Hello, I’ve downloaded the trial of Substance Designer, and I really like it, but I don’t want to spend the money to actually get a license for it. I’m here to ask if there is a substitute I can use instead of it. I use Blender 3D for my models so if there is a plugin for that so I can make the shaders and then export it to Unity, that would be helpful. Is there a free program that is similar to Substance Designer that I can use? Thank you for reading this, and I hope I can get an answer soon.
Filter Forge is a close second to Substance Designer. It still costs money but it’s cheaper. Downside to it is that it doesn’t have the shader/material output that can be imported into Unity. It can only output image formats.
Another alternative might be Genetica which has a slightly different workflow.
Or just http://www.mapzoneeditor.com, which is the predecessor to Substance Designer and is free.
However like Filterforge those can be used for image output only.
I’m fine with image output, but it would be nice if I had the shader/material output like Substance Designer. Thank you for the replies, I’ll check them out.
DDO is a another texture generator.
All of the “alternatives” cost money, but Substance Designer doesn’t really have any competitors. Substance Designer is not just a texture generator, it’s a realtime texture generator that takes a tiny description of the texture, and generates the texture at runtime. The advantage of this is that if 60% of your 100mb game is textures, using Substances will reduce this 60mb to less than 10mb. You can of course bake the results on build. The other advantage is that it’s incredibly fast, where something like Filter Forge is really really really slow (I own both). When I last tried ddo it felt very clunky - it’s essentially using a buttload of scripts to connect to a pipeline that isn’t made for what they want to do with it, the result seems to be a rather fragile document.
Unfortunately, the one caveat is that any solution costs money, so you might be out of luck.
That was the answer I was afraid of, but thank you for saying it straight. Also DDO looks interesting, but my antivirus software doesn’t trust it. Has anyone tried it and think it’s safe?
I have used it recently its a legit bit of software and totally safe… well as long as your getting it from thier website LOL.
Its a great bit of software and is very easy to use 
but it only creates textures, substance is different… sure it basically does the same thing but it creates its own material type thing that as someone suggested above save a shit ton of space.
Hi everybody,
Thanks for your interest in Substance Designer!
I just wanted to remind you that there’s a non-commercial license at 99$. For indies you can use it during your prototyping/early production and just upgrade to the commercial license (you just pay the difference) when the game enters full production.
Cheers,
Nicolas (from Allegorithmic)
Thank you for all your posts. I do not have any money to spend, so I’d like a program that is free, and that works with blender.
well that map zone editor is free… might be worth checking it out.
Map zone looks good, so I downloaded it, I can’t figure out how to work it with blender. Can someone tell me how I can do this?
The Procedural Material doesn’t support windows store app and windows phone 8 as of now. When I checked allegorithmic’s forum, they say that it is not a priority, and that was posted in 2013 June/July. I would like to see it runs on windows so that I don’t need to worry about my game running on IOS, Android or Windows.
Thanks, Fasil
If you don’t want to spend money at all dDo2 is your best option. It’s not a real substitute for Substance designer. Though it is a really cool piece of software in it’s own right. The current version is not suitable for next gen Physical Based Rendering.
And no - it’s no virus. Quixel is a pretty renowned company in their field.
If you want Substance Designer you will have to fork out money. There’s no real alternative yet. 
dDo2 is cool, but unless you already have Photoshop then it’s going to end up costing more than SD would. None of the products are going to integrate directly with Blender, anything you use is just going to generate textures that you’ll import into Blender and use.
Hello,
You can set SD to auto export the textures so that when you making changes, the texture will update and export in the background. If Blender can auto-reload textures, then you can just set SD to export your textures, load them into Blender and now when you make a change in SD when you switch over to blender you updates will auto-reload.
Cheers,
Wes