Alternative to Quixel Suite ?

Kligan

I recently upgraded my PC, which meant pretty much replacing all the component.
And my system was cloned to a new NVME drive.

After that Quixel Suite just flat out stopped working, and nothing I've tried fixed it.

It was a very handy tool in my workflow to quickly add some details on normal maps via converting masks and tweaking parameters. For example, instead of modeling a trim along the edges of a furniture piece, and then baking normal maps from it, I would just grab some tileable image, quickly convert it into mask in photoshop and run Quixel Suite's NDO to convert the mask to normal map and overlay it on top of the existing baked normal map texture.

I used it for years. And am very sad that Quixel stopped supporting it

Is there anything like Quixel Suite out there that could fill in the gap? To convert an image to normal map and allow to tweak it?

Neox

yeah, the substance suite.

Kligan

Neox said:

yeah, the substance suite.

You mean like substance painter and such? 
Well, unfortunately due to current geopolitical events outside of my control, I am unable to pay Adobe subscription. Not that I wanted to anyway, ever since they bought out Substance and walled their software behind bundles and other crap.

I work in Quixel Mixer mostly. It's just that doing things like what I mentioned in the original post was easier with Quixel Suite, even though theoretically I could do them in Mixer as well.

Fabi_G

If I remember correctly, Painter and Designer are also available on steam.

Kligan

Fabi_G said:

If I remember correctly, Painter and Designer are also available on steam.

Not for my region.

Alex_J

toolbag has pretty good texturing workflow. not sure about normal map generation... you can make a bump map and then apply that to a model and bake to normals which I think achieves same thing?

pxgeek

Designer is probably the way to go.

But I did find this artstation post that may help:

https://www.artstation.com/blogs/saschahenrichs/9vGl/ndo-photoshop-script-v0666-from-quixel-to-create-normal-maps-in-photoshop

Kligan

pxgeek said:

Designer is probably the way to go.

But I did find this artstation post that may help:

https://www.artstation.com/blogs/saschahenrichs/9vGl/ndo-photoshop-script-v0666-from-quixel-to-create-normal-maps-in-photoshop

Cheers! I'll check it out

Vexod14

Just popping in here, you could also use 3DCoat for that, and it works quite close to photoshop in terms of toolset/UI logic, but in 3D and less laggy. Dunno if that's available in your country though, but I'd give it a try

poopipe

instamat is a good shout

PolyHertz

Since this threads been bumped; For 3D projection paint, besides the tools built into standard modeling apps, these are basically all the choices:

Adobe Substance Painter

Agama materials (abandoned, but free)

Armorpaint

InstaMAT

The Foundry Mari

Marmoset Toolbag (painting added in version 4)
Pilgway 3D-Coat / Textura

Union Bytes Painter

Quixel Mixer is also an option if you just want to use pre-made materials, but afaik it's not a real painting solution like DDO from the Quixel Suite was.

gnoop

  How is Instamat in comparison with  Adobe  products ?   Any advantages ?  Fresh new approaches?     I see some cool blend nodes with lots of instantly available options   in the videos .     Always thought  what came from Allegorithmic   been rather a pain in my a..    Took me years to make a set of  custom nodes   just remotely convenient.      But for a price of being  always slow and unresponsive.  

  Their so called proceduralism  while letting certain flexibility   basically makes me  re-doing things from scratch  because  two weeks later I already understand nothing in my own files and substance Designer is like damn  house of cards , you touch something  and then  spend  next two days trying to do same real looking result  it gave before.     

Tried Armorpaint  last year  , same substance  Painter  just years  before lacking features. 

   

     Any opinion about Instamat ?  I have no stamina  to look through  it  right now.   Imo the industry is  long overdue  with something cool new and fresh.   Like once Blender did arise from behind of Autodesk products . 

poopipe

instamat has a bunch of geometry processing stuff and the way it handles presets for painting etc is very nice. so there's a couple of plus points over designer

however

it has a very, very long way to go to become a serious option as a replacement for designer
mainly cos the ui is pretty obnoxious and the library management is garbage which makes building custom tools/re-using/sharing things afar harder than it needs to be - it's also lacking scripting support.  
Designer has excellent ui and library management - the problems you seem to have with it are you problems, many, many other people manage just fine. 

I dont want to shit on instamat too hard - I really like it and If I didn't have the option of using designer I'd be using it for everything. as it is i use instamat for some things that designer can't do. 

gnoop

After Designer I always  feel like a breath of fresh air when I go to  Blender  nodes .   To be honest I hate  Designer UI .   In Blender  I just do a stroke  across connecting lines with shift or ctrl  . In designer i need to click 2-3 times to  insert that same damn  dot  and with heavy graph it gets so unresponsive .    

 Working with Blender grouped nodes is so much easier   than with  designer sub-graphs  . Managing  custom nodes in library  too.

 With  just one click you can make a custom tool local only and edit it .    Trigo works with degrees too the way we learned it in school  ,not radians only.    Math nodes are switchable  within a single math node .  So much more convenient .          

  In Designer I sometimes accidentally save over  custom  node  that is used  in other sbs  and nothing ever works anymore.     No way to relocate  dozen of resources    to another folder   except  damn aliases .     It never stops  to be a huge pain in your a...  

  But yeah,    after many years and many custom  scale factor independent FXnodes  I managed to work in Designer just fine too .  Still wish Blender devs would make something similar.  I would probably never look back .   

   

Asked Algorithmic to make  2d transform node where  I could scale around  a center of transform for a decade , not only rotate around it  . Ended up doing it myself.     It has so many  useless  stuff that never works right  and lacks  just basic conveniences.  Same as Painter although.