Substance Designer 5 brings in much needed procedural texturing features

With the future of Genetica being seemingly in limbo right now (no news, reviews, nothing), Substance Designer is now pretty much the only game in town when it comes to texture creation.

This release has brought something that I’ve been seeking for a while if I was ever buy a license, and that is a rather nice chunk of addition procedural tools that I think helps to get it a bit closer to how things were when they still developing MapZone (I was somewhat disappointed that they didn’t seem to have brought in an equivalent of the massive parameters windows in that app.)

If they devote this release series to procedural texture generation, I think they could get the rest of the way to obtaining a monopoly in this specific market, simply because they brought out an unbeatable product.

yyyyYYYeeeeeEEEEEAAAAAAaaaAAAhhhhHHH!

Bevel and tri-planar nodes! WOOOOHOOOO

Now if we can just get tri-planar fill layers in substance painter…

Careful, you might just get what you’re asking for…

Preordered!

With the ability to bake objects separately, most of my motivation to develop Meltdown is probably going to evaporate :stuck_out_tongue:

Even if they don’t immediately add it to Painter, you’ll probably be able to just export yourself a SBSAR with the right nodes from Designer and use them in Painter.

Does anyone have a link where I could read up on what the workflow would look like for blender -> substance designer -> blender, is it just a case of physically exporting whatever maps you have made from substance designer as images and then manually setting them up in a blender node setup like you would usually ?

If I read it correctly there is not a plugin that accepts the propitiatory export from substance designer into blender ? I had a search around but couldn’t find anything current or conclusive, well I found something in French but my French is not that good :slight_smile: thanks!

It pretty much is, yes.

perfect thanks I think I’ll take advantage of the pre order and have a play I’ve got loads to texture if I ever get all my models finished for my first project! The painting in blender seems good enough for what I want to do I was thinking if there was a better way to do the core texturing and normal maps etc. this looks worth a go!

A blender - allegorithmic port?

Blender will never be able to make use of Substance files directly because of the GPL (it doesn’t allow deep integration with commercial software).

What you can do is use it to make image textures that are then used in Blender.

Plz don’t say that, your tool is beautiful, and I’m skeptical that the baking quality in SD5 will be as good as in Blender, <3

SD5 seems nice, and I plan on pre-ordering the upgrade. Stuff like tri-planar nodes feel like they should have been in a previous version though, as does random selection of images for FX-Maps and the Bevel tool. For a milestone release and rather lacklustre updates in the SD4 series i’m relatively disappointed. Plus the UI is still rather unoptimised, crap on Tablet PCs and the program at least for me on Mac OS X has been a rather buggy mess, which makes me all the more want to see more comprehensive texture generation features in Blender.

You would be surprised. Its best to think of Substance Designer as the NUKE of node based texture creation. The quality and options far outdo Blender, but naturally at the cost of convenience and time. Substance Designer really requires the artist to get technical to pull out the best, which is certainly a problem. If they can find a way to polish it up, simplify and streamline the workflow, then it would be a perfect tool in my opinion. Also hoping for much tighter integration with Modo (doubt we will see anything like it for Blender due to GPL status).

On a side note, you shouldnt be basing your workflow and UI around tablet PCs. In fact, one shouldnt be working tablet PCs at all if they can help it. When it comes to getting the most out of the collection of asset creation software, its best to leave the Mac OS out of it and move over to windows. Its best and most versatile OS for the field at the moment.

there’s still integration with commercial products, like vray, octane, 3d-coat.

Users are required to get custom builds just for that integration, it’s possible to workaround the GPL by distributing modified Blender builds to licensees only, but it may ultimately be unsustainable because they have to constantly update and sync with vanilla Blender and they can never create a plugin for public download.

So if you would use Vray and SD integration, you would need two different builds and ultimately lose out, because you wouldn’t have SD integration in your custom Vray build. If you intend to use more than two commercial software plugins at once, you’re out of luck.

Ahh,
I see, and seams otoy also strips some from blender as well for their release. :confused:

Unfortunately for SD fans, this is something that even a fork cannot fix. There’s no immediate solution really, it would be almost impossible to get the approval of every contributor to change Blender’s license and writing a new free 3D app. from scratch will likely take years to even get to the Blender 2.3x level.

Btolputt once mentioned of developing some special API that would be designed to allow these types of plugins, but we don’t have a working proof yet.

Im aware SD5 is not comparable to Blender’s current texture generation stuff, but it would be nice to see that evolve in Blender. I’m actually perfectly comfortable with the technical side of things in SD, but the UI isn’t very intuitive in several places, even simple things like UI labels and scaling in the node editor are quite off and hard to properly read and visualise when working with large node networks.

I’m not basing my workflow around Tablet PCs, but they are enjoyable to use for multiple things, and with a toolbar script I have enjoyed composing node networks in SD4, but some of the UI scaling makes it difficult to use on a 13’, 1080p screen. I mean things like DPI adjustment should already be in the program for normal screen types, but the issue is exacerbated with the use of a Tablet PC.

In regards to your comment regarding Windows, i’m going to have to respectfully disagree. I run a Hackintosh and OS X has much better OS-wide file tools like tagging, better stability and a lot of great OS-exclusive software like Sketch, Affinity Designer/Photo and Pixa. Plus if you do a lot of font handling and 2D graphics, the OS makes it a lot easier to handle and browse through C:

Also, I presume if Allegorithmic were interested, they could make parts of their internal software GPL to make it work with Blender, but I doubt that will happen for a while. I’m not particularly bothered by it though :stuck_out_tongue:

Might have to pick this up eventually. :eyebrowlift2:

Of course that depends on the master of none to master of one ratio for any hypothetical 3D app developed from scratch.

A lot of 3D dcc apps these days are specialty suites, just like Substance. This means a reliable and easy pipeline to move work between these tools is essential. Many specialty apps these days come with integration plugins to make this task easier, but Blender has the GPL and no C/C++ plugin API; two things that really isolate it from this pipeline (and of course performance critical tool dev). For me the only thing that keeps blender tied to the pipeline by a vary thin thread is OBJ and FBX IO. To be honest, if it did not have FBX IO, I would have to drop it in favor of something else.

It would be nice to see integration of these various specialty application with Blender but, aint gonna happen.

Here is the table comparing the pro and indie license

For me this may make a future purchase a no-brainer, 100 USD is quite affordable for me these days and I would likely upgrade to ‘pro’ before my business revenue even gets close to 100K.