An alternative to Substance Designer, does it exist?
I am tired of Substance Designer. Nothing really changes in it for a decade already beyond bypass node command. And it haven't helped a bit really. I am tired of re-doing and debugging my tools all the time , tired wasting time for non stop puzzles with sbsar tools not working in Painter properly . Tired of macaroni monster puzzles where to solve something it took 30x time of what you spend usually to quickly fixing things in Photoshop. Not especially fond of Painter either.
So I am ready to pay Mari subscription , Is it any better there ? I never tried its node based editor . Is it on same level with Substance Designer? Maybe Maxon have any good texturing tool that could be an alternative?
I couldn't care less if it makes automatically tillable noises or not . It takes 5 min to make any material tilable in Photoshop with content aware move tool ,pattern preview and action panel, much more controllable and really tile less . So just something procedural with 2d warp, "slope blur " with long enough repeating loop working more or less in real time?
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Mari has a demo. Why don't you try it out? It's been used to create content for games but I can see where it might have it's own problems since it's made for the film industry.
Have you tried Quixel Mixer?
i tried Mixer a year or two ago. Didn't find it especially convenient either , Lots of limitations , square only textures and I do very few of them . Layer system is an unnecessary puzzle too. I am accustomed to work in twice of target resolution and it was pretty slow and unresponsive . Pretty much like Substance Designer . Same lack of convenient compositing tools to use pieces of photogrammetry . Same fixation on per-defined , initially set texel density /size everyone consider so important nowadays for some uncertain reason. So no easy material scaling , only by integers, no easy stretch compensation for a texture clamped within certain geometry . Our materials ( racing game) are often clamped within certain geometry feature , like a wall height, or a curbing width. And tiles in one direction only. So couldn't be always texel density driven.
In a word same disadvantages as in Substance Designer where you should basically redo everything from scratch if a curb is a bit wider now.
The issue with trial versions is you never really have time to try them. I think I already wasted Mari trail for nothing. It doesn't allow to use it in your current commercial work and I have no time really at weekends . So one month of trial turns to be just couple hours . Do they sell one month only subscription?
I don't have this problem with substance designer. I'd suggest that maybe it's a workflow issue. I have run into some weirdly unflexible workflows from other artists lately.
It could be because I don't use a lot of photogrammetry. I would have thought that Quixel mixer would be ideal for this.
Not at all IMO, it's basically same, just layers instead of nodes . I prefer nodes . Substance Designer does have certain workarounds. I spend my spare time constructing functions and value input/outputs for noises based on fx map nodes to create scale dependencies in between different noise inputs but it's damn tiresome and boring job. So I wonder maybe some better and simpler solution is already exists somewhere. Really tired of inventing bicycles.
There is not this much alternative. Mari was already mentioned. And you tried Quixel Mixer already as you say. Have you tried 3D Coat?
Besides that i only know of two more other softwares that goes into the direction of SD. Both open source. The one is Material Maker https://rodzilla.itch.io/material-maker . The other Armorpaint. https://armorpaint.org/ . Despite being open source, Armorpaint costs a few bucks when you are not able to compile it by yourself (which is a bit tricky, they haven't really documented it well. And the self compiled version lacks the assets and presets). And both are more suited for hobby needs. Poor mans SD. So don't expect them to be any better.
The thing is, SD is nowadays the industry solution ...
EDIT, did you have a look in the SD periphery? Maybe an addon exists that speeds up the tasks for you that you are tired of :)
This one for example: https://www.artstation.com/marketplace/p/ewNd/bwtools-2-0-substance-designer-plugin
Yeah , I tried them all except Mari nodes . 3d coat was my main texturing soft for years . Thanks Tiles for artstation link . Looks interesting. My substances are a undecipherable mess usually.
Mari has it's own set of challenges. I get along with Painter okay, Designer gave me fits, too. I have high hopes for Armorpaint, I don't think it's there yet, but has potential.
Marmoset has texturing integrated now, have you tried it ?