Can someone please explain the benefits of substance painter, I’m failing to see enough to justify the subscription. I’m thinking import a few custom brushes from photoshop and paint on the textures in blender. Use cgtextures which give me free 5 to use per day. Use the blender’s clone tool to clone textures across the mesh/model… Use crazy bump for normal maps etc or bake these out in blender. What am I missing apart from it being quicker?
e.g
Well, the subscription is only $19.99 a month, which for this type of software in some opinions is quite low(though for many, anything above free is too much).
If you aren’t using PBR shaders, it isn’t near as much benefit currently, though it can still be used with traditional painting. The biggest benefit in my opinion it has is allowing you to paint not only directly on the model(which you can do in Blender), but painting all the maps at once. For PBR, this means your “brush” not only includes Albedo, but height, normal, gloss/rough, metallic, even opacity, all in a single brush stroke. If you are using older pipelines, it could include Diffuse, Gloss, Normal, and possibly Opacity, again, all in one stroke. The next thing about it, it has the whole layers system like photoshop, but each layer includes all the maps. So you could make a specific layers height have less effect, the diffuse use a different blend mode(say multiply/additive/difference/all the ones you see in photoshop). You also get the mask functionality from photoshop. Many parts of it are also non-destructive. I mean to say, there are just way too many things it does that make things easier, and many of these things are directly useful in the sense of painting directly on the 3d models. Sure, much of it is a speed kind of thing, but other parts involve “easy” as well. There is something to be said for “fast” and “easy” as it allows you more time to do more things, or get less things done quicker, or do more polish on your game, or create better textures/materials in less time.
So, painting in Blender…it is free(good thing). You can import brushes in different formats, and paint them directly on the model. But though Blender allows you to paint different maps, not only color, but heights, and other properties as well. The biggest thing is that you can’t paint all of them at once. So if you have a diffuse map, and you make a height/normal from it using tools like crazybump(which is nice in my opinion), you not only have to paint them one at a time onto the model(if you are doing it via 3d texture painting in Blender, but you have to make sure to keep things exactly aligned so that the normal aligns with the color. If you are doing PBR, this is much worse, as there typically are more maps to keep up with. All of this type of issues just “suddenly goes away” when using Painter, as you paint with all maps at once.
Substance painter makes PBR material authoring a breeze. It’s so simple to organize and edit layers/channels. In other programs, I feel it becomes a hassle and general PITA after a while. In Painter everything is easy.
What will really blow your mind are the filter functions and layer effects. You can achieve complex and awesome looking textures in just minutes using a combination of filters, masking and layer effects. (Not to mention smart materials which can be a great starting point.)
We used to do all our character painting in Zbrush previously but now we rely solely on Substance painter to texture our realtime assets. We use Knald for baking things though which we can also recommend.
Thank you for your replies, so it’s primarily down to PBR then.
I guess my next question is… as PBR is not so great inside unity unless you’re using marmoset and maybe subsurface shaders, or another engine, is there ANY benefit to using substance painter now?
Substance painter allows you to paint PBR materials with bump/metallic/color applied to them at once in realtime. It also has procedural materials.
You absolutely cannot do this in blender.
In substance painter you could grab a “gold” brush, and paint the object with gold, for example, It’ll have color of gold, it’ll shine like gold, and if you don’t like current texture you’re getting you can press a button and it’ll be regenerated, because material is procedural.
There’s no mechanism to do the same thing in blender. You cannot paint “metallic” value in viewport and instantly see results in realtime, there are no procedural brushes, and there are no other procedural tools substance painter can offer.
Substance painter allows you to do stuff like “roughening” the texture of the model by blowing sand at it, pouring liquid particles over it, etc. You can’t do anything like that in blender.
P.S. Is it really subscription only now? I’m fairly sure I bought non-subscription version from steam.
PBR in unity is quite alright, IMO, even with default shaders, and you pretty much only need subsurf for skin and candles. If you’re doing pbr, substance painter is one of the tools you might want to own. If you aren’t doing pbr, well, you can live without it just fine.
Can you show me examples of how they import and look inside unity beause this is where the whole pbr argument hinges on, at least for me.
