Are people actually use Substance Designer for a job?
polycounter
I see Substance Designer examples in every resume . Sometimes it looks like a kind of sport achievements. But when it comes to actual work it looks like I only one who really use it for repeating textures. People use Painter for the purpose or just Photoshop with pattern preview , or Quixel Mixer. In a word anything but SD .
I see same kind of desert feel in forums about Designer , including Adobe ones and a kind of dead end sense in its development. They detour to Houdini field instead of making SD somewhat user friendly.
What's happening.
Replies
Also used a lot in the fashion, automotive, retail industry.. usage is constantly increasing.
I don't think many artists use Photoshop to create tileable textures anymore unless you're going for a very stylized look.
The reason most people aren't using it at work is because you don't want 100 people operating it independently, you want a group of trained specialists operating it collaboratively - that's how you get the benefits.
https://substance3d.adobe.com/magazine/forza-horizon-4-creating-seasons-with-substance/
Hitman: Building a Material Library to Texture the World of Assassination (GDC 2021) - YouTube
Arkane Studios: Texturing pipeline for the characters of Deathloop (GDC 2021) - YouTube
As for using it, I do most of my texturing using SD, with some quick hacks in PS when I'm too lazy to rebake maps just for couple of screws .
Tried to learn Painter few times and probably will again at some point, but I always end up feeling constrained by linear layering approach and run back to SD where I can wire messy spaghettis graphs.
The intention is almost definitely to use both in tandem; mats in designer, expose parameters, paint them on and adjust/finalize/apply in painter. You're just meant to use both.
You spend most of your time fighting weird quirks, and your experiences are not universal. Have you considered this kind of thing might be either user error or a bug? Have you ever just... asked if something is intentional and filed a report? Plenty of people have no issue working with designer, so it's not that "everyone" spends "most of their time fighting weird quirks". People wouldn't use it if it was such a huge pain in the ass consistently, for no reason, regardless of what you think AAA management is capable of doing in terms of forcing everyone to use the software they paid for no exceptions
In your Height Blend issues thread, since you keep bringing it up: you were kinda vague. Instead of asking what was going on with maybe a touch of humility, you presumed the math itself was wrong, that they designed it this way. Even kind of implied the devs must just be dumb bc maybe you could "fix it yourself". I truly hope that this was some kind of result of language barrier, but it was still rude. I'm not really surprised you didn't get an answer. FWIW, late, but I could not replicate that result with a version of sampler that I believe is fairly recent, if not the newest version since it's not what I typically need to use. There appears to be more options now so perhaps this was just a quirk or bug that got identified and fixed.
With the Custom Mask Blend w/ options as close to in your picture as I could get it:
And the regular Height Blend layer:
Just to clear that bit up. I have to say I'm unsure of which blurring you're talking about regarding substance painter, either. When you complain of these things, it would be nice to know what the actual problem is instead of what you think will fix it.
"So recreating something like in this video force you to work in very hi resolution only Mari is really capable of." = ❎
"When trying to recreate something like in this video even with a very high resolution it comes out blurred. Am I doing something wrong, or is this impossible to do in Painter?" = ✅
But one of the answers might ALSO be: "Huh, that's weird. What does your set up look like? It should be able to do this", or "theoretically you could if you set it up right but honestly we haven't tested it" or any number of much more productive conversation avenues than "...well, okay, use Mari then if you can already do it there?". If your intention is to say something more like "I would like it/ it would be useful if substance painter was capable of something like this and it might make it a better competitor to Mari", saying it that way sounds less abrasive than essentially saying "this is stupid, why doesn't it work like mari?". You will get better answers.
Maybe I'm going in too hard on you here, and it's not like I'm some Substance Evangelist. Substance is just another tool, I use Clip Studio Paint for edits sometimes so I'm hardly going to judge someone for preferring Photoshop or Mari or any other tool but... man. You come off really unproductive in threads like this.
I don't even like Adobe and I do have qualms about the state of AAA. But especially when the developers of the software have shown time and again that they're willing to discuss nebulous topics like this with you pretty much personally, I don't know what on earth you're wasting time navelgazing for. If I had that kind of access I wouldn't squander it asking things like "does anyone even actually use this?" without seemingly having a point. Just go to Artstation and filter by "substance 3D designer". You should get an answer fairly quickly.
(Coincidentally, you can also easily pick out actual professional usage from a quick visual survey here. Back4Blood, The Ascent, Far Cry 6, New World, Endzone, 9 to 5, Age of Darkness, Godfall, Larcenauts, Knockout City-- you may notice a number of these are not in fact AAA games btw)
As I said before. Your experiences are not universal. Substance Designer is not the best solution for every team. Just because something (and this goes for general collaboration approach, too) isn't the right solution for YOUR team doesn't mean it's one way or the other, in terms of ease of use, approach, or quality overall.
So "What's Happening", then? People have gotten used to Substance Designer. The new approach shine has worn off, hype has died down, and it's integrated more fully into peoples workflows. It's normal now, so people talk about it less like it's going to save game art like a Make Art button. And that probably means more people are using it, not less.
