Substance Bitmap2Material 3 vs Substance 3D Sampler

NAIMA

whats the difference? I got the first because it has a single licence and not a subscription which I hate, but I see the product seems pretty old as was last updated seems on steam on 2014 and I can't find trace of it on adobe site ... but I found this other one Sampler, seems to be doing the same thing? Or it has anything different?

gnoop

B2M is ancient and useless stuff.    Sampler uses  AI to fake depth   rather than just assuming darker pixels are deeper .  Unfortunately this AI is good  for limited number of things only .

Besides Sampler is a  kind of a version of  Quixel mixer .   Supposed to help you mix  materials easily  by  depth blending  and use ready made  atlas libraries to scatter small things. 

I personally find it a huge pain  in a...   and Substance Designer be  still more convenient and controllable  for those  things.      So  imo AI  is only reason to use it really.

NAIMA

why b2m useless ?

gnoop

Because  producing  height and normal maps from  photo  never works really  beyond a few very rare cases  where  darker pixels are always  deeper ones .       And you don;t need special soft for that.

Mink

Image-to-depth programs are generally only good for quick and dirty materials, which have their place. Substance Sampler(Alchemist) is a cut above the rest, and can give you initial outputs that can be refined into something workable, but for a top tier texture scan you are gonna want to do a lot of work after the initial map generation to clean it up and make it tile in a way that does not look terrible. Another path is photogrammetry, but that also involves cleanup, an expensive camera, taking enough pictures so that the exact curvature of a surface can be determined, and a ton of compute power. There are hypothetical methods of using specialized equipment to measure depth, but a lot of those are also subject to "darker is not nessicarily farther" issues and are prohibitively expensive.