SUBSTANCE DESIGNER 2.1
Check out the brand new webpage dedicated to Substance Designer, now in its version 2.1, and see in particular how Kenny Lammers, ex Activision, Microsoft Technical Art Director uses the tool as a true hub for all of his company's texturing work.
New features of version 2.1 include a complete redesign of the layer stack, now adding effects, drag&drop and mask preview. The SVG Paint tool also has been improved and a couple of handy modifications have been made with ease of use and productivity in mind.
http://www.allegorithmic.com/products/substance-designer-2
New features of version 2.1 include a complete redesign of the layer stack, now adding effects, drag&drop and mask preview. The SVG Paint tool also has been improved and a couple of handy modifications have been made with ease of use and productivity in mind.
http://www.allegorithmic.com/products/substance-designer-2
Replies
the svg editor is way cool as it lets you create masks on the fly.
i was able to load up my UV outline for my mesh, as well as have the mesh in preview, saves the extra step of making a bunch of textures and then piecing them together in another tool.
also really liked a couple of their pre-made filters. the high and low pass, o yeah and the non-uniform blur, very cool.
i think i prefer mapzones way of making FXmaps as opposed to this new system, although the iteration thing was helpful.
If I had the shader budget to do that, why wouldn't I just do it straight in the engine where I can more easily expose the shader to things like vertex color and use less textures with channel packing as well as optimize?
I'd imagine that most companies that use this use it as a means to turn out a lot of textures quickly and then render out flattened version.
All in all, this looks very cool and fun to use. This would be a killer addition to a 3D painting app like Mudbox, especially if you could access the highres mesh for inputs like for example, deriving true curvature maps.
The main advantage is that you don't store all these utility maps in video memory, you only store the final output.
The other aspect is that you can do stuff that can't be done with shaders or will at least require a shader artist that can actually *write* complex shaders unless you are using a visual shader editor like in the UDK.
We are trying to push its usage as a pure workflow improvement thing right now. The real time generation is just a bonus if your engin supports it.
You might want to swing by our booth at GDC if you go there or take a look at our website during the first week of March for some "killer addition" to Designer
Ho and BTW, there is a 50% discount on Designer until January 31st
https://twitter.com/#!/Allegorithmic/status/161762015176695808
Wow really? In the live materials? How does that work, does it stream them in as they are needed and then freeze the final result? is that how you do the unlimited resolution feature?
Out of curiosity what are some things that you can't do in stock UDK?
Do you get a more advanced instruction set or higher max instruction count or are you still limited by your Shader model? Is any of the texture generation done on the GPU in the first place?
In the brief time I looked on the site, I couldn't find any mention of vertex painting or landscape material weightmaps, do these features get exposed for the Procedural texture/material as inputs?
Damn, I wish I was going to GDC, but thanks for the tip!
The masks and other noises you might use to create the final output are loaded in cache (ram) just for the time of the calculation (a few miliseconds) then only the final output is sent to the graphic card.
When you are using a live animated substance most of the texture information is kept in ram and only a small part of the process is recalculated each frame.
You are not limited in any way, the only limit is the time it will take to generate the textures but there is no "hard" limit. You could theoretically create the same stuff in a shader in UDK but you would need far more instructions and texture samples than you are allowed to by today's hardware.
The generation can be handle by both GPU or CPU (CPU is used most of the time when generating textures at runtime so it does not impact the framerate).
Keep in mind that the outputs are still textures, so you can use them on your landscape layers like any other texture. Having vertex color or a weightmap as an input may be a (small) part of the killer addition we are talking about
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=105574022&searchtext
It now features instant map baking, seamless painting and automatic texture creation among other things.
If you can put a vote for us, it will be greatly appreciated
I also hope it has some shader specific baking options, like for example, if I could tell it to switch to a Oren-Nayar shader, and tweak/create a map from there, Fresnel Map as well, etc.
Basically create special maps on the fly and see them visually, would that be possible or not?
will be interesting to see what ddo has to offer compared to this as far as texturing unique assets is concerned - seems very similar in terms of capability.