Bitmap2Material workflow confusion
polycounter lvl 6
Hello!
I have a Bitmap2Material workflow question. First of all I have to say that I'm very impressed with what it can generate from simple untiled texture photos! This is gonna be a real timesaver in my toolbox, I'm glad I updated to Substance Live!
But I have to admit that I find the name of the program quite confusing. I thought this was a tool to create substance materials from bitmaps. But after quite some digging into docs and forum posts my understanding is now that: 1) B2M is a substance itself, built with Substance Designer. 2) The B2M application seems to be a (slightly modified?) Substance Player that helps with tweaking settings and exporting PBR bitmaps created from an input image. 3) The B2M substance can be used directly in Unity to streamline the texture generation in engine and potentially reduce filesize of the final game archive.
What I'm missing is a way to use the B2M application to export a substance that I can just drop into Substance Painter to use it there, drop it into Unity to use it there, and ideally for all projects to have the substance in one place, and allow me to open it up with the B2M application again to do further tweaks and have the other projects using it update their maps automatically. My understanding is, that this currently is not possible.
I think bottomline I have the greatest benefits when I use the B2M substance inside Unity, because it's awesome to see the textures in context and be able to tweak the settings. This is a real top notch feature! Now the downside seems to be, that I can't export a) the generated bitmaps, or b) the settings that I use. I think I have read the suggestion on your official forum to a user to write his own preset parser to import/export presets between B2M and Unity. That seems to be quite a big task to me though. TV-commercial voice: "There has to be a better way!"
I hope I'm just missing something trivial and there actually is a solution for this already. It would be a real pity if I had to choose between preset files with bitmap export capability, and perfect unity integration, but everything I do with B2M is trapped in there. Might it even be trapped inside the single unity project? I can't figure out where it saves its settings, which makes me really nervous, because I don't trust Unity to never break this stuff with future updates. If I were to create 200 PBR materials with B2M and somehow loose all that work because of a program error... I don't even want to think about it. Yeah backups, but [i]what[/i] do I have to backup? And what if there ever will be a showstopping incompatibility with a future Unity update? I'd feel much safer to have preset files and exported bitmaps as a backup.
I'd love to make the first setup in Unity, and click a button to automatically export a .sbsar that I can use in substance painter (and tweak further if needed [by loading .sbsprs files in SP or making manual tweaks]), a .sbsprs with just the settings and a set of bitmaps at max resolution for backup purposes.
Also am I correct, that currently the only way to create a .sbsar, which I can use in SP, with B2M, is to place the whole B2M substance as a node into a graph in SD and set up all the outputs and the input bitmap manually and then publish it as a .sbsar? It's all a bit hard to wrap my head around, so I totally might be missing some important aspect.
Only a few more questions and I'm done ^^. Why is substance share (seemingly?) not integrated with B2M at all? There is a button "More Substances" with a mouseover that mentions turbosquid, and the URL points to a 404 on your website. It would seem to me that this would be a brilliant workflow to just load up a texture photo, tweak the settings, and hit a "publish to substance share" button to upload it as a new tweakable .sbsar material to the plattform. I'm sure that would help filling the archive. And with the "make it tile: random" setting it even can be randomized a little. It's not like a full blown procedural texture, but I could still see this being very useful in SP workflows.
Is this maybe on your roadmap? It feels like such a good fit for the whole Substance ecosystem that I'm 99% sure you've at least thought about this already.
I still have an open licensing question in the substance share thread by the way:
http://polycount.com/discussion/157560/substance-share-is-here#latest
Maybe you haven't seen it yet? Personally I find the new forum layout very confusing and it seems to have changed all my email notification settings.
Anyway, thanks a lot for your help and for making such innovative and stable tools! Keep up the great work!
I have a Bitmap2Material workflow question. First of all I have to say that I'm very impressed with what it can generate from simple untiled texture photos! This is gonna be a real timesaver in my toolbox, I'm glad I updated to Substance Live!
But I have to admit that I find the name of the program quite confusing. I thought this was a tool to create substance materials from bitmaps. But after quite some digging into docs and forum posts my understanding is now that: 1) B2M is a substance itself, built with Substance Designer. 2) The B2M application seems to be a (slightly modified?) Substance Player that helps with tweaking settings and exporting PBR bitmaps created from an input image. 3) The B2M substance can be used directly in Unity to streamline the texture generation in engine and potentially reduce filesize of the final game archive.
What I'm missing is a way to use the B2M application to export a substance that I can just drop into Substance Painter to use it there, drop it into Unity to use it there, and ideally for all projects to have the substance in one place, and allow me to open it up with the B2M application again to do further tweaks and have the other projects using it update their maps automatically. My understanding is, that this currently is not possible.
I think bottomline I have the greatest benefits when I use the B2M substance inside Unity, because it's awesome to see the textures in context and be able to tweak the settings. This is a real top notch feature! Now the downside seems to be, that I can't export a) the generated bitmaps, or b) the settings that I use. I think I have read the suggestion on your official forum to a user to write his own preset parser to import/export presets between B2M and Unity. That seems to be quite a big task to me though. TV-commercial voice: "There has to be a better way!"
I hope I'm just missing something trivial and there actually is a solution for this already. It would be a real pity if I had to choose between preset files with bitmap export capability, and perfect unity integration, but everything I do with B2M is trapped in there. Might it even be trapped inside the single unity project? I can't figure out where it saves its settings, which makes me really nervous, because I don't trust Unity to never break this stuff with future updates. If I were to create 200 PBR materials with B2M and somehow loose all that work because of a program error... I don't even want to think about it. Yeah backups, but [i]what[/i] do I have to backup? And what if there ever will be a showstopping incompatibility with a future Unity update? I'd feel much safer to have preset files and exported bitmaps as a backup.
I'd love to make the first setup in Unity, and click a button to automatically export a .sbsar that I can use in substance painter (and tweak further if needed [by loading .sbsprs files in SP or making manual tweaks]), a .sbsprs with just the settings and a set of bitmaps at max resolution for backup purposes.
Also am I correct, that currently the only way to create a .sbsar, which I can use in SP, with B2M, is to place the whole B2M substance as a node into a graph in SD and set up all the outputs and the input bitmap manually and then publish it as a .sbsar? It's all a bit hard to wrap my head around, so I totally might be missing some important aspect.
Only a few more questions and I'm done ^^. Why is substance share (seemingly?) not integrated with B2M at all? There is a button "More Substances" with a mouseover that mentions turbosquid, and the URL points to a 404 on your website. It would seem to me that this would be a brilliant workflow to just load up a texture photo, tweak the settings, and hit a "publish to substance share" button to upload it as a new tweakable .sbsar material to the plattform. I'm sure that would help filling the archive. And with the "make it tile: random" setting it even can be randomized a little. It's not like a full blown procedural texture, but I could still see this being very useful in SP workflows.
Is this maybe on your roadmap? It feels like such a good fit for the whole Substance ecosystem that I'm 99% sure you've at least thought about this already.
I still have an open licensing question in the substance share thread by the way:
http://polycount.com/discussion/157560/substance-share-is-here#latest
Maybe you haven't seen it yet? Personally I find the new forum layout very confusing and it seems to have changed all my email notification settings.
Anyway, thanks a lot for your help and for making such innovative and stable tools! Keep up the great work!
Replies