Could somebody explain me Alchemist advantages please

gnoop

I have just did another try and puzzled what they did it for.  Imo for regular environment tiling textures it's monstrously inconvenient.

Everything it can do is perfectly re-creatable in Substance Painter + filters done in SD   with much more options and in much more flexible manner .

Evrything what SPainter can't do is rather bad.

1. Layers depth based or whatever else  layer blending.    Painter could do perfectly same with extra hand painting option like in Quixel Mixer to adjust heights of both layers, added height gradients, more precise levels based mix adjustment  and so on and on. So much more convenient and controllable.

2. Procedural effects  are all looks kind of  "procedural" and unrealistic  with  zero access to actual Node structure SD provide to adjust things subtly.

Same pain in the a... in Painter  too actually  but at least there you can hand-paint  a mask to kill especially bizarre procedurals .  

3.  I can't find any tools to scale bitmap fill precisely . An extremely important option.  Also kind of a huge pain in SPainter but at least you can scale  1,3  or  0,7 there smoothy

4. in Painter I can do non-square textures in Alchemist I can't

5. In Painter I can place a separate non-tilable  detail in its own exact place in Alchemist it's all procedural and never right.

6. Clone tool looks same in SPainter  (not very good in both) 

7. De-lighter is a joke  basically doing same hipass as everywhere .     Not even close to https://lightbrush.org/   I happened to buy it before they gone subscribtion.:)

So what am I missing ?   Alchemist looks imo like a quintessence of everything I don't like in Substance Designer after they kill an option to hand- paint  masks  and at the same time looses all other its advantages.

ps. why I can't find a way to load both color and height image .  Do  somebody makes height from color image   in 2019?

zachagreg

If you can't see advantages of using it then don't use it for your workflow. You clearly hate most things about Substance Suite anyways so anyone trying to explain advantages of the software are most likely to get hand waived away. Don't use it. Use what works best for you. From this post as well as the similar ones on the substance/adobe acquisition thread it very much seems like you just don't like nor want to like them. None of them do exactly what you want. That's fine. So use things that you like and get the job done.

To try to help though in case.

Alchemist stands out primarily as a scan-processing tool. It very much is marketed as quick solutions to difficult or time consuming processes. That doesn't mean that you're going to pump out hand-crafted AAA materials from it. It is an alternative to that which offers faster results with less time. First impressions it would be great for indie teams that want to parameterize their materials and keep them with the same style without having to delve into substance designer. Scan processing is another thing that it's marketing to. It would also be great for concepting and block in phases of projects to quickly get general look and feel in a level.

It is not supposed to be a replacement, it is a gap-filling software that focuses on rapid creation and iteration. As for the specific questions.

1) Similar features yes, if you prefer painter, do it in painter. The setup of alchemist seems to very much compete with Quixel Mixer. Which was probably the main purpose when it was being made.

2) Again rapid iteration and production is where Alchemist will do well. Teams on a budget either money wise or time wise. Procedural be procedural for the time being which is why like you expresses in Painter hand editing, same with Designer blending noises and custom transformations. One of the things that makes the difference between a great texture artist and a mediocre one. 

3) Yes that is annoying. I can agree that there should a straightforward way to do this. Though crop will give you some more control over this, it doesn't work as well as it should.

4) It will come, the software just released a month ago. There is probably quite a bit of work to do on the backend of alchemist to put this feature in especially for their machine-learning tools. It took a while to get it into Painter and I'm sure they know that drawback.

5) Just not what alchemist is for, you have to look at it for intended use. Rapid creation, prototyping, and scan-processing. I agree it would be nice to hand edit but then just use SD or SP.

6) Then use painter or perhaps put suggestions on the Algorithmic forum if you like neither.

7) Yes a single node is worse than a software dedicated to the task of delighting. It is also great that you have access to the software before it went subscription. Use it if it is better. But having a quick delighting for making more accurate results in engine is not going to make anyone who has the substance suite upset.

That's the whole concept of their business right now, The Suite. The "ecosystem" substance is trying to make. If a smaller team has team subscription to SS then they get this tool with it. Same with larger studios. Some may not want to add another software to the pipeline just to delight. Do it in Photoshop, which may they most likely have, if that is the case but if they are already using Substance Suite then there it is, problem solved quickly and efficiently.

There is nothing wrong with criticizing a software you pay for. That is completely fine. But there seems to be this contrarian nature that you just don't like Substance. Also fine, but if you want legitimate answers or assistance or would like to see features implemented try approaching it in a way that isn't just repeatedly bashing on things you do not like. Pointing out that neither clone tool works well isn't something that anyone other than Substance devs can help with. I believe you legitimately want substance to be better but the way this post is framed does not come across that way.

gnoop

I am sorry for my post.  It does a bit too much harsh probably.    Substance definitely deserve  some credit for sure   for trying to make new generation of texture tools and  they did succeed in that.  I use their products every day after all.  All  other alternatives are worse, no doubt.

