Is it necessary to learn substance designer?
polycounter lvl 4
Im currently studying 3d character art but i also found environment art interesting.
so i was doing some research and i found out most of environment artist’s portfolio includes material making skills using substance designer.
so i tried it out and hell my brain cant handle node based substance designer so i wanted to know if it’s essential to learn substance designer to get hired as a environment artist?
and i wanna know what kind of skills or what kind of portfolio do i need to get hired as an environment artist🤔
Replies
not super needed, dependent on the production but it is becoming more and more an integral part of many productions, so knowing it will certainly not hurt.
i would assume, productions that need you to know it, would also state that in their job description.
Just curious, are there even alternatives nowadays? Mari is still a thing in movie production, but besides that?
For an environment artist, I would say yes these days it is important to know Designer. Most environment assets will be constructed from tiling textures, which is what Designer is best for.
If you're a character or prop artist, you'll be focusing more on uniquely textured assets, so Designer knowledge is less critical. In this case the various 3D painting applications would be where you would want to focus.
Depends where you work.
At my studio only specialist Material artists and tech artist/ render people are allowed to touch designer because we have a carefully managed material pipeline.
There's no harm in learning to use it but if you're at a studio that's willing to let just anyone produce content with it they probably wont mind you using photoshop or whatever that quixel thing is called
I followed one tutorial that was pretty in depth and used the info to create my own material. Its a pretty detailed process but it would really be worth it for environment people. If the light hasn't gone on follow a tute then make your own stuff directly after. Keep doing that till you get it.
are you mixing this up with painter? mari and designer do not cater to the same folks usually. that doesnt mean mari users might not use designer and vise versna but one is for uniquely painting assets, while the other is especially great at creating tiling materials
to me it really comes down to how the production is set up, if the env artists do their own textures, then yes highly likely you will need to know if, if you work with textrues done by others (best exampe would be neughty dogs pipeline i guess) then probably not so much. but as said, can never hurt.
Yes, you are right, mixed it with Painter. Thanks for pointing at it :)
uggh I hate both substance painter and substance designer, maybe jsut getting old, but I try to avoid them like the plague
EDIT I pretend that i know it in that i can actually open the program successfully
Many things are becoming node based. Blender has geometry nodes. There's node based material editors for unity and unreal. Many companies are using Houdini to create assets and in other areas of their pipeline. And of course a lot of places use substance designer and substance painter.
So I'd try to get used to it.
Yes, everything nodes is coming in Blender. And it is really cumbersome to work with. Basically you always start at zero.
It's amusing to see that legacy of Bryce 3D lives on :)
I mean. Back in days, Bryce's Deep Texture Editor was one of most interesting solutions for making procedural textures. Though it was not fully modular, but surely was one of notable stepping stones together with Art of Illusion and some other software (i know you could do things for Imagine 3D, but it was via scripting/coding and plugins).
Then Werkkzeug came in (remember .kkrieger? yes, demoscene masterpiece), but also Genetica and MapZone.
MapZone later evolved into what we know as Substance Designer.
Edit:
Who was the first, though? SideFX Prisms?
SideFX Prisms was definitely the first. It's been around since 1987! Technically some of the code is based off software from even earlier than that.
https://www.fxguide.com/fxfeatured/side-effects-software-25-years-on/
Really it's the fxmap that makes Designer special.
Do any of these older ones feature anything similar or are they just chucking noise around like most alternatives? (bryce was fun tbf)
Houdini has it's own scripting language. And several different modes of processing data. It has way more depth than substance designer. But it's designed as a general purpose 3d tool unlike substance which has a focus on texturing.
I'm familiar enough with the geometry bits in houdini, I've just not used it for texture generation.
Where designer falls down for me is a lack of flexibility in terms of passing data around a graph and it's inability to deal with high resolution images - this is my fault for doing stupid things with it tbf - but I'd be interested in finding out if there's alternatives that have the same sort of node based / library thing going on and aren't so tightly tied to game art.
It depends on how you think about this. In many cases a texture is just a substitute for not enough polygons. If you can draw enough polygons you wouldn't need texture information. For example if you're making sci-fi panels you could just model all the screws and panels in 3d and bake it to a texture later. So to create textures using Houdini you can just create the information with geometry and bake that down to a bitmap.
Designer copes fine with simple stuff like that - better than doing it in 3d in most cases.
What it can't do is recursively process full images effectively - eg generate a vector field from a bunch of painted lines
Yes I've seen people doing iteration in Substance Designer and it's needlessly complex. Iteration in Houdini is simple and one of the core functions.