Allegorithmic's Substance Painter announced. Next Gen Texture Painting?

Allegorithmic just dropped another bomb shell (or at least I just found out about it) in their line of texturing applications.

Here’s the teaser vid.

What we know is that its a stand alone app that can work along side Substance Designer. Given that teaser vid, it looks like some brushes can also have dynamic and procedural effects tied to them as well as a particle system in which to generate texture information. It’s definitely a different approach to texture painting.

Neat stuff. What do you guys/gals think?

I think separating the texture painting from Substance designer is a bit greedy. Then again, buying both is cheaper than other solutions anyway.

Yeah I was a little bummed to find out it wouldnt be part of SD (which I have a license for). I know with their bitmap2material, which is a stand alone app, you can at least recreate it in SD since b2m is pretty much a stand alone substance on steroids. Either way, its a pretty neat approach. I hope it wont come along with SD’s price tag, which is $600 retail, and if you get this stuff on steam you get free upgrades im pretty sure.

Allegorithmic would’ve had a killer application had they decided to implement the Substance Painter functionality into Substance Designer without increasing the license cost, I mean I have a license of one of their competitors (Genetica 4 Pro). and the latest version has brush functionality integrated into the canvas node along with 3D model loading and UV layout painting.

If it was decided that Allegorithmic would split their technology into different applications, then they could end up being the Autodesk of texture creation (ie. having a suite of production-ready software, but at premium prices).

looks cool but the stated concerns are agreeable, the direction they seem to take with many little tools which cost a lot is not so good…

Allegorithmic would’ve had a killer application had they decided to implement the Substance Painter functionality into Substance Designer without increasing the license cost

They have a killer application by itself. Did we both see the same video? This is something that hasn’t been done before (interactively) and it is going to make a bunch of texture artists redundant. Time to look for a real job, guys!

Even if it reduces the number of texture artists needed for a production (especially if direct integration with 3D software makes this resolution independent). I have noticed before that there doesn’t seem to be an easy to obtain highly structured details outside of regular patterns (as opposed to texturing effects based on the random position and blending of derivatives), so you might need to have a texture artist on hand for those things.

After watching the video, I’m left to wonder what all of the sparkles and other effects are for other than to give an impression that the user is working with magic (I sincerely hope that it’s not going to be how the users will see their brushes applied), I would also note that Blender users will not be able to play with heavy integration of this app. because of the GPL (that is unless someone made a powerful FOSS equivalent that can legally be plugged in).

Oh there will always be a need for at texture artist, though if the time is cut in half they may end up being able to do more or wear multiple hats, also always depends on a studio. So I agree with you on that front, and even after generating some surface details, from experience if you want a more personalized and detailed texture you still have to dig in there and add some finishing touches by hand.

As for the sparkles, those are particle. Its part of the particle system and particle brush they have. The particles can simulate types of wear and tear on the texture or be used for caustics and such. Very neat approach to texturing. This is just the teaser video though, so I hope we can see much more about the application. With the teaser they mainly focused on what makes it unique, in this case particles resulting in texture creation.

It is indeed sad that substances cant be tied into Blender. I know many have asked for it on other forums and on their own site. Its one of the downsides of the GPL. Seeing how Substance Designer is integrated into Modo for example just shows how much the blender user loses out on.

Hi guys, Jerc from Allegorithmic here. Just wanted to address a few concerns :slight_smile:
The decision to make Painter an independent tool was driven by 2 things: the first one is that we think the target for both software are not the same, as Substance Designer is geared toward technical artists, Painter has a much more artistic approach and it made no sense to force people to have both while they would use only a fraction of the toolset. The second reason is purely technical, it was a lot harder to build the painter on top of the Designer legacy code than to start from scratch and build something very dedicated to painting.
As for the price, I can’t give you specifics now, but Painter will be much less expensive than Designer and we will also have a very cheap non commercial license.

About the particles themselves, indeed the teaser was just to show off large scale effects as those tend to be more impressive, but it also allows you to paint very precise things with tons of control over the behavior of the particles. Particles are still only one of the new features we bring to the table, we will have more videos detailling the other ones in the coming weeks.

Geeze, you are everywhere Jerc. If I didnt know any better, I would say you were omnipotent. You must be juggling a large number of forums. =) Thats not a bad thing though.

Do you think there could be a discount price for those who currently have a commercial Substance Designer license? Via steam or otherwise? Might even give some an incentive to buy both SD and SP.

Haha that’s me:

We will announce pricing later but yes, we want to make sure everyone feels he got a good deal :slight_smile:

@ Jerc,
thanks for the insight,
I kind of like how you guys are handling stuff, also you have fast email responses which is for me a huge selling point, other companies should take Allegorithmic as a good example on how to interact with customers.
the only downside in my case so far is, that substance designer has a steep learning curve and i wasn´t able yet to get proficient with it.

I am eagerly awaiting this program with the more artistic approached option for texturing, the Trailer already hooked me up.

@Jerc…Thanks for posting here. I loved SD 3 and just got the upgrade to SD 4. I haven’t had time to really get into it yet but so far it seems great. I also just purchased B2M on your Black Friday sale. Awesome! So looking forward to Painter.

P. Monkey

Well, I guess if the commercial companies had an aggressive marketing campaign that states “our app. can do what BlenDON’T” and offered discounts for those half decent at Blender already, this forum and the Blender dev. scene could become a very quiet place by the end of 2014 (and bring with it the termination of any sort of future for FOSS in the productivity sector, time to get the FSF to close their doors and remove the GPL scourge from the world of software, all hail the future where there’s no such thing as free software, you silly people thought it would be an idea that would actually work, hehe) :stuck_out_tongue:

On a more serious note, if one could re-engineer the Blender Internal procedural texture system to optionally produce a tiled image with a texture node tree and spit out the result in the image editor where it can be saved (along with the addition of a tangent space normal map node), then Blender could become a useful tool for making textures as well. Make your textures in Blender before rendering the scenes that use them in Blender. As for the particle texturing, I guess you can sort of do that already if you can, as of now, save the result of a simulation using dynamic paint, but it might also be useful for Blender to be able to allow the final result be usable independent of the animation frame.

I no longer remember how long i’ve been suggesting that. Since before 2.5 anyway. Zero traction gained though. Quite depressing considering the damn compositor is right there, just waiting for someone to massage it into a texture editor. It’s just UI work, it almost works already, it’s just missing some texturing-specific bits and pieces.

But it requires more than UI work because you would need to code algorithms for the option where the procedural textures line up on the edges and in a way where there are no anomalies in the pattern (which means you have to do more than just apply filters to the edges).

I have already heard with Cycles at least that OSL can be used to create a pattern generator for Cycles, I wonder if someone could code a suite of nodes then that would allow Substance-like tileable textures from Cycles as a proof of concept for reference when the final C-code is committed.

if under 300bucks I’ll buy for sure… it looks like a life saver in many situations.

Actually, I believe it would still be very useful for texturing without any sort of pattern generation whatsoever. That can come later.

Update:

Jerc was kind enough to show off some doodles with what appears to be the particle brush tied to certain effects…
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Looks very cool! Could be great for experimenting with weather effects on architecture vizualisations as well.
Its like a very effecient and mouse based version of Dynamic Particles…