?
But since it's essentially about the difference of the tools themselves, you pick your choice based upon that. For example, I like painting in ZBrush, but Substance Painter is like a Painter version of ZB, so I'm going on what I'm comfortable with in terms of location and muscle memory, vs. Mudbox or 3DC, which require some different tinkering.
Also, since you don't require physical correctness between applications and tangents correction in painterly textures, the update that will bring a baker inside for SP, it will speed up my 'pick up and paint' style much quicker.
The other apps do the same by the way...
So not sure about the other 2 things, but I currently have my color picker set to my wacom hotkey, I think typically the hotkey is I on the keyboard.
I've never done the "hue\sat\value randomization per stroke" myself so don't know what you are referring to.
What im referring to, is the option thatboth coat and photoshop have for variation in hue, saturation and brightness per stroke. So, if you pick a red color, and make 5 strokes, they will all be 100% the same. With the option to randomize these per stroke, you can have subtle differences in color, brightness etc without having to constantly change the actualy color you paint. It is a huge timesaver for me when I hand paint textures, so I would really hope for something like that.
am I the only one using it?
That sounds awesome, never done that. Will have to check it out. Can you point me in the direction where to set that up in Ps?
thanks, sorry for being so novice haha.
So far, the poor way in which it handles painting over geometry and seams has been my biggest problem. As a whole, my strokes just feel incredibly inaccurate.
If you want true 2D painting, you need to change to UV alignment indeed but also the Size Space to Texture. This will give you true, 1 to 1, 2D painting. We need to let you switch from a mode to another more easily that what it is now though.
It warps and stretches around convex corners, bypasses concave corners and seams entirely, and fails to maintain a consistent size with the strokes based on depth (it tries to alter the brush to match the depth of geometry, but isn't very accurate in achieving it).
It's all but impossible for me to create smooth strokes.
Here's an image of an extremely simple project I've been attempting to do with SP.
I've been working on the texture for literally HOURS, but I just cannot get a clean result. I tried the same thing first in 3D Coat, and got an acceptable result in less than half an hour.
As you can see, the strokes are inconsistent and blotchy, with very prominent seams.
It looks like something hacked together in three minutes, but I've been at this all day trying to get it right.
For comparison, this is what I was able to quickly achieve on the same object in 3D Coat.
It's not an issue of familiarity, either. I own SP, I'm just using a free trial of 3D Coat. I have more experience with SP than 3D Coat.
Red was a stupid idea, by the way; I feel like my retinas are on fire.
I've been doing some basic tests in SP and 3DC to test the stroke accuracy and couldn't get strong differences apart from some distortions in the strokes in both cases due to my camera being at and angle from the surface I'm painting on:
The size of the brush is constant on any part of the mesh when using Object size space. It means that painting in the 2D view while in this mode can seem inaccurate because of UV scale differences between chunks and distorsions in the UVs.
In viewport mode, the stroke size is constant in screen space, which means that if you draw on a part of your mesh that is further away, the stroke will look bigger in the end than if you're painting on a part that's closer to you, but the stroke size will be consistent in both views.
Texture mode sets the stroke size depending on the UVs, which means that if you are painting in 3D, the stroke size will vary depending on the UV scale.
I agree that all of this is pretty confusing, and typically 3DC switches the way the strokes are applied automatically depending on which view you are painting in.
Anyway, if you can provide more info about what issues you are having exactly I'll be very interested in seeing how we can make things behave better!
I'm going to try my hand at it again with this in mind and see how it goes.
-Edit-
Actually, I'm not sure anymore. No combination of settings will cause 2D to behave in a normal manner without distortion.
3D at least seems to be behaving more consistently though when set to Tangent and Object.
I suppose if I had a cleaner UV map the distortion in 2D view probably wouldn't be significant enough to matter.
In your brush settings, go to color dynamics.
This is big. Thank you! Please keep us updated, and let us know if you need any input. I own a license, but never really get to use it. This could be a game changer for me, though.
I noticed this while painting the cork, which has much tighter UVs.
When set to Tangent Alignment, my strokes get heavily stretched along the length of the UV. Say the UV is longer horizontally; the stroke will bleed out and fade horizontally.
When set to UV Alignment, it attempts to maintain normalcy in 2D and so creates 3D deformation according to UV deformation. Clearly not meant for work in 3D anyway. Even in 2D view though, the stroke appears to adjust its size according to the size of the UVs. In theory this is probably meant to in some way minimize 3D deformation, but can't actually solve that issue by pure virtue of how it works. I'm pretty sure that's what Tangent is for.
Size Spaces appear to behave as they should.
On a side note, I highly recommend downloading Krita ( https://krita.org/features/highlights/ ) and playing around with it for a bit. There's a certain feel and control scheme that makes it perfect for painting and texturing (2d or 3d). Additionally, depending on how the brush system develops with painter, being able to use existing .abr brushes or sets can really up the appeal. Krita does this to some extent, but can only use some basic properties from the .abr brush packs (which litter the net).
Looking forward to having Painter become the go to app for texturing all kinds of assets.
I have been out of the substance loop for a year now. Did anything happen in this regard?
Vector tools, transform tools, blur, clone and fill brushes are sorely needed.