Substance designer for modeling. What's the advantage?

rvakato

I'm a newbie in Substance Designer. Recently, I've been fascinated with modeling in Substance Designer. Cem Tezcan and Lee Borrer's works are two of my favorite SD creators.
I'd like to know, what are the advantages of using SD for modeling? Especially regarding Unreal Engine game performance. I really want to dive into the SD learning journey, particularly the modeling part.

poopipe

It's a complete dead end.
The model graph is deprecated co you can't manipulate meshes at all. 

If you're talking about generating displacement maps and deforming geometry then I guess it's useful in the same way that it is in any other tool.

It's an image processing and compositing tool, best to treat it as such 

rvakato

I see. Seems it's not worth to learn how to create model graph in substance designer. It's a sad news to me.

poopipe

Instamat might be worth looking at as that has some mesh tools but really if you want to play with geometry you might as well grab houdini

rvakato

I'm learning Houdini now. Exactly what you mentioned. I like Houdini as well.
According to your suggestion, I think I'll focus on Houdini procedural modelling not on substance designer although it's fun for me.

gnoop

In my humble  opinion   geometry nodes in Blender are way easier  and simpler to use.   Especially with some nodes people did.          But I haven't touched Houdiny for years .      SDesigner mesh graph looked like 3dmax creation graph for me .   A thing nobody uses . But I gave up right after unsuccessful try to import a curve.

poopipe

That's a good point, I didn't think to mention geometry nodes

Designer's model graph was never finished and had some pretty severe weaknesses that prevented it from ever being worth using. 

Houdini is fine provided you can deal with houdini - I'm not a big fan but it is by far the most powerful option.
For anything where it's viable I'd rather just write the code to build whatever I'm making from scratch  tbh