Substance Designer has only pretty useless smart tiling similar to "detect edges" in Alchemist . ( 7:11 in the second video)
As of Alchemist it has a few promising features like Content aware fill (9:47) and clone but I never found it really helpful . They both deteriorate somewhat natural look of photogrammetry scanned things. It's just not that apparent in this pebbles example but I always see that weird looking seam masking areas when the lighting is tangent and you instantly see every issue with your normal map.
And I strongly suggest against using any excessive cloning to mask repeating patterns. More you do so less natural the result looks. You losses the main advantage of photogrammetry , instantly real look unmatched by any procedural thing. It's often still necessary although but Alchemist provides little ways to do so subtly with full and exact control of what you are doing.
In some way I find Alchemist even less convenient to work with than Substance Designer since you usually fight with the software non stop. It never does what you want , never provides you enough control .
For a year a company I work for paid for Artomatix Art engine which imo has better trained AI than Alchemist, better working content aware fill for seams, better "mutation" kind of re-shuffle technique to hide repeating patterns while still maintaining that natural look pf photogrammetry sources.
But in the end it had been the same issue. You rather fight with the soft AI which never does what you want it to do. We unsubscribed because I found myself using more just old good patch tool in Photoshop to work on Height channel + recorded action to recreate same job on color channel.
Now I am using Affinity Photo , its patch tool has an advantage of rotating and scaling patches on the fly so you could squeeze exact detail to match neighboring ones on a seam edges . Plus it has a nice MAcro recording panel for repeating your work on color image , better than Photoshop action panel too.
I suggest patching om height channel first and then play the macro/action on color image after . It's easier to hipass off the color channel quirks than height ones. Also fill the areas you gonna patch on with solidify filter first . Never do it on something too contrast or transparent.
It's weird nobody did a simple and convenient tool so you could re-compose fragments live and on your own. Without recording anything . It's somewhat possible to do in Substance Painter and Mari but oh boy , it's so monstrously inconvenient in both of them.
Sp far AI things are rather disappointing in image/texture editing soft IMO
Replies