It's just me feeling frustration with their new soft I expected to be representing kind of a new idea of "simple and convenient"    Their programs have always been  feature rich, flexible   but never easy and convenient.   For a while I hoped Abobe could bring such an ideology.  Nope.    

I tired of both SDesigner and PAinter with its never-ending puzzle solving and workarounds   and want something fresh and simple.

 Again they are trying to pursue  same weird idea that all the textures should be roboticly generated with minimal artist hand and taste input.  

First they killed their excellent MapZone  tool allowing to manually re-shuffle noises  then killed an ability to paint mask by hand in SDesigner .

While Photoshop for example is all about doing subtle touches for photos, a core thing for textures too,   Substance as always tries to make it as hard as possible  with its damn sliders you basically have to re-set ranges for each of them.  

Clone tool is a minor issue. It just needs something to mirror and scale copied fragments  like patch tool in Affinity photo for example . Maybe a bit more smart on height channel . It's where Ai would be very much welcomed.

But most of all  I am puzzled why on Earth they couldn't make hand painted masks  so we could kill  few  bizarre procedural cracks  that never looks right or hand paint depth modifications to mix things easily. Quixel mixer is all about it if they wanted something similar.

ps. I am appreciative for your detailed input   and  just hoped I might be missing some functionality.

 BTW, the texture scanning  idea is very understandable  but why not something like Reality Capture + decent camera  that could make you super detailed geometry up to microbe level. Well almost

    Why wouldn't  help us with  something  cool and easy to  bake millions of photogrammetry point cloud dots  straight into height texture instead of this ancient multi angle thing.

   

poopipe

Painter is far from ideal for tiling maps - you can do it but it's not exactly convenient.  
There are also many issues around dependencies and change propagation with Painter that don't appear to be as problematic in alchemist. 

We will be using it in our studio to allow environment artists to generate tileable textures from materials generated by specialist material artists - essentially it'll be equivalent to Painter but for tileables. 

I don't see any advantage in it as a single user or small team if you already have designer  but for larger studios where you want more people to create maps but you don't want them messing values up it's sort of ideal

gnoop

Agree, Painter is very far too.    For some weird reason they killed those few very little things to paint manually in Designer around version 3.   And I need something to touch final textures with my own hands,  erase/ patch  few bothering procedural spots etc.  So Painter is only option.

Ideally I would love to see Designer as  a node based  addon to Painter.  Working in a single soft .   Maybe something like in Mari. Actually they are getting close gradually.

I hoped Alchemist could be something like Quixel Mixer on steroids with extra procedural features.  But it's nothing even close.

They do same as everything :   very inconvenient program basis  decorated with lots of fancy  and nice for sure small features but still not canceling that super inconvenient basis.

ps.   There is one very basic  feature I asked Allegorithmic for years: to make convenient transform gizmo with a movable center of transforms to scale around.   in both Designer and Painter , for projective painting at least.    It's like shouting in void.

Evry image editing soft have it . Affinity Photo did it a month after people asked.   3dcoat did it .    Substance - nope

poopipe

make your own transform node - it would be fairly trivial 

gnoop

I tried in Designer, found no ways to modify gizmo the way it would scale around certain choosen point  like it does with rotation mode.

Would be appreciative for a few suggestions how to do so

As of projection mode in Painter I doubt it's possible at all there

oblomov

gnoop said:

   For some weird reason they killed those few very little things to paint manually in Designer around version 3. 

Mmh. I'm not sure what you are referring to. We can still paint in bitmaps in the 2D view in Designer 2019. It's never been a very impressive feature, but it's still there. Create a bitmap node -> From New Resource ... and then select the paint brush icon on the left side of the 2D view.

gnoop

oblomov said:

gnoop said:

   For some weird reason they killed those few very little things to paint manually in Designer around version 3. 

Mmh. I'm not sure what you are referring to. We can still paint in bitmaps in the 2D view in Designer 2019. It's never been a very impressive feature, but it's still there. Create a bitmap node -> From New Resource ... and then select the paint brush icon on the left side of the 2D view.

Thank you oblomov, you are right.  Somehow I missed it  altogether . Used that a lot before and few years ago my old  sbs stopped to open for some uncertain reason.

Still kind of love it would have Painter styled of layer system. I mean all in a single soft. . They had some simple layers once .  Unless I am also missing it somewhere