My understanding is that unless you update the substance params at runtime, the substance is 'baked' into a texture and stored in a cache. So the final texture is calculated only once.
So I am just really thinking about the worth of substance designer right now for UE4. It seems to me a lot of the node based functionality in substance designer can be done in the UE4 material editor. So then what would be the point of the node based system in substance designer with UE4. Here is my breakdown of the…
I just don't know about using substance to change parameters inside UE4. I love using Substance Designer to make textures because of its parameters, but I always bake out from designer and bring those textures into UE4, and set up any extra parameters by hand in the material. Even if all the substances are baked at…
I use them for user-generated content. Instead of sending whole textures across a network, we can just send a few substance params. Other than that, I usually import textures generated by substance, rather than tweak in the editor.
yeah the difference between using material layers in UE4 vs Substance, is that at runtime UE4 materials are still layered so you're still rendering every single layer in the stack, while the Substance materials are baked down to unique textures so you're only rendering the one layer.
Substance is a procedural texture generator. The material editor is a shader editor - they do entirely different things. Substance can generate it's textures at run time, which means you aren't doing any blending, but you also don't benefit from the dynamic stuff a shader can do. I'm not sure why this is hard to grasp :p?
you use both, bake what you can to static textures, and if you need to do vertex blending, or shader effects do that in the shaders of ue4. Its not one or the other, they go hand in hand, think of substance as a way to generate content for the material editor to work with. Use the material editor for anything that has to…
The high millisecond count on the substance nodes confused me at first too, so I asked in the Steam forum for the beta and it was confirmed that the substance is built once at runtime. So the cost associated with a 500ms node is just the initial cost. Though if you incorporate a parameter change into your gameplay that…