Search

1. Substance designer in UE4 vs UE4 material editor

   

   Topic by VisceralD · Jun 2014 · Home› Unreal Engine

   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…

2. Re: Substance designer in UE4 vs UE4 material editor

   

   Reply by Rooster128 · Jun 2014 · Home› Unreal Engine

   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…

3. Re: Substance designer in UE4 vs UE4 material editor

   

   Reply by almighty_gir · Jun 2014 · Home› Unreal Engine

   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.

4. Re: Substance designer in UE4 vs UE4 material editor

   

   Reply by VisceralD · Jun 2014 · Home› Unreal Engine

   So what situations do you think substance designer does better then the UE4 material editor

5. Re: Substance designer in UE4 vs UE4 material editor

   

   Reply by Jerc · Jun 2014 · Home› Unreal Engine

   Using material layering only in UE4 is not practical for real game production for performance reasons on top of the limitations you mentionned. Most of the material blending doesn't need to be computed in real time, so you need to find the right trade-off between what is baked as a texture )masks+base materials+bakes) and…

6. Re: Substance designer in UE4 vs UE4 material editor

   

   Reply by passerby · Jun 2014 · Home› Unreal Engine

   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…

7. Re: Substance designer in UE4 vs UE4 material editor

   

   Reply by Jerc · Jun 2014 · Home› Unreal Engine

   There are different cases where using substances at runtime can be useful: - Download size, if your game has to be downloaded and especially if it's free to play, you want to have the smallest game as possible and "expand" the texture package when you launch the game for the first time for example. - Customization, instead…

8. Re: Substance designer in UE4 vs UE4 material editor

   

   Reply by ambershee · Jun 2014 · Home› Unreal Engine

   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 ?

9. Re: Substance designer in UE4 vs UE4 material editor

   

   Reply by stry · Jun 2014 · Home› Unreal Engine

   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.

10. Re: Substance designer in UE4 vs UE4 material editor

    

    Reply by VisceralD · Jun 2014 · Home› Unreal Engine

    Ok now I'm confused what does "bake down to textures on runtime" mean, and why is it efficient. So are you guys saying that it is not more efficient, but equally as efficient as the same number of nodes.