Substance Share is here!
interpolator
We just released Substance Share into the wild!
Substance Share is a free online exchange platform for all the Substance users out there.
It allows you to upload and download materials, brushes, tutorials and much more directly from within the Substance Tools or from your browser.
You can rate and comment other artist's work and help us build a enormous library of free quality content for everybody!
The artists at Allegorithmic will regularly upload cool new stuff as well.
It's still brand new, so if you encounter any bug or would like to see any missing feature, please shout!
Substance Share is a free online exchange platform for all the Substance users out there.
It allows you to upload and download materials, brushes, tutorials and much more directly from within the Substance Tools or from your browser.
You can rate and comment other artist's work and help us build a enormous library of free quality content for everybody!
The artists at Allegorithmic will regularly upload cool new stuff as well.
It's still brand new, so if you encounter any bug or would like to see any missing feature, please shout!
Replies
For example, if I use the substances in unity for a game, do I have to credit each individual author somewhere?
If I use (smart) materials in substance painter do I have to credit the authors wherever I show and or use the resulting final texture?
If that was the case I don't think I'd use the archive for much more than learning from the graphs, because that seems like a real hassle to keep track of to me. But if I can do those things without needing to credit people and only need to give credit when I for example take a substance from the archive, modify it and then want to redistribute the modified substance I'd be fine with giving credit.
I'm not sure where the line gets drawn in terms of "derivative" content. E.g. if I download a brush and paint with it, does that count as derivative work?
In the meantime, the way we see it is for a material, brush or filter used to paint or texture an asset that's part of a larger project, this project can't be considered "altered material" or "derivative work" as its scope is much larger and the original creators do not need to be credited.
BUT assets being used to create and redistribute a similar (single or group of) assets require the creator to be credited. eg. You download a smart material that you tweak and embed in another smart material that you redistribute or you use a substance material as is or slightly modified to texture a prop that you sell on an asset store.
thank you for this!
this would be very welcome.
I was just googling to see if you have already implemented the custom license that you mentioned, but it still seems to be CC-BY-4.0
Personally I think everyone would benefit from stuff on substance share being under CC-0 / in public domain or an equivalent license (some MIT license maybe?). I've uploaded a substance for the contest and if someone takes it and sells it without attribution that would still be more than worth it to me if it means I have access to a hassle free archive of stuff that I can use in my work and don't need to worry about. I'd image others might agree, but I wouldn't dare to estimate how big the part of the userbase actually is, that agrees with me.
You said yourself that the definitions are blurry and I'd rather stay on the safe side with this issue. Another thing is that I'm concerned about requirements for derivative works to stay under the same CC license. Frankly I don't understand the legal talk in these licenses well enough to know if this is really an issue. But I'm pretty sure there are at least some CC licenses that require derivative work to also be licensed under the same license (or else there would be crazy loopholes making all CC licenses meaningless, which I doubt is the case). My personal definition of "derivative" is "used the thing during the creation process in any way shape or form beyond just looking at it". I don't even know if there is a binding legal definition. It is clear to me from your reply, that this is not how you intend the license to work. But I'd like to have something that is legally rock solid, to protect me from any legal licensing issues. From my perspective only something like public domain or CC-0 can do that, or some custom license that for example allows to do whatever I want with bitmap export from any of the substances, smart materials etc., but requires (derivative) substances or smart materials to be shared on substance share exclusively or something like that. That still wouldn't cover cases like embedding substance share assets into Unity games to create textures at runtime, but maybe that's an edge case you could cover as well in a custom license.
I understand if the no-strings-attached-licenses are clashing with your interests and plans for the future of substance share, but I think CC 4.0 isn't a great fit for something like substances. I hope any of that was useful in finding that custom solution you mentioned.
By the way Blendswap offers its users some choices under which license they want to offer their assets. Maybe that would be the way to go? People could use search filters to only get CC-0 assets shown for actual production use, and other licenses if they just want to pick through a node setup to learn from? Just a thought.
Thanks and keep up the great work!