Can someone explain what this is/does and what some practical examples of its use are?
Best bet would be to download the 3 free substances on turbosquid and mess with them a bit. Substances are procedural texture definitions. Also check out the beginning tutorials on the Allegorithmic website. Then imagine that all the sliders that he messes with to generate the textures are exposed inside unity (and even at runtime) and you can see how powerful they can be.
My questions: When will the Unity discount for Designer be available, how much is it, and is B2M included w/ a Designer license? One of the tutorials shows a Bitmap to Material template, is this the same as the B2M substance?
Are there any free substances out there?
This was helpful:
Thanks.
and
KrankyBoy where do you get that B2M generator for Unity?
I know how to put B2M material in unity and tweak it but where can i find that B2M generator inside Unity?
I don’t know - Unity 3.4 is still importing my 25gb project =)
You have to purchase B2M from the Unity Asset store for $150, or buy the standalone version from the allegorithmic site, I think.
This is the best I’ve been able to determine about this:
- You can buy, prices from $5 to $20 for individual ones, up to $100 or so for "packages, (or get for free in “some” instances) premade materials from the Unity Asset Store, TurboSquid, etc. These have a “limited” set of adjustment parameters in the material, and you can’t make your own without the “designer” product below.
I have yet to determine if you can change the “input texture” on these premade materials. If someone knows, please speak up.
- There’s Bitmap2Material, that costs $150. This is basically a premade material like above, except it has a “lot” more parameters that are more generic than what is above, so you can take your own texture, import it, and it will generate normal and specular maps automatically (in fact it does this at runtime in your game saving you from including these maps in the download/on disk). It also automatically makes the texture tileable.
I’m not sure if it generates any other types of textures automatically, besides normal and spec, it didn’t show any in the video. Does anyone know?
- Substance Designer that is $990. This is a separate program that essentially lets you create any of what is in 1) or 2) above, yourself. So in essence you can create/add your own custom parameters and use any type of texture inputs you want. There is a “lite” version in the works that is $300, but I have no idea what differences/limitations are vs. the $990 version.
If there is a list of lite vs. full functions somewhere, please link to it.
This is just what I’ve been able to gather from various places (posts, videos, the allegorthmic site, Unity asset store), and may very well be wrong as it doesn’t seem there is a very concise list of what/where/how for all these various options.
I also think I read that there are a couple of freebies that are supposed to be bundled with Unity, but I have yet to find where they are. None of the allegorithmic materials in the Asset Store are free.
Does anyone know where these free materials are that should be bundled, or did I read that wrong?
Lastly, I have one technical question if anyone who has used this product is reading. Is there a parameter that allows generation and/or adjustment of a “displacement” map in substance designer or any of the materials?
Redbeer thank you for this informations.
I am dissapointed that there arent any informations on Unity site, their videos or anywhere that you have to purchase B2M. Free B2M materials are good, but those are useless for any serious usage, which means that information for B2M purchase is pretty much essential.
On other hand i am pretty much surprised that there is in-engine feature where you have to purchase third party software to make some use of it. I dont know why UT didnt make some “complete” licence of it so that it can be used just like Umbra. And it is even much cheaper feature.
I dont know, i dont get good feeling from updates since 3.0. Everything is thrown out a bit too quick, without some preparations or explanations. This is why i preffer UDK updates, what is there IS there. No additional fees or purchases of third party software, not to mention major bugs.
Still afcourse allegorithmic is excellent feature and thanks UT for implementing it. Seems like there is no other way but to pay for that B2M plugin/tool.
There is no free B2M materials.
There is B2M which is 1 product and substance and you have to buy it for $130 USD.
It seems you are mixing Substance Editor - Substances and Bitmap2Material in what is what.
There are free other substances though or were mentioned to come.
And the informations were known for weeks if not months if you followed the substance thread actually.
Also its no must buy, if you don’t like to use it don’t invest money, its not like you lose engine features or anything.
And UDK updates are nice but UDK neither has umbra, beast nor substance, they add other eye candy stuff while the productivity end is still somewhat lacking with the major lack being a total absense of a scripting IDE and that since Unreal Engine 1.0 which is a major major dealbreaker
There’s a free one on Allegorithmic’s site here:
free-make-it-parquet
Use the download now rather than the player link if you’re on a Mac. Not sure if you can get any substances out of the player download. It’s an exe. There was a bonus pack for Maya on their site that had more but I’m getting 404’d now. As niosop said, there are also 3 free ones on Turbosquid.
