Sorry if this is a stupid question… My background is in programming, not art.
For my web development work, I sometimes have to deal with tweaking jpgs, etc. and for that I use Paint Shop Pro (still on version 9!). For these projects I usually make sure the client has a “designer” who is ultimately responsible for the graphics.
I’m working on my own on several games. And for this I buy all my 3D models.
Is there a tool I can use to edit the textures (supplied with a model) in one window and see a real time preview of the rendered model (with my texture edits) in another window?
There might be a very obvious answer to this question that I’m just not aware of because my background is not in the art pipeline.
Is there a Unity asset that will let me do this? A standalone application?
It doesn’t have to be free. But I’d like to keep it under $200.
I don’t need any features relating to mesh editing, I just want to edit the textures. My main priority would be that the software has a low learning curve.
For textures, I’m usually use GIMP or Krita (depending on whichever is more suitable - if I have to make texture from scratch, I usually go with Krita and GIMP is used for adjustments that don’t require painting new stuff - things like color correction, etc).
Because Unity reimports assets after each change, the “preview” can be done by putting model in the scene and textures will be updated there each time texture is saved. Not best solution, but cheaper and good enough for what you’re trying to do.
@ , I guess I should have bought SD the last time it was on sale.
So can SD save the edited texture as just a jpg or png, or does it only save as sbar files?
Quixel’s website mentions that it’s integrated with PhotoShop, which I don’t use/have. Does it have it’s own bitmap editing tools or does it rely on PhotoShop?
@darkhog , I was thinking that this scenario might work (my dev rig is multi monitor) but was concerned about how much time I’d lose constantly saving and waiting for Unity to reprocess the texture. I feel like the workflow would be awkward for trial and error type edits.
But I like this idea because I’d be able to see the in-game lighting and shadows (plus the impact of material shading) on the edited textures.
I guess I’ll have to do some testing to see if I can make this work. Maybe I’ll do this until SD goes back on sale.
I recommend Allegorithmic’s products too. I just saw this thing where you can pay $318 over 16 months at $19.99 a month and then you own it. This isn’t a subscription, because you actually own it in the end. And you get all three of the products, B2M, Designer, and Painter.
I’ve messed with all 3 a bit, haven’t got expert at them, but man, I don’t think it gets much better than this, especially at this price point. Painter lets you paint on the 2d side(which is what you appear to want), but you can also paint on the 3d side. Designer is great for coming up with textures from scratch, if you need that. And Bitmap2Material is kind of a Crazybump alternative, except it does much more. This includes different ways of getting normal maps out of diffuse, and can do similar work for roughenss and metalness as well. You can then use these images directly in Painter as well.
I’ve watched several Allegorithmic videos on Unity’s YouTube channel and I’ve bought several substance packs and played with using them in my games. So I’m familiar with what substances can do. They are indeed awesome.
Maybe I’ll pick up the “Live Indie” bundle when it goes on sale next time.
I didn’t buy it during a prior sale because I’m not an artist and it seemed like overkill for me. But maybe I do need it after all.
Until then I’ll check out the trial version to see if I can wrap my head around it.
What @kburkhart84 is referring to is named ‘Substance Live’.
My one year Unity subscriptions runs out this after this month and I will cancel it. With the new licensing system in place, there really isn’t anything Pro offers that would be worth 75$ a month (at least for me, personally). Since I don’t have much money (student), I need to allocate what little I have wisely.
After this month I get Substance Live Indie, 3Dception Pro and a GitHub Micro account. I’ll pay less than now each month, but get a great tool for all my texturing needs, HRTF audio and a waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay better way of hosting my code.
Yup, I just put my money where my mouth is. I have been waiting for a bit of extra money to buy the Substance Suite, and right as I was posting the above post, I found the information on Substance Live…cha-CHING, it is now MINE!
Quixel does use Photoshop yes, whereas SD is standalone and integrated into Unity / UE4 and some 3D modelling apps like Maya LT / Modo… Personally I’d just use SD, but I like to present options for people to make their own mind up…
If you can get the suite awesome, if you have textures that need to become PBR you can do that. Plus Substance painter is like the poor man’s MARI…
From my experience, Unity reprocess textures very fast, under 5seconds per file. And that’s on magnetic drive. With SSD it should be even faster, though I wouldn’t trust SSDs with any important data - they easily crash. HDDs are just more reliable, with HDDs when they start to fail, you usually have a month or two to backup all data, buy new drive and put it there. With SSDs you can easily turn off computer one day, computer that seems to work fine and then woke up the next with all your files destroyed.
Well, my HDD is 7500 rpm and it takes at most 5 seconds for Unity to process saved image, and that’s only when computer is really overloaded, like when defrag is running or whatever. Usually it’s less than 2 seconds, much less. Maybe even 1sec or less.
I can confirm that SSDs as of yet for some reason aren’t as reliable. Anything I want for speed is on my boot drive SSD, but nothing that isn’t either backed up, or easily replaceable(like software installs, things for download, etc…) I then have a pair of 2TB 5400RPM drives in RAID0. Honestly, I don’t count on those either, not because of lack of stability or reliability, rather because I always keep anything I care about backed up anyway. Anything I’m working on in Unity happens to be on my SSD because I want the speed…but anything there like that is in my dropbox as well. At some point I’ll graduate to real source/version control software, but I don’t have anything that IMO warrants it yet, and dropbox is enough for needs currently.
