Substance Desinger. Toughts ?
polycounter lvl 12
Hey mates.
I became interested in Substance Designer after a suggestion on hangout. And I see there is a %40 sale in Steam today.
Of course I read up the Steam reviews. I wanted to ask about experiences here once more.
I usually make characters not environment props, and I just use ZBrush+ xNormal most of the time, but I am ineterested if Substance Designer can actually speed up some of the processes ( bake, taking screenshots, art tests etc)
So what does Polycount think ?
Cheers
I became interested in Substance Designer after a suggestion on hangout. And I see there is a %40 sale in Steam today.
Of course I read up the Steam reviews. I wanted to ask about experiences here once more.
I usually make characters not environment props, and I just use ZBrush+ xNormal most of the time, but I am ineterested if Substance Designer can actually speed up some of the processes ( bake, taking screenshots, art tests etc)
So what does Polycount think ?
Cheers
Replies
The biggest strength is being able to build up a library of awesome base textures which have editable parameters - what this means is that if you wanted to have a base texture of rusted iron, you could control for example:
thickness of rust
total coverage of rust
rust spots
rust direction (ie: is it caused by water leaking from the top of the object, and is therefor streaky?).
once you've built up a solid library of base materials, it really does speed up your creation process. But you'll still want to go in and finalize everything by hand in the end.
At my studio most people prefer Quixel though. It's just easier to get into since it's Photoshop based. But if you really dig into it, you can probably do more with Substance.
I'll add one thing. Let's say you have a metal material that looks really nice but you want a less shiny version. Assuming you setup your graph right (with add/sub blend modes instead of copy), you can just duplicate that graph, adjust the roughness/base-color sliders in about 1-2 min, and have that new material you were looking for without destroying anything.
It's really great. I have copied some of my base materials and used them for more stylized works, just by adding, changing, or removing some nodes.
All super interactive too, which is always fun
I've played around quite a bit in FF but not much yet in SD. AFAIK they're the same kind of workflow, node-based filtering, diffuse/normal/ao/etc., option for tiled output, etc.
SD is geared more towards 3D content, but it does seem to suffer from the same procedural looking output as FF, which it seems you really have to spend a good deal of effort combating, if you want a naturalistic-looking non-machine-like output.
Curious about impressions from those who have played with both.
The only issue I've had is getting many effects to properly respect UV borders, but it's far from impossible to circumvent. It usually just involves making some asset-specific tweaks to the base texture.
This texture was made purely in SD, no hand-texturing of any kind. It's organic, and has a lot of UV seams right in view of that image.
I fell in love with Substance Designer after getting used to the node-based workflow
wow nice !
Would you mnid highlighting those seams for us to see :O ?
I especially liked the mindset/built up part
I still use photoshop to create stencils and such for Designer and Painter - as I so far have not fonud a way to create text in Substance Designer
or drawing straight lines in Substance painter (without using a ruler on my graphics tablet)
Both features are coming soon