Using substance over modeling?
Can someone help me understand the use of all these complicated substances I keep seeing? For example, I saw one posted today of an egg carton with eggs. 100% pure substance. What’s the point of this? This would surely be thousands more polys once tessellated opposed to just modeling an egg carton and some eggs out. Not to mention, probably a lot quicker to model out and texture than it would be to build the entire substance graph.
I understand the procedural-ness behind it, but it still doesn’t make much sense to me to create this whole substance and use tessellation over just modeling out the carton and eggs. I get using flatter substances for textures, as I create regular terrain or non-organic textures on a regular basis. Another one I saw was a whole entire building front with windows, etc. Wouldn’t it be cheaper/faster to just model these out?
Also, for the egg carton, how would this even work in engine? Are you just applying this texture to a rectangle about the size of an egg carton and using displacement/tessellation information from your height map? How would this be any better than creating the actual model that has a more accurate silhouette? Are people just doing this for practice or are these complicated substances slowly replacing modeled out props?
Replies
The substances you see like the eggs or like the keyboards are for practice and fun. It's a unique material that provides a personal challenge for the artist and is usually never going to be applied like it would in game. Even though technically speaking you could without the tessellation and displacement.
They look impressive, however if you want ones that are more likely to be used in game look through what Josh lynch or Daniel thiger have created. Usually SD materials will follow a convention of being 2meters or 4meters and be much larger than the 20cm that a lot of SD matballs are.
But yeah, mostly pointless