Hi, @ZacD posted good answers. I'll chime in as well. 1) What are the main differences between the two applications? At first glance they seem to do very similar things. Substance Designer's core purpose is to create substance materials (.sbsar) files that can be loaded into Substance enabled applications such as UE4,…
@GlowingPotato Transparency is coming in the next update. But generally speaking, yes, you can write your own shader for Substance Desigenr / Painter. @WindchILL You can have overlapping UV shells, if you have flipped symmetrical geometry for example.