What should I learn?

naman

Hello everyone,

I am on the point where I have to decide what to choose. I don't understand whether should I learn procedural texturing or master myself in Substance painter. For procedural I am thinking of Blender. But I don't how can I use it in substance painter as the only substance designer would work together. Can I use blender procedural textures in substance painter.

gnoop

You can use whatever in Substance Painter , you just wouldn't be able to tweak procedurals in Painter directly until they are properly exported from Substance designer . Painter is still able to use rasterized bitmap images you would export from Blender.

Saying all this you should understand that you can use Blender instead of Substance Painter too if you wish. Both are basicaly painting masks mixing already made materials. But SPainter is abit more convenient, has it's own baker and nice output channel packing . Blender has some nice 3d party addons for that too. Baking is better in Marmoset anyway. IMO.

As of doing procedural textures in Blender vs Substance Designer. If you already do them in Blender you should be deep into vector math, UV deforming . Evrything SDesigner have ever been is just placing blobs randomly and do few basic opperations after. I.e blur and displace pixels in 2d space in direction set by height slope or directly.

I bet it's basically some kernel algebra you could probably reproduce in Blender with its math nodes which btw I find much more convenient than Substance Designer ones. Everything in SD is a bit like mad scientist invention imo. "Exposing" etc. But perhaps have some processing optimization ground i am not sure .

Saying that I have never been able to reproduce anything but direct displace in Blender . My math knowlege is pretty basic. If you can make Sobel operator in Blender with its math nodes my guess you would absolutely in no need of Designer .

An advantage of Blender is that you can connect an output node to anything and instantly get an idea what your math nodes are doing , better than even in Uneal material editor where you have to compile first . SDesigner also has a preview but often it's limited to say float4 or just shows you nothing at all or your cant make certain node as output one . You have to copy/paste to "value processor" all the time to figure out something. In result I have lots of nodes I couldn't recollect how I did them while in Blender it's self enlightening all the time just because the output node is ALWAYS working . So my advise is stick to Blender if you already doing procedurals there.