Substance painter or designer?

1813

So. What's the difference between painter and designer? I get from the names that one is just designing mats but why can't you do that in maya with the node environment and paint it in painter?

pior

The names are kind of confusing and not really self-explanatory. I would sum it up as follows:

- In Designer, you design dynamic materials through a node based system, and you can apply them to regions of a model through an ID map. Meaning that Designer is not just a material creation tool - it can very well be used to texture a complete asset with various surface qualities and materials.

- In Painter, you design dynamic materials through a condition-based system ("Detect crevices and put some dark in them" ; "Tile this or that texture with x number of repetitions" ; "Overlay this or that color with a specific blending mode", and so on). You can then apply these complex materials to regions of a model through an ID map. AND you can color pick the result of it all with a smart color picker, to paint complex material and/or color information with strokes and stencils. In short: Painter is not merely dedicated to stroke based painting ; as a matter of fact it is probably the least important feature of the program, used only at the end of texturing for added weathering.

Sastrei

Ooooohhhhh. This is very informative. Are they meant to work together (prelim work in Designer, specific weathering in Painter), or is it more of a one or the other approach?

Jerc

As a general rule, Substance Designer is the best tool for creating tiling materials, filters and tools while Painter is all about texturing unique assets (by taking advantage of all the content produced in SD).
That's how most studios use the tools.
But then again, SD can do a whole lot of other things.

FourtyNights

I can't afford SP2 at the moment, but I have a SD4 (yeah, didn't get a free update to 5) indie license. Everyone suggests SP2 for character work, but I hope SD4 is capable of handing texturing a whole character plausibly enough. I mean I can use like Mari for skin base texturing and stuff, but yeah.