Substance designer or not?

Nerdicon3000

Hey everyone. I was just wondering should I be using substance designer for materials like this. I am half way through making a basic painted wood planks texture and I brought it into UE4 for a bit of a test and realized that without tessellation this material looks super flat. I only tried it because I have seen so many people making textures like this but I have to say I haven't seen many actually used in a real-time game unless they are already a flat surface to begin with. Should I just make these textures the old fashioned sculpted and baked down way? Are most of these Substance textures just for show or am I missing something here?

oglu

An Artist should know how to work with Designer. But you dont have to use it for everything.

It all depends on thr game you are working. In large studios there are specialized substance artist. You dont create them yourself. On other studios all is done by hand. 

Maybe next time you end up in a studio and you are the one special substance artist.

Its just a tool in your toolbox. Use it if you need it. 

Noors

Yes all these tesselated stuff are cool for a  portfolio or training, but i didn't come across much games using tesselation. And it will always be kinda overkill over an optimized mesh. I get it for terrains, rocks,organic stuff or offline rendering, cinematics...But for wood planks it's silly. Look at the mesh resolution needed. It's like people using gradients all around to make something you could sculpt in 15min. It's impressive, and is certainly a good exercise, but not sure how efficient. Now you 're not forced to output a heightmap, you can do other stuff with designer. Basically defining a material the exact way you want for substance painter.

jStins

I'm no master of Substance Designer, but I do like to start with tessellation and a height map when building a new material. There's so much you can derive from height to generate other common maps and it's helpful to see actual height on the material. Maybe this is why so many Substance artists present materials with tessellation even though it's not often implemented in engine? I definitely agree that tessellation is overkill for final implementation on something like the planks posted above. 

gnoop

I would use Substance Designer only if you really need something "procedural" .    Photogrammetry  takes fraction of time  necessary to recreate such a texture in SD  and ALWAYS looks better and more real if placed next to each other.

    Another  thing is you can create such things in actual 3d soft , even Blender , using custom procedural tools, particle/hairs  and arrays which usually much more convenient  and easy to work with than  SD.  Any 3d soft has  much better scattering tools usually  than SD splatters   and rendered  results always look better too usually.        

Noors

Thinking about my previous assertion, I don't know if you can export a tesselated mesh from designer to make a low poly from it. (Or use the heightmap in a 3d software).
The mesh from substance would be a sort of highpoly, and then you could bake on something else than a flat plane.

FourtyNights

To be honest here, I've only used Substance Painter for texturing, and I have no knowledge of how to use Substance Designer in practise. 65% of time I'm using SP for texturing characters, and the rest of the 35% for props for the character or small environments for them.

If I'm using tileable materials for procedural texturing, I've used stuff from Substance Share or already made tileable PBR packages with base color, roughness, metalness, normals, ambient occlusion, and whatnot. I've kinda wanted to get into SD to give more credit for myself from that point of view, but I'd have to buy the software in the first place, and I'm not sure how much I'd need it in the end though... and working with nodes in general isn't my strongest suite, because of their order, logic and complexity.

Talked briefly to Rogelio Olguin months ago, and he recommended me to get into SD, even if I'm doing characters, since I could do my own procedural and tileable fabric materials, for example. I said "Yeah, that's a good point, and I probably get SD soon anyway." And here I am, still not using it, lol.