Substance Designer 3 - 99$ Non-commercial use Licence
interpolator
Hi all,
I've been a lurker on PC for a while and it happens that I also work for Allegorithmic, so I'm starting this thread to tell you all that Substance Designer 3 is now available for 99$ for Non-commercial use licenses.
I'll keep the thread updated with new features, tuts and content as they become available, and most probably some special discounts for polycounters
You can also use this topic for letting us know of any feedback, feature request, bug, rant, etc.
For those of you not familiar with the tool, Substance Designer is a node based texturing tool in which we try to gather as many texturing tasks as possible into one software: Image compositing, painting, baking, scripting, all in the same environment streamlined for game texturing.
The goal is to automate the most tedious tasks while keeping full control over what really matters, from AO baking to in-engine tweaking (substances can be modified within 3dsMax, Maya, Unity and more big players to come very soon).
We decided to release this NCU licence for all the students, hobbyists, and indies out there who can't afford a 600$ software. You'll still get access to all the features for use in personnal and portfolio pieces, prototyping or early dev work.
So as a first feature update, here is what the new library view will look like in the upcoming Christmas update
It allows you to monitor any folders on your computer or network, filter assets, store them in custom categories, perform a quick search through all of them, add favorites and toolbars, etc.
And finally some Substance Designer Made eye candy from our friend and fellow polycounter Jarred Everson!
EDIT: Ho and by the way, you can support us on Steam Greenlight
I've been a lurker on PC for a while and it happens that I also work for Allegorithmic, so I'm starting this thread to tell you all that Substance Designer 3 is now available for 99$ for Non-commercial use licenses.
I'll keep the thread updated with new features, tuts and content as they become available, and most probably some special discounts for polycounters
You can also use this topic for letting us know of any feedback, feature request, bug, rant, etc.
For those of you not familiar with the tool, Substance Designer is a node based texturing tool in which we try to gather as many texturing tasks as possible into one software: Image compositing, painting, baking, scripting, all in the same environment streamlined for game texturing.
The goal is to automate the most tedious tasks while keeping full control over what really matters, from AO baking to in-engine tweaking (substances can be modified within 3dsMax, Maya, Unity and more big players to come very soon).
We decided to release this NCU licence for all the students, hobbyists, and indies out there who can't afford a 600$ software. You'll still get access to all the features for use in personnal and portfolio pieces, prototyping or early dev work.
So as a first feature update, here is what the new library view will look like in the upcoming Christmas update
It allows you to monitor any folders on your computer or network, filter assets, store them in custom categories, perform a quick search through all of them, add favorites and toolbars, etc.
And finally some Substance Designer Made eye candy from our friend and fellow polycounter Jarred Everson!
EDIT: Ho and by the way, you can support us on Steam Greenlight
Replies
I would consider it more of a photoshop alternative for texturing. You should check out the videos on their site. It's a real powerful tool.
It's not the same thing as ddo at all. It's more of a complete alternative to Photoshop, as far as texturing an asset goes.
To me, the philosophy behind ddo and ndo is to fill the gaps and weaknesses of Photoshop for texturing and it does it very well. Designer's philosophy is more about starting from the idea that Photoshop may not be the best tool for texturing in the first place, at least not for all the texturing work.
The main feature that makes it a lot more powerful than Photoshop workflow wise is the ability to modify the textures directly in an engine or 3d software without having to go back to Designer. The assets created with Designer never become static, even in-game, you can still modify the texture at runtime.
I was searching around and came across this guy's post on another forum. He voiced my concerns perfectly and I hope polycount doesn't mind me quoting from another board:
"This is an impressive tool, but has a major flaw IMHO. Unlike a procedural system that operates in 3D, Substance Designer works in 2D, generating textures that must be UV mapped on 3D models. This means that in many cases you'll get seams across UV borders and SD doesn't provide any tool to fix them.
Having a non destructive system like this is amazing, but it becomes useless if I have to fix seams with a destructive solution such as projection painting.
Imagine tweaking a few parameters and then regenerating hundreds of textures in one click. SD allows you to do this with its batch tool and its amazing... too bad you'll have to fix seams in every texture by hand, one by one, using a 3D painting tool such as BodyPaint, Zbrush, 3DCoat, Mari, etc..."
