Is Alchemist worth one more try already?
sublime tool
Last time I tried Alchemist it was totally useless and monstrously inconvenient . Couldn't do a thing there beyond lots of useless depth blending that could be done even in Photoshop easier ( with more control) by groups clipping . And somewhat soft,/blurry, not crisp enough outcome.
Is it closer to what SPainter is now? Any new features? like painting brushes to blend layers and do masks? Decal style layers ? Materials scaling with non integers only? Non-square textures?
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Im answer to the painting questions, the short answer is no. The manual masking tools are rudimentary although from my initial tests they're actually pretty effective for the sort of work you'll need to do so I'm not sure you'll actually miss the fancy stuff from painter.
The AI image to material stuff is basically magic on organic stuff like rocks or ground materials and theres definitely value to be had there
Im going to start looking at how It fits into pipelines tomorrow, based on the docs and some guesswork it does appear that it will be possible to actually work with it in a studio setting but I'm reserving judgement for the moment.
So I stopped evaluation and went with Mixer for the time being.
@rollin
That's my biggest issue with the setup - however, it is possible save working projects to actual disk locations and export finished materials to wherever you want.
You can also set it up to load specific libraries on startup so shared libraries across the studio are feasible.
I don't have to worry about network stuff as everything lives in source control and is accessed locally but I agree - this sort of fuckery is precisely why otherwise great software just fails at being usable in a professional environment.
**edited for clarity
It could well be that I just haven't worked out how to use it properly yet but it seems that even compared to painter - which is a pain in the arse (sorry
Thanks Jerc. Would be nice to see a youtube video of those new features and how they work. I seems can't find anything about that crop layer
I've not finished my evaluation yet (it comes second to more pressing project matters) but I will certainly be in touch in an official capacity if that sort of thing is welcomed.
The ideal for me is Alchemist filling a spot similar to painter in our pipeline. Where painter allows non-specialist artists to use our material library to texture uniquely mapped assets, alchemist would facilitate creation of tileable textures -thereby leaving our material specialists free to make base materials and concentrate on more complicated matters than generating tileables,
I'm thinking about exporting / importing the project towards a source control folder and then using the merge functionality if different people export different versions of the project with their personal changes included.
But it seems bit awkward to do it that way.
Hey, @Jerc, as you're here anyway: how about some sneak-peak input on this?
I don't think there's any real hope of handling merges/conflicts - technically you could since the builk of the data is json but it all has gibberish names and it's just dumped in a folder.
I'm assuming if it moves to a single file it'll be binary and we'll be as fucked as we are with Painter so I've decided it's not worth worrying about and will just work out a way to treat a project folder as if it were a binary (i'm considering just zipping projects up tbh).
Practically speaking I don't see it causing a problem with the users I'm going to target for our first few licenses but longer term there's definitely a need for something clever.
Honestly if it were a standalone product this sort of thing would be the difference between us buying 5 licenses and 100 licenses and I imagine it'll be the same anywhere else that has more than a handful of artists.
Under the subscription model we're paying for it anyway but I'll still be holding it back from the general art team as we do with Designer if I can't work out a good way to deal with version control.