Really scalable substances in SD?
Years ago I used Filter forge plugin to make procedural textures and I still miss its great option to scale up and down any material you do with a perfect result.
In Substance Designer it should be possible too my guess but I am trying to make something working reliably for years already.
You need to connect every scale input in every noise to be working in sync and something always doesn't whatever green input/ouputs and scale ratios I setup through my graphs. It's always look like crap once you change the initial scale of something. Especially on non-square textures. You have to tweak the whole graph again from the very beginning which takes same time as doing it from scratch.
Wonder how people deal with that ? And what may be the secret in Filter forge . Surely it should be reproducible.
Replies
When you say "scale" do you mean in UV space? why not add a scale node and use that to scale the noise nodes?
I also find it useful to split up your graph into smaller graphs that do simple functions. This makes it easier to make new graphs without having to re-do logic.
By scale I mean for example making smaller bricks or a bit squeezed/stretched ones for clamped brick wall material. So yes scale in UV space. in all involved patterns and noises in sync. Otherwise you mess the nature of details. It looks totally different , never same realistic if you scale just X Y in brick input pattern and not a gazilion other noise inputs and slope blur distances. The only way is to work in big master resolution and just downscale to target scale factor in photoshop ( because it does it better) and fix the seams by content aware move tool.
When you texture your world with absolutely fixed texel size it doesn't matter. Your scale is predefined and never changes. But in a racing game it's just impossible . Possible in 3d objects but never in tilable textures since half of them are usually clamped to certain geometry features. it makes material libraries pretty much useless if you have to spend hours to tweak what was 1m wide curbing to now 1.5 m in a next turn .
As of Filter forge it had this option since day one . I mean upscale or downscale everything in sync ( within certain limits) .
pc . What's the scale node ? is it something new ? I honestly stopped to read release notes for a while because usually it's nothing really helpful .
The base noises have a marked change in behaviour at 2k resolution but beyond that they seem to be very consistent - TLDR - work at 2k or higher
to be frank - the rest of it sounds like you need to reconsider your approach - I just shipped a racing game so I know for a fact that you can build one using tileables that cover a fixed area and your other complaints honestly just sound like you're doing it wrong.
I meant the "transformation 2d" node. Or the "material transform" node.
But I agree with poopipe - it sounds like you need to arrange your workflow in a more flexible way.
The point of a material library is that it shouldn't contain any data that is locked to a specific mesh. It should just be 'concrete' not 'curbing'.
I meant not a specific mesh but rather specific texel size . But doing everything in perfectly, exactly same texel size , no clamped anything like painted lines on asphalt or curbings which we always do clamped to somewhat different width and tiling distance due to actual features scale , is a huge waste of texture space usually and it is always not enough in a racing game. I imagine it would solves one issue but causes a huge another one.
Still maybe you are right , something is off in my approach probably . But I am trying to adjust myself to SD limitations for decades already. In fact I did lots of fx maps with scale independent logic and non integer scalers but for some uncertain reason they are so full of bugs and mistakes after every new update I am so tired fixing them non stop.