sculpting environment vs substance designer

focus_method · Jun 5 2024

hi,
i am thinking......why sculpt environment such as walls, cracks, tiles, bricks, cliffs, when there is substance designer.
if i go with sculpting what would be advantages of it ?
if client want something stylized or specific according to a concept they provide it can still be done with SD ?

Alex_J · Jun 5 2024

say you sculpt a brick wall. It looks amazing. It took you 2 hours.

A week later it is decided that the bricks need to be 50% larger.
A week later, the size is good, but we want 75% of the bricks to be damaged.

If you sculpt them each time, your soul is dying and somebody is losing money fast. If it's setup as a procedural material in Designer, it's a couple minutes to make such changes.

The advantage of sculpting is that if you aren't a subdstance designer wizard you can make whatever you can sculpt.

poopipe · Jun 6 2024

nothing stops you using both

sculpt some bricks, bake heightmaps and use designer to lay the heightmaps out

Designer is not well suited to creating very specific shapes - if you need one of those, use a tool that is well suited to the task and use designer to handle the bits that it is good at

Neox · Jun 7 2024

I'd say anything that is reusing a lot designer is king to build the trim sheets or tilables. Any unique asset will profit from sculpting. That being said, nobody is stopping you from using designer generators, textures etc to texture your uniquely sculpted mesh

gnoop · Jun 13 2024

Designer is not a quick way to do things actually and final substance may be so complex you could hardly able to tweak anything in the beginning of the node flow. It's often like a house of cards. You touch something and it no more looks real. Especially with the scale of things since you may need to size in sync every noise involved too usually. Cracks are often looks ok in Designer only with a specific seed . A new seed and they look crazy artificial. In Zbrush your intuition let you make them physically accurate just subconsciously. So in my experience it's never a couple minutes . You sometimes need to redo or re-tweak a whole brunches of your graph to change something . Especially when your details are on a brink of pixel accuracy. And Designer is especially inflexible when you need to change actual texture cover in meters.

Wish we could have a quick bridge in between Designer and Zbrush. I'v been asking for easy "paste" option in Designer for years. For both vector and bitmaps.

ps. Well , perhaps everything I have just wrote is because of my increasing reliance on their recent while loop node which quickly makes things slow as hell.

sculpting environment vs substance designer

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