Substance Stager? Does anybody use it?
polycounter lvl 6
I can not, for the life of me, figure out who exactly is paying an extra 150% of the regular substance subscription price a month for a program capable of doing little more than dropping models onto a basic scene. I can't find any reviews about it, user tutorials, or anything that would indicate that there is a single person on the planet who pays for this thing. I also see that substance is making their own modeler, and I have to ask, why? I can see the temptation to try to compete with Houdini within substance designer, but I just don't see anybody switching over to a new box-modeler unless it does something truly exceptional that say, blender, does not. What is this company doing right now? Who is stager and now modeler for? Novices who somehow know what substance is, but are just ignorant enough to buy the stager + modeler package that'll probably go up for ~$70 USD per month? smh
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How useful it is depends on how you get on with it. I quite enjoyed medium and there's definitely some benefits to working in VR but equally there are disadvantages.
Stager can natively read modelgraph and materialgraph files so it will cut down on iteration time with those and could serve as a nice alternative to keyshot etc. for those doing product Vis or concept art - not least cos you'll be able to hook it live into your material pipeline
Will I be paying for it myself? No
Will I look into it for our studio? Yes
As for the app itself, Stager is a tool for virtual photography. It has a pretty wide range of use cases, from simple portfolio renders, to product design iterations and marketing material (ads) production in larger companies. The main advantages are how straightforward it is to get good results vs a traditional renderer and how it interacts with Painter/Designer (you can send models from Painter directly and it will retain all textures, shader settings, etc.). The tool is still young though, only a few months, so we have quite the road in front of us, including having more tutorials!
For the technical aspect, Stager uses a custom Vulkan based unbiased renderer and works on either GPU or CPU. No shape scattering or hair support just yet. Again, plenty of room for improvement down the road
For Modeler, it's a different beast entirely. The goal is not to create yet another poly modeling app, there is enough of that on the market already and it's not really interesting..
What we're trying to do rather, like for Painter back then, is to try a completely new approach to modeling and create an app that makes it really easy to get into, but at the same time provides enough depth that you can create high-end professional stuff with. It doesn't work like anything that's out there in desktop mode, but it's really fun and intuitive. The VR mode also has crazy new ways of building stuff that can only be done in a VR context. We should be able to show more of it before the end of the year.
This only works with the CPU mode right now though but will be available with the GPU render in the next update.
Scattering system, we'd love to get to. You can scatter stuff in the geometry graph of Substance Designer and we have more advanced scattering features coming up., ideally we could use these in Stager with dynamic mesh inputs in the future, like you would a Substance filter with images.