Can we replace Substance Designer with something?

gnoop

   Do somebody ever managed to get rid of Substance Designer for modern tillable textures?   I sometimes wonder whether  it's possible to recreate  slope blur, vector warp, distance, edge detection and a very few SD main nodes   in something like Blender Eevee for example . Or Max + plugins?    A mix of 3d and 2d solutions with  true 3d item scatterer + active shade/interactive preview.  A good set of procedural patterns/maps + weathering effects not depending on UV space at all.

 I have been using  SD since MapZone    and still  amazed how monstrously inconvenient it is in its every  detail.   Like it  was their special goal to make most intolerable, time eating  and over-complicated node system ever possible.     I was an ardent  fan of everything node based before SD  and now started to appreciate elegance and simplicity of layers and modifiers.

    

poopipe

Use alchemist,  they invented it for people who don't need to use designer. 

musashidan

I agree with poopipe, Alchemist is actually very flexible. At first I thought it was just the same as Quixel Mixer, but of course it's Allegorithmic and they have really fleshed out the features beyond what Mixer can do, and they will continue to improve it and add elements of Designer, along with more filters. I have looked around and the few alternatives to SD are more like procedural texturing in your 3D DCC and not anywhere near as powerful as SD.

Blender is set to add a host of new procedural texturing features. It will be interesting to see which way that goes.

As for OSL, Mads on the Max beta is doing some crazy stuff with that, but it involves coding your own shaders to really push it.

It is weird that those few nodes in SD that do so much of the work haven't been recreated as procedurals in Arnold or Cycles or any of the other DCC renderers. 

poopipe

You appear to be able to do a lot of what the basic designer nodes  do in Arnold etc. (no expert, I've just poked it a bit) But by the time you've put 4 or 5 of them together you could have just bought designer with the money you've spent.
I'd imagine that plus the massive benefits you get from the asset management side of designer is enough to render it pointless for anyone interested in making money

gnoop

   Thanks guys for the suggestions.   I have some appreciation to Substance Designer actually.  Through years it forced me to learn vector and general  math principles  deeper than  I would ever do otherwise  to an extent I am able to construct shaders and suggest  my own approaches. 

   Still it's only node based soft where I am looking at my own node network I did couple years ago and think:  how the hell I have done it.   

   When you want to automate some very trivial  mass texture edit like crop, re-scale, etc   SD could be so monstrous time eater. I have just spent the whole day trying to find what's wrong. Would  just have the task done old Photoshop "actions" way long before.

   I am trying to recreate those very few nodes I use in SD regularly in both Arnold and Clarisse  and still having zero success.  Scattering things in Clarisse is so much procedural and in fact somehow more visually interactive than with SD.    As of Alchemist  it looks same crazy alien to me  yet , I have my expectations low.

poopipe

I'm not unsympathetic, it does feel like you're expecting the wrong things from designer though. 

Designer is a technical art tool  - you have to put the groundwork in and be working at a certain scale to see all it's benefits and its certainly not something your average artist should be expected to operate in isolation. This is why we have Painter and now Alchemist, which both use familiar layer stacks, filters. Modifiers etc. 

Fwiw.. 
Designer is excellent at automation, you just need to read the docs and write some code (or command lines if you're not doing anything too complicated) - it's more effort than a photoshop action but it's also more powerful.  You can propagate updates across an entire material library at the click of a button, rebake all your assets, generate materials automatically etc etc.  It just requires you sit down and write some code. 

gnoop

   Yeah, it's old good  "thanks for buying our soft, now kindly hire a programmer"     An amount of time and efforts I wasted in Substance Designer through years is enormous.       It's a forth time  I am redoing all my  custom tools from scratch there because it's all gradually turned into a mess and no more working or slow as hell. I bet it 's all my faults somewhere although

     Very much hope with Alchemist it wouldn't be another decade of fighting with software.       

poopipe

I've not done a huge amount with Alchemist but from what I saw when playing with the beta it's basically Painter without the painting  - which makes it ideal for artists to composite tileables using materials and tools generated by technical artists. 

It's not something I'll use much personally but I'm pretty confident I'm going to be generating a lot of tools for it over the next few years - just as I have been with Painter.

gnoop

Painter mostly collects dust on my side, I hardly use it at all.    Rather Corel Painter sometimes.      SPainter  for some super quick job  for not very visually critical typical metal props  using tri-planar projection.     Prefer 3d coat and sometimes Mari indi for something true real life looking and mother nature related.  Mostly because of more advanced projection painting there and brushes of 3d coat.   

Anything I do in SPainter  gets a sign of kind of stylized "procedural"  or a bit simplified  look.    My own substances hardly works in SPainter at all being  monstrously big, heavy and too slow  usually.    Besides  I rarely do square shaped  textures.

   Alchemist is also looking like another Painter  for me, thus my skepticism.    With probably  even greater  feeling   of painting on a canvas with a brush in your teeth,  hands handcuffed behind and  a palette  on a low small stool beneath your canvas.

SPainter had been supposed as more artist friendly version of SD but I never felt it that way.    

  As a material mixer I will  rather use my own nodes in SD which I understand what they are doing at least.      Would love to see more advanced vector things, AI based seam removal, re-composing and patch tools      but doubt it will ever be there                

             

poopipe

Sounds like your substances are too complicated .
Painter prefers simple materials with layers of filters/masks - you don't want to create a mossy rock material with controls for varying moss placement,  you want moss, rock and a mask generator. 
Alchemist appears to behave the same way as painter so  a more modular approach to material generation qould be sensible. 

gnoop

   Yeah, you are right probably.  Still I am not sure how a mixer with gazillion sliders I have no deep understanding what they are doing   would help me really.  In my experience the good texture differs from a bad one by very subtle nuances and all my SD custom nodes are about making it easier to tweak such things.       Surprisingly SD is very inconvenient for nuance tweaking.

  For example 2d transform gizmo.   Every   image editor out there, vector raster or node based, every 3d soft too  allows you to set a center of transforms in some arbitrary point and scale the gizmo around it very precisely , same as with rotation.  Not SD for some uncertain reason, not SPainter in its projection mode last time I tried.   

   And so on with color tweaking .    I love Photoshop and APhoto picker in curve editing. It makes it so much easier to tweak nuances. How SD is still not having same.    I feel I am back to stone age every time I need to do a color or curve tweak.

  I often use 3d rendered things in SD. How it's still not supporting cryptomatte and I have to deal with jaggy masks while Blender does.      Why Blender could automatically normalize preview of floating point images and SD couldn't

 I regret they seems not focusing on conveniences that are really matter and instead  suggest me gazillion of sliders  I am sure I will be lost among.