Substance Designer Vs Unreal Engine 4 Shadering / Zb Vs Substance Painter

CrazyKlown

Hi there, i would like to open this topic to talk about some workflow that i think about during a texturing character video game creation process. I rather work as sculpting/painting on Zb, fix some maps on photoshop and use the shadering PBR with unreal engine 4. My questions are : Why, during my workflow, should i use Substance designer and what's its his strength ? instead of the unreal shadering ? What couldn't i do with unreal 4 ?

Second question : why should i use Substance painter instead of zbrush during the painting process ?

Allegorithmic' softwares seem to be very popular but i' ve tested only substance designer and it's seem to be pretty similar to unreal 4 shadering. Is there some pretty tricks that i've missed which i've to add to my workflow ?

I would like to know your huge experience in graphics design about it and make my own opinion.
Thanks

cryrid

Zbrush only lets you paint RGB vertex colors. Even 10 years ago this was a shortcoming; if you needed a specular map for your material then you would either have to paint it as separate polypaint (and without a preview of what it actually does to the material), or just use Zbrush for the color map and use that texture as a guide in Photoshop to create the specular map. 

Substance Painter lets you paint several different channels at once while giving you a real-time preview of the result. With a single stroke you can paint your albedo, roughness, etc. This lets you create material presets in advance (like rubber or gold) and then quickly paint them onto the model. There's also some pretty sweet particle brushes and filters/generators to use. If you're familiar with painting in Zbrush, then watching some Substance Painter videos should quickly give you an idea of the difference between painting tools. 

Edit: Also, layers! If you want to layer some red paint on top of copper metal but then change it to blue paint on gold, it would be a breeze in SP and simply unpleasant in ZB. 

musashidan

As for UE4 mat ed Vs SD: yes, you can emulate SD materials in UE4. It just depends on how proficient your are.(a good example of this is opening the infiltrator demo materials and seeing how they are built) The UE mat ed is extremely powerful, but ultimately I personally find SD to be a lot more artist friendly and dedicated in the approach. SP and SD complement each other very nicely (as you would expect) and for me at least I would much rather be texturing a character in a 3d painting environment than a node graph.

ActionDawg

Another difference is that UE4 materials will cost you a bunch at runtime whereas textures made in SD/SP can be baked down and only cost you a texture sample, super cheap in comparison.

This was originally talking about Photoscanning vs Zbrush vs Substance, but the point still holds:

somedoggy said:

Practice. Photoscan and Zbrush can't touch some of the things you can easily do with Substance. But combining all those tools, you can relegate each to what it does best. Need a specific pattern for some tiles? Zbrush or Photoshop it and import into Substance. If you already made a tile Substance, great! Just plop the pattern into the graph and call it a day. Art direction wants 10 more patterns like this? Cool, draw them out and import to Substance. Those might take you 20 minutes a pop because all the hard detail work is done with the program that does it best. And it even keeps your visuals consistent for free!

It is most advantageous when you've got a lot on your plate. If you have a hundred objects to make, you can make a material library that you blend together for each object's material. Realized your dirt roughness is too low? Bump it up a tad and every object updates immediately. You won't get that with photoscan and zbrush.

CrazyKlown

Alright, Thanks guys to your reply, so i'm pretty sure now i'll keep my mind on SP & SD. I wasn't convinced by those video which pop on the web so i wanted some general informations from you guys before continuing my learning process.
Regards.