You just import them as an asset. I’m liking changing settings from script. Check out the new ProceduralMaterial class in the script ref.
@Redbeer, I don’t have Unity in front of me but I think yes to all. You can change input textures, it generates other types and you can adjust displacement. I’ll try to confirm if I get a chance or just go grab one of the free ones and play with it.
[edit: @janpec, to help clarify, Unity implemented the runtime engine with the ability to edit parameters. That’s different than the Substance Designer product. It’s basically the Substance Player from what I understand.]
@Redbeer, you can change the input textures if the substance has exposed the texture as in input.
@janpec, Unity supports many things that it provides no authoring support for: FBX importing, Audio file importing, Texture importing, etc. This is just one more thing it supports, and a really nice feature. You can purchase substances individually, just like you can textures, models or sounds, or you can pay to get software to design your own. It does suck that there are no free authoring alternatives for Substances like there are for other assets, but I expect to see a lot of free/very low cost Substances making it to the Asset Store now that support is in.
To sum it up, you need Bitmap2Material from asset store (150 bucks) to use your custom images for substances correct?
yes either buy B2M or find a suitable substance that will let you change the input texture.
Yeah, I played around a bit and downloaded some stuff.
If you download their free “substance player” you get a trial of Bitmap2Material to mess with. As far as I can tell the trial just has a watermark as the limitation that makes it “trial”, so I would think you can mess around with the trial as long as needed and then just buy it to get rid of the watermark. The substance player, which is essentially a standalone that does what you can do directly in Unity (change parameters and generate maps) and preview the various maps applied to a few primities. It comes with a few free substances, maybe 7 other substance materials, give or take.
As far as changing the import texture goes, for B2M, definitely yes, but I knew that. As far as the “other” materials go, it seems that they are tied to the texture they come with (which can of course be adjusted quite a bit).
However, there doesn’t seem to be a way to take, for instance, the sample “brick” substance and replace the built in brick texture, with another type of brick from your own textures.
I guess this make sense given they have B2M and the fact that having a minimal set of substances would give you a “ton” of others if you could change the input texture to your own. This is of course only testing a couple of the freebies, I have no idea about the ones you can buy.
B2M does support a “lot” more maps, but they only show up in Unity if you have a shader that supports those channels. So it seems you can get a displacement texture out of it if you create a shader that can handle it. I have yet to try B2M with custom shaders, I gather it maps whatever features match up with whatever you make available in the shader automatically, that it understands, when you assign that shader to the B2M material.
In the end you probably have to buy “something” to really make use of this. You need to either buy individual substance materials, Bitmap2Material (which has lots of options but a minimal set of “effects”), or get the designer to have all possibilities.
Of course there is always the possibility that nice people with substance designer might make some free substances available, so it’s good to have in Unity just in case.
Bitmap2Material is just a Substance. If you want the specific functionality that B2M offers, then yes, you’ll need to purchase it. There are other Substances available for free or for a price which accept one or more textures as input and do stuff with them. Or you can purchase Designer and make your own Substance that is tailored to your project. B2M happens to be pretty flexible, so a lot of users could get away with just using that. But it’s not a bad deal at $150 considering it has pretty much the same functionality as CrazyBump which sells for $299, but allows you to use it inside Unity and modify values at run time.
The MakeItParquet substance has an input texture slot (which you could actually use for brick). Sounds like it just isn’t exposed in the brick one. I don’t know if B2M allows you to expose it or if you need Designer (no Mac trial for it and no Win here).
Well, now that I’ve messed around with it, I think this is a pretty decent addition to Unity. I don’t mind at least having the option of buying some materials if need be, since so much can be tweaked and randomized, it’s a lot more practical for mass sale IMHO.
I’m going to wait and see what the “lite” version does before I jump into buying anything though. I’m very sure that designer is far MORE than I need, and B2M is a bit “less” than I want, so maybe the lite version is the right choice. Hopefully it will be out soon.
Do the substance tools in 3ds Max and Maya allow you to create substances from scratch, or do they just support loading pre-made substances like Unity does?
Oh come on. I’m no UDK evangelist or anything, and while UDK doesn’t have Beast/Umbra, they do have equivalents (Lightmass and… I don’t think their occlusion culling implementation has a name).
+1
Also WOTgreal has been around for ages. Learn it, live it, love it. We know you LOVE Unity, but stop spreading disinformation for the sake of trying to be right when you aren’t. Ugh.