Want to learn Substance, a few questions.

loggie24

Hi. I'm looking into learning Substance designer coming from Quixel Suite. I have a few questions before beginning.

1. What workflow is the best? I see a lot of people using purely SD when creating their tileable textures rather than doing the "highpoly - bake - texture workflow".

2. Are substances re-usable on different textures? Are they random?

3. How long did it take you to get comfortable with SD and it's workflow?

4. From what i have seen, most texture that come out of SD seem to have a cartoonish style to them (maybe i'm wrong), are photorealistic textures possible without too much stress? Maybe a stupid question but just want to be sure.

If anyone have experience with Quixel Suite i would like to know the reason you switched or wanted to learn SD as well.

Thanks!

aelwine

I'll try to answer to the best of my knowledge, I've been practicing SD on my free time, and a bit at work.

1 : Both workflows have their values, the main advantage of using a full substance workflow would be the customization.
Let's say you're making a brick wall, if you're using a full substance workflow, and once you know what the nodes and parameters do, it's easier to change the number of bricks whenever you want, or the amount of damages on the corners, the difference of depth between each bricks, etc.
But you have to give up the idea of being always in control of where things are.
The Zbrush workflow gives you more control on the final look, but locks you inside the final sculpt shape.

A lot of people, myself included, build the height map first in SD, and once you've done that both workflows are similar.

2 : Depends on how you build you substance, but if you expose some parameters and your graph is resilient enough, you can build lots of variation with the same graph.
even without exposing parameters, just changing the random seed of the base graph should give you different enough variations

3 : I think everyone is different, but for me the learning curve was a bit steep at the beginning. There is lot to learn, and lots of different ways to do similar things.
It takes a lot of trial and errors.
The thing that really started to click for me is the fact you really have to start thinking in detail layering instead of building everything together. Bigger shapes to smaller details, splitting thing into small element.

Hope it helps

4 : try to look at what Bugo or Josh are doing for some dark magic tricks.
I think what makes it more difficult to do photoreal textures is the amount of details you need to put in order for the eye to get confused enough. And be really vigilant about breaking the procedural noises which are dead give-away

highbred3d

It definitely takes some practice and trial and error as aelwine has said. I've been using for probably over 3 years, and I'm still learning. It's very much worth it though, and actually becomes addicting! While I always try to make as many procedural height maps as I can, there's definitely still many good reasons to make textures in zbrush and bake in substance. I'm always combining baked texture workflows with procedural workflows inside of substance.

At the end of the day, think of Substance as a way to replace and automate alot of what you normally do inside of photoshop (and xnormal as well). All of my textures end up going through substance at some point, even if they start in zbrush.

It is very much possible to get realistic results from substance. All the principles of form, color and light apply just as much to substance workflow as it does photoshop and zbrush. Controlling deliberate mark making can be a challenge though, and make sure those procedural patterns and noises are unrecognizable in the final image.