TextureLab - Web-based Substance Designer Alternative

njbrown

Hey guys. I've made a node-based texture generation tool similar to Substance Designer. It's called TextureLab. I made it web-based because I wanted it to be easily accessible and I wanted to promote sharing and build a community around it. It's far from being complete, but the prototype works well enough for you to be able to play around. You can download the textures you make to a zip file or as a unity material package.

I've already demonstrated that a variety of textures can be made using the tool already. The variety and quality of the textures will increase over time. (https://texturelab.io/browse):

The Editor:

https://texturelab.io/texture/wjzo68mnmq/source

(Works best with Google Chrome)

You can sign up and start making textures of your own too.

Let me know what you think. Should i continue working it or does Substance Designer already completely own this space? What improvements/changes should I make? Would you pay for a tool like this if it's more fully featured?

Links:
Home Page - https://texturelab.io/
Gallery - https://texturelab.io/browse
Sample Texture - https://texturelab.io/texture/wjzo68mnmq/hex-mud
Sample Texture Source - https://texturelab.io/texture/wjzo68mnmq/source
Sign Up - https://texturelab.io/account/register

Obscura

Hi. I made an account and took a very quick look. I would need further testing but I can already tell you a few things. I use chrome but I got 2 loading errors on the first 2 pages I visited. Not sure if this could be something with my connection or something else though. Anyways, I use Substance Designer very regularly, so I think I could compare them in a fair way. For now, I would say its lacking of useful nodes, and you should have much more. Particularly, I was looking for the equivalent of directional warp and slope blur from SD. Also, at least for me, it was very unclear how to select already placed nodes and how to connect them. I tried different combinations of ctrl-shift-alt and lrft-right clicking but no luck.

Anyways, I think it would be nice to have an alternative, but as for now, this feels very unpolished, and made me simply leaving it in just a few minutes. I'll keep my eyes on it though, please keep going.

njbrown

Hey thanks for the feedback. I really do need to focus a bit more on polishing the ux of the editor. Are there any other nodes you use frequently?

Obscura

I use tile sampler, blur, slope blur, directional warp, and edge detect together with flood fill very often, but there is more. I checked out the splat node in your implementation, which could be the equivalent of tile sampler, but it only has a "count" parameter.

njbrown

Ok, noted. Do you think I should keep it a web-based tool or should I make it a standalone application?

Obscura

Personally I don't see a problem with it being browser based, unless some performance limitation arises.

Also, at home I use Opera as browser, and I gave it another try and here, and now I don't have the problems with selecting and connecting stuff (in opera), but I had in Chrome in the office.

One more thing

The slider handle should be different color from the ui backgrounf. Currently its hard to see where is the slider.

njbrown

Ok. Most of the heavy lifting is done on the GPU using shaders so performance isnt an issue. 

gnoop

I'd love to see  SD alternative because IMO after all those years it's still amazingly  inconvenient and artist unfriendly in every part of it   but unfortunately from what I see that texturelab needs a lot yet to be just on same level with SD.  

For example SD transform node gizmo is tremendously inconvenient  and here we have no one at all.    

One good thing you  have truly scaleable noises. SD didn't have one for years. 

Also I am a bit concerned  you seems try to follow same SD approach of having a Gordian knot of nodes on a screen with lots of them being redundant really and could be just  some input /output  modifiers   like invert or simple blending. I recall I loved node system in Messiah3d project where blending was + - * /  < > =  etc marks next to a node input/output meaning that  such a node would be blended with content of  its input  using certain math .   It's kind of more inline with Photoshop layers where we don't have put another blending thing and instantly have a number of blending tweaks like "Blend if"   without another Gordian knot of nodes

  I love also Blender node system  where you have bypass "M" and could make "groups" and see what you do inside such a group immediately real time, not with damn  SD saved  graphs where you should put some test pictures first to see what you are actually doing.      I love clone nodes in Fusion  without all the pain of "exposing" something  in SD and wasting hours then trying to debug it.

In a word there is so many good node system examples to borrow from and  not to follow SD crazy one.

ps. I definitely need  such a soft to be standalone since I would load lots of bitmaps.