With all fresh new Adobe 3d substance what are real improvements?

gnoop

Is former Alchemist capable to work with non-square textures now?

Have it's AI improved  in depth reconstruction and especially  de-lighting  or it's still same hipass mostly?

Is it respect pixel grid to move something exactly 1 pix  without blurring  everything like Designer  with every move and crop i.e  ready to compose/re-shuffle   something from  bitmap blocks/objects like in Photoshop with pattern preview?

How it's in Designer  itself now?  

Any  new cool changes in Painter.   Is baking  there still same pain in a..  with never ending  flow of puzzles and  glitches and I should try to abandon Marmoset  and go Painter ?   i,e  something  convenient to tweak/ paint ray distances   and rays direction?   

Is the new  modelling Designer  worth trying   or  it's better to stick to Houdini and  Blender's Sverchok/construction nodes?

From how monstrously inconvenient  the node system in Designer  is ( i mean inside pixel and value processors)  comparing to  Blender for example I am kind of afraid to even try it .  It's only  3d max  MCG  that is ahead of Designer in  being undecipherable/ unreadable  puzzle.    

fdfxd2

The marketing material does an awful job of showing the new changes but,

Designer, actually has a lot of cool new changes, Raytrace nodes, and parametric modelling (why wasn't this mentioned in the videos?)

Painter, got a better shader system and better UVs, which, I could never figure out how the old shader system worked so +1

Alchemist or... "Sampler",  got new filters.

And in general, better performance, interconnectivity and streamlined UIs for all.

gnoop

Thanks  fdfxd2    .    Can Sampler work with non square  textures?  

How is parametric modelling vs Houdini  . Is it easier to work with at least ?

poopipe

I've put a couple of hours in with the model graphs now and.... 

Its basically in a beta state at the moment IMO - it's quite crashy, there's a pretty rudimentary set of prebuilt nodes, documentation is incomplete and you can't work with subgraphs (yet?) - I find that last bit the most frustrating. 
The initial learning curve will be fine if you've used mdl graphs - if you've not, it'll be a bit strange
Its worth noting some of the default values are set wrong which is a bit confusing (eg., transform node defaults to 0-1 when it should really be 0-100)

Today I've made a tool that'll place bricks in a brick pattern across a cube - all parameterised etc., lofted a bunch of splines, dicked around with the bend tools etc.  I'm really looking forward to digging further into it 

Houdini it is not. If history is anything to go by it'll develop quite rapidly and I'd expect it to be a reasonable alternative for small, simpler jobs (i.e what 99% of indie users do with Houdini). The graph editor is naturally much better than the Houdini one (because designer has the best graph editor on the market)

in terms of output - Adobe are clearly trying to make us all buy Stager so the only place you can use an .sbsm is there - hopefully they'll eventually realise that nobody gives a fuck about Stager and allow you to bake from them in Designer - in the interim there's fbx 

The nicest surprise was discovering the Indie subscription price has dropped pretty significantly if you pay yearly - over 50quid less for me


for illustration, this is the brick placement thingy graph
and what comes out

Jerc

Just chiming in on the procedural geometry.  Like with Substance, it is based on a runtime engine that can be integrated in any 3rd party app. Right now, we only have an integration in Stager, but the plan is, like Substance, to integrate it in as many 3D apps and game engines as possible over time.

gnoop

Thanks for  an example  poopipe

Can you make such brick wall with different brick objects ,different size  and orientation,    a window inserted   for example,  using different parts of texture atlas / doing UV shifts ?  

I.e  something   helpful to build procedural something  from  trim textures ?         I always found it's kind  of too complex when it comes to UV in Houdiny.                

poopipe

Thanks jerc, I perhaps sounded more cynical than I actually feel about it. 

Gnoop.

There doesn't seem to be a lot of interconnectivity between model graphs and materials yet but you could certainly throw your own objects in and I don't see any reason why you couldn't randomise positions etc. 

The stack and merge nodes would allow for trim sheet generation pretty easily. There's just a few hoops to jump through

Right now it feels like the basics are in place and in a version or two we'll have something genuinely useful. The real challenge to my mind is working out how to take advantage of the new tools with am established pipeline in place - the line between modelling and surface work has been blurry for a while but this really throws a spanner in the works. 

gnoop

poopipe said:

The real challenge to my mind is working out how to take advantage of the new tools with am established pipeline in place - the line between modelling and surface work has been blurry for a while but this really throws a spanner in the works. 

   For a person like me  who had an art college education with  just a little bit  of descriptive geometry and "perspective " subject  based on some classical authors, studying what math  they use in antique Rome to produce theatrical perspective  or what projections Hypatia of Alexandria invented   in 3 cent AD   just because "geometry" is considered a "free art"  etc,    the nodes available in  Substance Designer  provide a never ending puzzle.   

And my main complain is that I have very little to zero visual feedback  in SD   connecting the nodes and having no idea what  really happens.

I do more or less in regular graph   but not in pixel or value processors.    Some nodes like flood fill  I couldn't even understand  how they work  by de-constructing  to the very base atoms   because I see nothing .  Mostly just black or white  backgrounds.

Blender for example allows you to have as much outputs as you want  switching by a click.   You see what you get at evry stage .   Sverchok  could show  you  actual  list of numbers  it passes  from one node to a next one .   In Blender  shader network you can connect evry node or stage  to normalized output  to understand whats happening.       In SD  it's always a trouble