Designer can be a bit dangerous in the wrong hands in my experience. It's not at all uncommon for improperly trained users to leave source data unusable for the next person and equally common for them to break something that is used by several other people- understanding dependencies seemingly isn't something that comes…
Sorry if I seemed rude. it wasn't my intention at all. Neighter I implied any derogatorily meaning in my "whether people actually use Designer " question. Not "even" . I just see less of it in my work environment , less in job requirements , less in public forums , absolute silence in Facebook groups and basically wanted…
BagelHero . I am referring to "custom mask blend" and its "use height information" option which works with the heights kind of wrong. It produces sadden height ridges when you paint manually. Same with the clone tool which is no surprise since it works same way in clone and auto tile nodes in Substance Designer too. But I…
The intention is almost definitely to use both in tandem; mats in designer, expose parameters, paint them on and adjust/finalize/apply in painter. You're just meant to use both.
Couple of other examples of Designer being used in recent games: Hitman: Building a Material Library to Texture the World of Assassination (GDC 2021) - YouTube Arkane Studios: Texturing pipeline for the characters of Deathloop (GDC 2021) - YouTube
Designer is used on pretty much every AAA game out there and on many movies and TV shows. Also used a lot in the fashion, automotive, retail industry.. usage is constantly increasing. I don't think many artists use Photoshop to create tileable textures anymore unless you're going for a very stylized look.