Best tool to use in creating complex black & white patterns to be used in Substance Designer?

TheGabmeister

I'm working on a material which has complicated shapes like these:

In my current workflow, I create these shapes using planes in a 3d modeling software, place an orthographic camera at the top, and then render a black and white image. It's good enough, but maybe there are more elegant ways to do it.

I've seen some artists create crazy shapes such as Baroque architecture using only Substance Designer. At the moment, I'm looking for easier alternatives. My friend suggested Adobe Illustrator. Should I try and learn Illustrator? Or maybe learn how to create this shape in Photoshop?

poopipe

All are perfectly valid methods. 

I usually use max because it has excellent spline tools. I use render to texture and bake them to a plane so positions remain consistent

Photoshop has decent vector tools so it's a good alternative.  

TheGabmeister

Ok. Thanks. I'll check out the spline tools in Max.

Just tried Adobe Illustrator. It has a tool called Image Trace which does a pretty good job in converting a bitmap image into vectors with just a click of a button. Very useful indeed for well-defined shapes.