Does Substance make sense for props within low end game projects?

capone

From what I understand, even the big studios like NaughtyDog really only use substance for tiling textures. I see many people using substance for props but it's usually for portfolio purposes. 

Imagine a prop such as a clock, say it had wood, metal, plastic and diamonds. You'd need 4 substance designer materials but each of those would have albedo, metal, gloss, AO, ID map, Normal etc. So this one prop would have 25 texture maps. So I'm guessing this isn't really feasible for games (especially on my intended platform of mobile) or is it? Perhaps for the long run you end up with less maps because those 5 maps for wood are used all over the project?

Does anyone here have experience of how they go about texturing props in Substance Painter for a game project? I'm guessing I missing something technical here, like there is no need to export any maps because the engine reads substances which are much lower in filesize? 

pior

Using Substance tools for a project doesn't necessarily mean using dynamic Substance assets throughout. One can texture to one's heart's content in Painter and Designer using as many crazy materials and inputs as needed, only to ultimately export out the result as a mere normal+albedo+roughness+metal.

poopipe

People generally dont use substance live in engine because it's incredibly slow. There are cases where it's used as a preprocessor to generate content at install or whatever though. 

You're sort of on the right lines with your thinking. 
 if you have a fully layered material system you can output hundreds of basic materials (as texture sets)  at a fairly low pixel size and mask them together at runtime - everything is shared so you tend to save memory in the long run and because you're tiling maps you can achieve much higher texel density than would be possible with single textures

This method is pushing it in terms of shader cost on consoles though -  let alone a phone so you're probably best sticking to the standard method of making things look nice in substance and exporting some unique textures. If you use designer you can automate plenty of steps and save yourself vast amounts of time.. 

Mant1k0re

capone said:

From what I understand, even the big studios like NaughtyDog really only use substance for tiling textures. 

I think a great deal of the base materials used for props are made in Designer and then used in Painter for bespoke texture at N-dog nowadays actually.

capone

Oh I think I'm finally getting it now.

So you can have a library of millions of substance materials, use as many of those substance materials as you want to. Even if you had a prop with 10 different materials it would be exporting a single albedo map (for example) with all those materials combined into one texture map. It's obvious now but for some reason I was imagining exporting all the maps for the tiling wood, metal etc. Which makes no sense because in engines you normally can't apply multiple albedos etc.

Feel daft now  Thanks so much everyone.

Bruno Afonseca

You got it! Though in Paragon for example, Epic has a library of tiling materials and each character's textures are just a set of masks, which is similar to what you described. It's a pretty unique pipeline though and I haven't seen it being used in production anywhere else.

poopipe

It's the same technique thats use  was widely publicised on the Order. 

Ue4 has this support natively so it's somewhat surprising it's not more widely acknowledged/used

Mant1k0re

poopipe said:

It's the same technique thats use  was widely publicised on the Order. 

Ue4 has this support natively so it's somewhat surprising it's not more widely acknowledged/used

Are you referring to layered materials?

UE4 documentation itself cautions against using it too much because it's costly.

poopipe

It isn't cheap in terms of shader cost but it can save a lot of memory, allows for very high texel density,  makes it easy to swap materials out on the fly and allows for clever batching in the renderer. 

Whether it's a good idea or not will depend heavily on how your project is set up..