No, because I don’t normally work with pbr, and creating an example would take too much time.
You’ll need to look that up with google yourself:
https://support.allegorithmic.com/documentation/display/SPDOC/Unity+5
OK a few more questions how does this tie in with shaders? Do you need to have a special shader or does it all do it for you (excluding sss shaders of course)
Substance Painter has options to export specifically for Unity 5 standard shader. So it will look the same in Substance as it does in Unity (sorta).
YOu need to check pbr articles, for example, from marmoset.
http://www.marmoset.co/toolbag/learn/pbr-practice
https://www.marmoset.co/toolbag/learn/pbr-theory
http://www.marmoset.co/toolbag/learn/pbr-conversion
And also this video:
https://unity3d.com/learn/tutorials/modules/intermediate/graphics/substance/04-02-exporting-textures-from-substance-painter
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pbJgDwtEfw
Aaand allegorithmic’s youtube channel.
The idea in pbr systems is to produce albedo, metallic and roughness/smoothness map which is then plugged into a pbr shader. Standard unity shader is supposed to be such pbr system.
Can’t add anything else to the topic.
As @neginfinity said, the beauty of substance painter is being able to paint on whole materials (not just textures but diffuse/bump/specular/emissive and whatever else you like) straight onto the model itself. Whereas with other software you’d have to work on the textures separately. It’s quite hard to picture exactly how a specular map for example is going to look when you’re looking at it and working on it in isolation. Same for diffuse, when you can’t see the specular details you tend to add too much diffuse detail at least ime.
For me, that alone is well worth it, but I tend to just use Designer with material masks a lot since most of my stuff is hard surface and I don’t need to paint stuff on by hand.
You always could and still can just buy their tools. Substance Painter is 149$ on their website. You could wait for a steam sale if you want to save 50% or so on it. The “subscription” is for b2m + SP + SD, and it isn’t really a “subscription”, it is “rent to own”. So after you’ve paid the equivalent of what a purchase would cost you, with your monthly rates, you own the thing then. It’s a very fair system. I still just buy upfront though.
Ah, right. I remember it now. I think owning all three entitles you to something. I’m missing b2m at the moment, but both designer and painter are collecting virtual dust in my steam library. haven’t had any chance to play with them for a looong time.
Interesting, well I’ll have a think about these things and consider if it is worth me getting. ATM I’m not so sure if it will drastically improve any of my pre made materials or make them look any better inside unity, well at least to a level I’m happy with.
I do think it’s a fair price actually, and didn’t realise you own the software after you’ve made enough payments.
Is it for me, I don’t know, I prefer as much as possible being free or as cheap as possible to own.
Since you aren’t making money with it yet you might qualify for a free educational license:
Bear in mind, Painter is not for creating materials from scratch, it’s for combining materials that you already have. For example you might have a bare metal material and a paint material, then you could have one layer for the bare metal and another layer over that for paint, and then use a scratch brush to reveal the bare metal where it has been scratched.
If you want to create materials for use in Painter, Designer is for that - you can make some extremely high quality stuff using nothing but the procedural pattern and noise nodes they provide.
You can get free materials from substance share and you can do a lot of things purely in substance painter by combining different fill layers and procedural grunge masks. I have substance designer too and I’m having a hard time finding actual uses for it because it feels like it just takes too long to make materials from scratch in it. This is one I made:
https://share.allegorithmic.com/libraries/841
That took forever to make. The graph is included in the download if you want to take a look.
True, substance painter comes with a bunch of great materials and effects, and there’s also substance share which has quite a lot of free stuff. But just wanted to clarify that you can’t create materials from scratch in Painter.
I checked your material a while back, I think you mentioned it in the AAA thread, it looks great.
Yeah the whole idea of making scratches and stuff doesn’t really appeal to me or justify the need to use substance designer. I get the whole PBR thing, but most of my models aren’t even lit with real time dynamic lighting, most of my models are baked with light probes.
I’m not satisfied that the results are as good as they look in other engines (especially the SSS stuff), again this is just my opinion, and for my specific needs.