We are working on the issue.
will be purchasing this when my girlfriend isn't looking
thought i wouldnt make a better deal in the future.
its still worth the money, though.
i do hope to see an increase in users and maybe some more posts about sd3 now, here on pc!:)
Also nodes can be unwieldy and confusing. Are their decent tutorials on how to use them for it?
Also these 2 YouTube playlists, here and there, will guide you through all the available nodes and the painting tools.
If you use the stamp tool to fix the seams in Photoshop, you can also do it directly in Designer using the built-in stamp/brush tools.
If you really want to use Photoshop, you can simply copy the content of any node from Designer to the clipboard and paste it in Photoshop for retakes and fine-tuning.
Is there any non-video tutorial and/or documentation anywhere ? I find that the more technical something is, the better it works in text as opposed to video. Especially when it comes to quickly jumping to a certain piece of information.
Well so far I found this :
http://download.allegorithmic.com/tutorials/substance/english/substance_designer_1.1-user_guide.pdf
I think eventually it would be great to see detailled transcripts of the video tutorials. It would allow users to easily search through them for specific items.
The following is a very good formatting example - crystal clear and easy to print out.
http://www.simonfuchs.net/folio/tut01_getting_started.htm
We try to have as many tutorials as possible , but Designer has a very broad range of applications, so it's difficult to cover everything, I'm taking notes that we need more written basic tutorials, hopefully we can release some of those in a short time-frame.
It's much less than ideal. But an actual solution would require some kind of 3D painting at any case. I hope they'll add that to Substance.
Actually, there still isn't a full 3D painting solution out there. The closest I've seen is 3D-Coat, and Mari looks promising in their theoretical next version which will have layers. But those are both quite primitive still. If substance can jump on that, it could get a solid lead on that aspect of things.
The other issue you could be facing is that the light may be inside of the model if it's too big. You can move the light away from the model using Shift and dragging with the right mouse button.
you guys rock.
We just released [size=+2]Substance Designer 3.2[/size]
Here is what you can expect from this (free) update:
- New Library View
- Refined Explorer View
- Improved performances
- Reduced global memory consumption
- Removed the Gallery View
- Added a New Substance Wizard
- Added an online documentation
- Added a statistics module
- Boot time reduced to 2 seconds !
- Many bug fixes
Our friend Wes McDermott aka The3DNinja recorded a nice video to introduce the new Library view, I recommend watching this if you want to get up to speed with the new asset management system in a few minutes.
[vv]56963582[/vv]
Edit: oooooh a statistics module. Ok now I want to upgrade from 2.0 - will wait for another sale!
The statistics module is a user stats gathering tool helping us see what is used and how in Designer to help us drive future improvements.
We are also working on a profiler though, that will allow you to fine-tune the performance of your substances.
Runtime Substance support is the main highlight of the latest UDK drop.
Go grab it now and do marvelous art.
Here is an example of how you can use Substance in UDK to speed up texture management and iteration:
[ame="
http://www.allegorithmic.com/gallery/beneath-showcasing-killer-semi-auto-texturing
something to help optimize our graphs?
http://forum.allegorithmic.com/index.php/topic,94.30.html
What's new:
Grab this new free upgrade HERE
There`s the question. Commercial license for whom (for freelancers, indies or just for big companies)?
the only other thing (outside of what i would consider to be a core app, like zbrush or max for example) that costs this much is hair farm, which i only purchased after an extended trial (very kind of them) and much deliberation.
i completely understand and agree with the price point for commercial licences from a studio stand point, but for a freelancer i think it's one of those "i'd love it but..." purchases.
cool! Im really curious about using this on unity3D on ios mobile devices, I have read that you have to keep your substances relatively simple on mobile and it has to recalculate the materials on every frame is that true? surely that kills performance a bit?
Is there an CE3 integration planned ?
Those interested can use Substance Designer for free for 90 days.
About the CE3 integration, we are wiiling to, go bug Crytek
That's [size=+2]50 bucks[/size] for the personal version, won't get any cheaper than that