Substance updates are still regular for the suite; they're clearly doing fine even if only one person is using the program, so the question is a flawed one anyway. As always; How To Ask Questions The Smart Way applies.
Also make sure you use the UV projection mode and not the default if you want to be able to get no distortion at all and get pixel accurate transform.
anyone know a script or a method to convert all filtering from a project, from Bilinear Filtering to Bilinear Sharp, or vice-versa ?
Thanks.
You have no useful access to the layer stack or tools via script
we generally get around that sort of issue by working at a high resolution and downsampling at export. painter's downsampling is pretty decent in general - you can often do better by picking the right options in photoshop but it depends on the scale you're working at
It's a little more than abstract division - you need to go through several matrix transforms to work out where the brush hits on the texture.
also..
By the time you reach the fragment shader the idea of a texture pixel is long gone - which is good because it allows you to do filtering, mips and lots of other cool stuff but it rather scuppers the idea of per pixel placement.
I suspect that'll lead to a bunch of nasty artefacting inside your projected brush
Thank you for the discussion. I had the same initial question - and it is good to see the answers.🙂
I was too quick saying that they fixed that custom masks height blend issue . They told me so from Adobe support but I had no chance to actually test it. And now I did.
They haven't fixed anything at all. In fact it's quite obvious from your screens too if look closely . You just used blur in the dirt/snow edges the way they would never look so in real life to hide the issue. I mean your top screen vs regular height blend where it's all ok but not editable.
Same issue witch clone brush . it doesn't make a seamless height blend without blurring the edge unrealistically.
It's all weird since in both Painter and Designer you could do it proper way without any problem except it's a bit more calculations.
Perhaps it's a design choice in favor of more responsive work on low end pc or something but it makes the whole idea of height blend somewhat useless since for many subjects a tiny height variations is what you need for realistic effects and blurring the mask edge just doesn't make it.
Does anyone know if it's possible to bring your own height blend done in Designer into Sampler? I am trying to use advantages of its AI but the rest of the soft is so inconvenient it's useless basically .
The top one used a stylised texture I'd made in designer as a mask, so the blur is from the nature of that texture iirc, not (as far as I understand) something inherent to sampler. Granted, I still don't quite get your problem and it'd be nice to get an updated comparison vs what you'd expect it to look like (eg a ref you can't match, or manually made texture you think looks better).
BagelHero . I am referring to "custom mask blend" and its "use height information" option which works with the heights kind of wrong. It produces sadden height ridges when you paint manually. Same with the clone tool which is no surprise since it works same way in clone and auto tile nodes in Substance Designer too.
But I figured out what they have fixed . it's their "height adjustment" filter. It works just right together with regular height blend mask so provides a working solution . Still kind of less convenient than what's in Painter or Designer but works sort of. Allowing to edit the mix manually by brush input. Except a complex cases where one material height is laying over another , not just flat intersecting . I
It's pitty IMO they do several separate programs instead of having one layers + nodes + AI hybrid . The price the same anyway
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Job titles such as material artist, texture artist are what you want to be searching for if you're interested in surfacing rather than modelling
While many AAA-studios may have a fixed pipelines they want artist to fit into, anything smaller (and some AAA) can be able to (not necessarily will, though) adjust to each individual artists' skill set (preference of modeling software, texturing software, workflow, etc).
Substance Designer is a great tool even if you don't author any tile-able materials: there is a huge amount of custom tools you can make for a team to use in Substance Painter (which is much more commonly used among artists) to speed up their workflow (remove repetitive tasks, reduce time needed on each individual asset, etc).
These tools are often very specific to the product you're working on, since the art direction, game genera, game engine and other technicalities will dictate a lot of the requirements from these tools. You can't find a 1:1 solution for a lot of things online to buy a license for.
But just like how Houdini isn't industry standard among all artists, Substance Designer isn't something everyone needs to know. Or rather, it's not an absolute requirement to know, because most artists don't know it. And even though most workflows and pipelines would benefit from it greatly... well... people don't know what they don't know.
As an "Environment Artist", I've used Substance Designer (professionally) to peal away weeks and months of work from my team, which we instead spent on producing more assets (increasing scope as we go, rather than cutting down) and going home earlier.
It's not at all uncommon for improperly trained users to leave source data unusable for the next person and equally common for them to break something that is used by several other people- understanding dependencies seemingly isn't something that comes naturally to the majority.
That said - I agree with your general point.. the more people who understand what Designer can do and what it's actually for, the more likely it is I won't be asking an art team why they spent 10k manually rebaking and processing a load of textures instead of getting a TA to spend half a day writing them a script.
Most of the time, writing documentation for other users is enough for them to get everything they need to use the tools.
and... no offense, but a designer graph is only as robust as you make it. If you couple everything together, don't account for errors by limiting users' parameter options and inputs, then I do see how it can feel like a house of cards.
But yes, the .sbsar export and painter library refresh could be much better.