The What’s New list for Unity 4.1 lists “Allegorithmic Substances for mobile” as a new feature. But the User Guide (Procedural Materials, Supported Platforms) states that procedural materials are baked at build time for non-desktop platforms.
Is runtime procedural texture generation supported on mobile or not? If supported, is it performant? How slow is generation times on mobile devices?
When looking at the Allegorithmic site- they have a “Substance for mobile” section which lists two products (B2M and Redux) which both seem to be compression tools, not actual runtime generation. This is kind of confusing…
Does anyone have real world experience they can share about this?
Thanks!
B2M is runtime generation, and it works just like the other substances with mobile platforms as well now. However it’s noticable that it requires quite some additional startup time.
Thanks Glockenbeat. I see now that B2M generates normal and other from a bitmap which is super cool, but this isn’t the same as generating say wood or rocks from just procedure and parameters. Realism textures like ambient occlusion aren’t a high priority for me currently as I’m using a somewhat simple/cartoon-ish style.
It doesn’t say to do something different. 
You plug a texture in and get normal maps, specular maps and so on generated. Plus it does a pretty good job at creating seamless textures. You can tweak several parameters, play with those and so on. Helps to decrease the pipeline a lot in many cases, though you will of course still need a good texture for that. And in some cases the specular maps and/or normal maps might not turn out exactly the way you want it to be. But that’s just normal.
However you main question was wether substances are supported on mobile now. Answer is yes, they are. Where you get these substances from is another question. There are some free substances around, there are single substances or packages in the asset store or on Allegorithmic’s website, or you can buy access to the whole database (which is a good deal once it pops up in the Asset Store Madness again for ~900 bucks).
B2M might also be helpful for cartoon textures, though these do not need the amount of details as you mentioned, that’s right. However those texture generators around are not good in my eyes either, so I guess you will most likely (need to) stick to the usual workflow of manually painting your textures.