SD4 You Tube Tutorials

Reich

Hello Polycount and fellow Substance users,

I am in charge of the the SD pipeline at our studio and also had a user story a while back on Allegorithmics website.

Recently I have been documenting the pipeline and my thought process so that others can pick up where I left off if need be. While doing these videos I thought I could make some of them public to give some information back to the community.

I go over the basics, most people can skip that. And than focus on creating templates and how I came to conclusions that I did and some of the things to look out for in your own pipelines or workflow. Later on i will probably go more in depth with how to create mask generators and FX nodes but we will see.


These were filmed at my desk in the studio so there is a bit of background noise and sick people. Sorry about that but they are free in the end. If people are finding them helpful I might start making stuff at home so i can share nodes and have a quieter recording space.


Enjoy. Please let me know if there are more things you would like to see in the future.

http://youtu.be/rC9D1nsWYcg?list=PLUmA-QV4QiPbS5Vbla8M5GqnXbDBIfmyr

Jerc

Awesome! Thank you for sharing Steven!

MeshMagnet

Nice, thanks for spreading the knowledge.

Xoliul

Cool that your studio lets you share that stuff. Some people are not that lucky

Kon

Very nice! It's incredible how the community builds up around this software packages and sharing insight views. Thank you, Steven!

AdvisableRobin

This is super cool, thank you a ton!

Reich

Xoliul wrote: »

Cool that your studio lets you share that stuff. Some people are not that lucky

A lot of the videos are not public. But things that are more general theory we were fine with sharing.

It's rare that I post on social media or forums (last posts here were in college i think) but I gathered a lot of information from it all when I was learning so I really wanted to try and give some back...even if it was a little rushed.

MDiamond

Thank you so much for sharing this, getting a peak of how a studio uses a tool like Substance is pure gold for a lot of people learning the program and game developing itself.

Kon

Thanks for sharing this with us. It already helped me and I just watched the first 2 videos. It's great to have a community like this with Substance and people like you who are willing to share!

Kon

Sorry, Double-Post:

What I don't understand: How do I use the Aliases? Your explanation does not help me and the Documentation about it doesn't make it better, too.

NicolasW

Aliases becomes necessary only if you start having a lot of custom nodes and you plan to share them across a team.

Substance files (.sbs, packages) can be dependent from each other: when you drag&drop a noise from the library into a graph, you create a dependency to that node. So when you open your package again, SD looks for the dependencies and loads them up to memory.
These dependencies are stored within the sbs file either using relative/absolute paths or using a alias.

Lets say you have created a basematerial graph and want to use it all the time, you store the basematerial.sbs somewhere on your harddrive, /mySubstances/ for exemple. When you instantiate this basematerial into a new graph, the dependency written in your package will be /mySubstances/basematerial.sbs

Now you want to share the package in which basematerial is used to someone else: when this guy opens the package, SD will look for the dependency and will try to find it at /mySubstances/, if it's there that's cool, if it's not he will ask the user to relocate it.

It's not much of a problem if it concerns only one dependency, but when it concerns 1

Kon

Thank you Nicolas!

Now I know why I should use Aliases and that"s great. But how do I use them exactly?
I can check/uncheck them when I export a substance with dependencies.
What if I just safe it like a normal .sbs? Does it have to be just in the Folder which I declared as my Alias-Folder?

To see my 'Aliased'Substances, what is the best way to see them in the Library, also?

Reich

NicolasW wrote: »

Aliases becomes necessary only if you start having a lot of custom nodes and you plan to share them across a team.

Substance files (.sbs, packages) can be dependent from each other: when you drag&drop a noise from the library into a graph, you create a dependency to that node. So when you open your package again, SD looks for the dependencies and loads them up to memory.
These dependencies are stored within the sbs file either using relative/absolute paths or using a alias.

Lets say you have created a basematerial graph and want to use it all the time, you store the basematerial.sbs somewhere on your harddrive, /mySubstances/ for exemple. When you instantiate this basematerial into a new graph, the dependency written in your package will be /mySubstances/basematerial.sbs

Now you want to share the package in which basematerial is used to someone else: when this guy opens the package, SD will look for the dependency and will try to find it at /mySubstances/, if it's there that's cool, if it's not he will ask the user to relocate it.

It's not much of a problem if it concerns only one dependency, but when it concerns 1

Reich

New tutorial series up for creating Mask Generators.

Mant1k0re

Really enjoying your tutorial series Stephen. Combining this with Wes' stuff makes up for a great training.

Thanks!