New Year, New Tool? (aka using non-subscription specialty tools?)
polycounter lvl 6
Hi,
I apologize for being the new kid who doesn't appreciate good old tools.
But my workflow nowadays is largely:
- Maya LT for modeling.
- ZBrushCore for simple sculpting.
- Marmoset Toolbag for baking.
- Substance Painter for texturing.
- Substance Designer for procedural material authoring.
- Photoshop for texture inspection, environment map editing, image format conversions, graphic design etc.
- Small team, no custom toolchain: so minimal pipeline switching cost.
You can see Photoshop and Maya LT are the ones where I must have an active subscription in order to use.
I am thinking the following replacement, but want to hear some opinions:
i) I intend to replace Photoshop with Affinity (Photo and Designer). Largely because:
a) PS is not my main tool for texturing.
b) AP/AD's feature list covers what I want, and it's cost efficient in the long run.
c) I am not super familiar with Photoshop anyway, so I can switch without feeling much pain.
d) I am more used to speciality tools, like Sketch (UI design tool).
e) I use macOS, so many Photoshop plugins and tools do me no good.
ii) I want to replace Maya LT but replacing custom MEL script and ShaderFX graphs seems like a pain to me. Plus I don't see any non-subscription alternative on macOS, besides Blender. (which I know is good, but the transition seem hard.)
a) I think there are currently no specialty tools can replace Maya LT for less money? Besides the all-in-one Blender.
b) Looking at the tools wiki, Silo seem like the only generic modeling package people still talk about.
TL;DR: it's 2018, let me know if you are enjoying any Photoshop or Maya LT alternative? If you have any transition success story, do share!
Thx!
I apologize for being the new kid who doesn't appreciate good old tools.
But my workflow nowadays is largely:
- Maya LT for modeling.
- ZBrushCore for simple sculpting.
- Marmoset Toolbag for baking.
- Substance Painter for texturing.
- Substance Designer for procedural material authoring.
- Photoshop for texture inspection, environment map editing, image format conversions, graphic design etc.
- Small team, no custom toolchain: so minimal pipeline switching cost.
You can see Photoshop and Maya LT are the ones where I must have an active subscription in order to use.
I am thinking the following replacement, but want to hear some opinions:
i) I intend to replace Photoshop with Affinity (Photo and Designer). Largely because:
a) PS is not my main tool for texturing.
b) AP/AD's feature list covers what I want, and it's cost efficient in the long run.
c) I am not super familiar with Photoshop anyway, so I can switch without feeling much pain.
d) I am more used to speciality tools, like Sketch (UI design tool).
e) I use macOS, so many Photoshop plugins and tools do me no good.
ii) I want to replace Maya LT but replacing custom MEL script and ShaderFX graphs seems like a pain to me. Plus I don't see any non-subscription alternative on macOS, besides Blender. (which I know is good, but the transition seem hard.)
a) I think there are currently no specialty tools can replace Maya LT for less money? Besides the all-in-one Blender.
b) Looking at the tools wiki, Silo seem like the only generic modeling package people still talk about.
TL;DR: it's 2018, let me know if you are enjoying any Photoshop or Maya LT alternative? If you have any transition success story, do share!
Thx!
Replies
another downside in my opinion is how the layer stack simply lacks readability compared to PS where you can color-code, sort into folders, the thumbnails show the element in relation to the entire document and so on. Affinity so far is pretty bare-bones in that regard.
Lack of TGA export could be a problem, yes; I currently use PNG because I didn't have to deal with custom alpha (I use BaseColor + Normal + RMA map). Is alpha channel the "channel editing limit" many people refer to?
Lack of color coding layer/groups is probably a longterm issue, but I haven't done a complex enough handpainted texture or vector graphics to experience it, yet.
----
To everyone else, is Modo Indie 10 perpetual license a good way to go? I am not used to buying an older but perpetual license but that maybe the status quo for 3d modeling?
When I've worked places where there was no access to Max I've had them buy me Silo (or used my own money in a couple of cases) to get around the fact Maya is crap.
To my mind, you're best off with Blender if you want to shed the shackles of Autodesk.
- 2.79 release has Principled BSDF shader, so finally PBR gained native support. One slight drawback is Blender somehow used the Disney model which is different from the real-time game engine model (many based on Unreal's innovation on the Disney model).
- I am pretty sure if I can get pass the UI/Shortcut difference, I can pretty much do everything Maya LT has to offer. My problem with Modo Indie alike are exactly because they are pretty locked down, and I do have a few custom MEL script like this one or these ones.
Unreal just used Disney's BRDF for specular highlights aka GGX. I don't think they differ other than that. Besides 1 -> 1 asset matching is a nice to have not a necessity
From looks of Blender's principled node, I am thinking Blender is not aiming at real-time preview, but rather render-on-demand. But I can be very wrong, as I haven't used Blender yet.
The real optimization comes from the importance sampling loop driving the roughness, since if they didn't do their split sum approximation technique it would be a lot harder to run in real time.
All in all the result should be comparable.
True, but I am saying in other modeling tool it would have been a real-time preview shader (see Maya / Substance).
You might find this interesting though:
https://cgmasters.net/free-tutorials/realtime-pbr-in-blender/
There are always ways
EDIT:
It also mentions on the documentation page here: https://docs.blender.org/manual/de/dev/render/cycles/nodes/types/shaders/principled.html
> making it compatible with other software such as Pixar’s Renderman® and Unreal Engine®.
I imagine there's a realtime component to it as well
EDIT EDIT:
Here it is combined with Eevee in upcoming Blender 2.8
Ue4 is quite old now, I wouldn't take it as the definitive example of how to do a realtime pbr Shader today. Certainly what we use at the office is more complicated and that's console based.
And I have gone through Modo Indie 10 release highlights, while it has very cool procedural modeling features + nice boolean tools + powerful non-destructive stacks, I just read too many horror stories about it crashing and getting no customer support.
So eh, I guess I will stick with Maya LT as main modeling tool for a while: decent at modeling + great UV tool + ShaderFX + MEL script are still pretty hard to beat.
In other news:
- I did end up buying Silo, I can count its features with fingers but they are exactly what I would use in Maya LT. I might just use it for modeling and leave UVing to other tools. It's also getting some updates lately...
- I did switch to Affinity Photo and Designer, so far so good.
I don't think they're that behind the AAA studios though but they just can't build the engine for a specific case, it's a robust game framework, it can't have every feature under the sun else it'd be too large and cumbersome (and I'd argue it already is).
I still love UE though.
@bitinn
I thought you were using Unity anyway?