Another update showing off how one can change UVs and still preserve the work done in Painter.
Substance Painter, early access beta just went live on steam.
50% off during its Beta period.
Ah shucks, I overlooked this thread when posting the news item on this earlier.
No worries, doesnt hurt to have it in both sub forums. =)
Tell that to fweeb… I smell a locked thread in the future…
Ha! To be fair to Herbert123, this thread had been dormant with zero replies since December. But yeah, traffic from that thread has been redirected here.
Thanks for keeping this place nice and clean!
And really, I get excited everytime I see a locked thread. I gotta know what went down in there.
Substance Designer: 549,99€
Substance Painter: 590$ (price in euros not listed)
Much less expensive. Riiiight.
Ouch, looks like they backtracked on that quite a bit.
Too expensive and no Linux version (that I can find). 
At least for this Linux using hobbyist. 
Playing with the beta now. This is easily the coolest new 3D app that I’ve played around with since the beta of Mari came out.
550 Euros = 760 Dollars (rougly)
So no, it is indeed cheaper.
Ah, but you’re using common sense. You forget that in the Steam spacetime continuum 1$ = 1euro.
Too bad that such a sophisticated technology is used to produce static art. What I would consider better would be simply to offer development technology for game engines or real time dynamics in movies.
Static art? Not really, they are texture maps nothing more nothing less. How you use them is what makes the difference…
As for something like animated textures (and thus alpha based emitters) Its possible, there was talk about it during a user group meeting with the allegorithmic folks. I believe the functionality already exists within Substance Designer. That said as a painting application it needs to be just that. They target game artist primarily.
As for the particle system…its licensed from another company actually. Its called Popcorn FX ( http://www.popcornfx.com/ ), so I’m sure anyone with the right funds can license their tech and use it for other purposes as well.
as for now there was said that the commercial version wont be sold on steam.
Substance Painter might be able to push 3dcoat out of at least my pipeline.
I installed the trial version, and here are my observations so far. (I use/have used zBrush, 3dCoat, Deep Paint, BodyPaint, some Mari, etc )
Pros:
- simple and quick to get started. If you’ve ever used BodyPaint, zBrush or 3dCoat before you will be up and running within minutes.
- painting feels very nice and smooth. Performance of the viewport is great.
- the physics (particle) brushes are hilarious, and also really, really forward thinking. The devs had some very nice and usable ideas.
- the environment can be easily rotated separate from the model. Handy.
- excellent realtime preview.
- layers. Fill layers.
- reasonable amount of brush settings.
- while particle strut their stuff the viewport remains responsive, and the user can rotate, pan, and so on. Neat.
- full 8/16/32bpc painting with rgb and luminance only choice (for height maps).
- GUI is quite flexible, and multi screen friendly.
- when another model is imported in the current scene, the texture you worked on appears on that model. Handy.
- the brush preview is excellent. Really well done.
- adding new brushes and presets is very quick and easy too.
- great potential for professional game assets.
Cons (bearing in mind this is a beta version):
- rather limited set of painting tools so far
- current brush settings and options still quite limited
- textures have a max size of 2048 by 2048. (Deal breaker for me).
- no adjustment or effect layers like in Mari. But SD integration will take care of that, I presume?
- UV map must be created first for meshes, otherwise SP will not import the object.
- I really dislike the viewport navigation: working with 3dCoat and zBrush you can orbit the view by grabbing the empty space. Then use the right and middle mouse button for panning and zooming. In SP I am forced to hold down keyboard <alt> to do this. Perhaps I am missing something here? I checked the key settings, but to no avail.
- default speed for viewport nav feels way too slow to me.
- Same issues with the interactive brush size and strength settings. In 3dCoat, for example, as long as I hover over the object I can use the right mouse button to quickly set the strength and size. In SP I again have to hold down a shortcut key. Small things, but they do break the workflow a bit (at least, for me).
- no real ‘depth’ painting, i.e. the underlying polygonal structure remains unaffected. (I understand this is not the point of SP - but still - it is SOO convenient in 3dCoat, and then normal bake the details in your texture)
- performance caves in with more heavy objects (I tried a 500k poly object, and painting became very laggy to the point of unusable.
My main gripe would be the Wacom integration in SP’s workflow. I would be unable to use SP on a tablet or Cintiq I think, or at least it would be a very inconvenient experience. That part can definitely be improved (unless I have overlooked some sort of setting?) - would love to be proven wrong here.
A lot of other things are missing (like a 2d texture view), but the devs have already mentioned these, so I will not repeat those here. I am looking forward to the integration of SD in this. In the end this is a beta (alpha-ish?) version.
In short, great for game assets. I see a lot of future potential - although at this point I do feel that the $500 commercial version would be a bit steep for me personally. The $149 price for non-commercial work is okay. It will not hook me for 3d painting when I can use my pro commercial version of 3dCoat for $249 (and a non-commercial version is available for a mere $99 - and 3dCoat is still light years ahead). However, the target audience for SP is mainly game asset only, as far as I can tell, and viable for a part of the texturing pipeline. 3dCoat can be used for the full texturing pipeline (though it misses out on the nice none-destructive things and the particles).
Looking forward to SP’s evolution! Also hoping some of these ideas (like the particle painting) will bring some renewed inspiration to other 3d painting apps.
Can’t really compare the two at this point. 3dCoat provides a full texturing pipeline, while Substance Painter “only” provides the paint aspect so far. Time will tell!
agreed and 3dcoat has many more other topics like retopo covered.
as you already have written substance Painter is easy to get into and that is something which I really seek out in programs,
my experiences with texturing in 3Dcoat are still at its infancy due to the many different import settings.
Hm… i wonder if that dirt-wind effect can be achieved with particles and dynamic paint in blender…