Un-disassemblable nodes in Substance Designer?

gnoop · Jan 20 2026

I always though that every node in Designer could be disassembled deep upto atomic nodes or basic math and functions inside pixel processors. But some like Flood fill had never let me figure out how they really work whatever time I wasted .

I want to make a few basic quick working sbsars for Photoshop with nodes like AO, smooth curvature, flood fill and they are just being ignored by Photoshop.

Chat GPT tells me they are engine driven, CC codded deep down , couldn't be fully deconstructed and couldn't be really used by Photoshop. It does only simple stuff with pixels calculations and ignores/filter certain sbsar blocks by in-codded semantic .

Wonder is it truth or Chat is hallucinating as usual when doesn't know proper answer?

poopipe · Jan 21 2026

well

flood fill is openable, inspectable and has no dependencies external to the standard lib

so yes, the robot is full of shit, you can determine this by opening the node and looking at it.

the most likely reason for stuff not working in photoshop is that photoshop is using an older version of the designer engine and resources

there is an alternative (probably older) version of floodfill here
Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Substance 3D Designer\resources\packages\flood_fill.sbs

the one you get by default is flood_fill_2.sbs

they leave the old ones in place for backward compatibility - perhaps you'll have more luck with that

Atomic nodes are indeed hardcoded - things like the bitmap node, directional blur, pixel processor etc.
everything else is built from atomic nodes

gnoop · 1:41AM

Thanks. poopipe it's what i suspected yeah. Chat GPT starts to produce so true sounding BS sometimes it's hard to disbelieve.

Turned out everything works in Photoshop mostly when you use standard Adobe Material as template in Designer. I just accustomed to use my own. Once I switched to default everything is ok in Photoshop .

It even allows to use RGB channels in Photoshop layers as separate grayscale inputs for sbsar graph . The thing Adobe employee told me wouldn't work a while ago. The only pain I have is a necessity to manually set resolution in material settings . it doesn't read it from document size in photoshop even if you follow x2 rule and list it with stupid ultra, medium etc names .

Un-disassemblable nodes in Substance Designer?

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