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Substance Painter?
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➔ Substance Painter website
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46 reviews of this app found across Reddit:
https://www.substance3d.com/subscribe/ Notice the licenses - pretty sure the personal license and the free trial license aren't for commercial use, so you might want to pay for the correct license. If you are looking for free alternatives, Mixer buy Quixel looks great from their website (and from the fact that they partnered or something with Epic Games).
Yep, they sure do - however from what I understand using Substance Designer in this way to run algorithmic iterations (they use Conway's GOL as an example in the article) on the texture using nodes and switches is not common practice. By all means if i'm wrong here, please show me more! I'd love to dig into it.
Yea, don't even think about it. We are talking about Adobe my dude... I don't think Allegorithmic have any word in it sadly.
But ofc you can try: https://www.substance3d.com/contact/ Ask them.
[Marmoset.co] Basic Theory of PBR
[Substance3D.com] Allegorithmic PBR Guide
Most importantly I'd say get your work in front of experts who can tell you what's wrong with it and how to make it better.
These outline a substance designer workflow for material capture.
https://www.substance3d.com/blog/your-smartphone-material-scanner
https://www.substance3d.com/blog/your-smartphone-material-scanner-vol-ii
There actually is a perpetual license (Click the "I want perpetual licenses of Substance software") and they each are listed as $149 which is exactly what they are priced on steam before the summer sale discount. I believe the steam listing is simply the perpetual license for 2019 versions with the 12 month maintenance period (Steam says you get one year of updates from the steam purchase date if you link an Allegorithmic account).
Here is the steam page in case you'd like to read.
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As far as free alternatives, I haven't found any myself. TECHNICALLY blender can do a lot of what substance painter can do? It's just very messy and convoluted, no good for real production where efficiency is key, and you aren't guaranteed perfect compatibility with PBR workflows if you try to export textures hacked together in blender.
The steam summer sale is totally free (Assuming you own at least one steam game I guess) and Substance is a huge industry name so there's no reason not to join the raffle. If you win then woo hoo you get some free pro software to play with, and if you don't then no big deal you didn't wager anything to begin with, plus blender is always there if you want to try painting textures.
Quick reply on the difference between maps:
Diffuse map - this one is your color information map, pretty straight forward
Specular map - this one tells the engine how reflective or shiny is an object at a given point, it should be black and white only being black, no light reflects at all and pure white maximum light reflection. In some instances you can have color in this map to change the color of the reflected light, in those cases it acts as a metallicity map as certain metals can change the color of the light when they bounce off them.
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normal map - this one is a detail map, it tell the engine how bumpy a surface is without actually changing the 3D surface itself (the topology remains the same). So, it tell the light where it should cast shadows or put highlights giving the impression of 3d deatail, but if you look at an angle you'll see that the surface is still flat or smooth.
Gloss map - this one might look similar to the specular, the difference is that this one only changes how smooth or rough is the light reflected, and doesnt chage the amount of light reflected. White means really smoth, like glass or something very polished and black means very rough and diffuse, like dirt or wall paint sor something
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This is a veeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeery simplified explanation, search in youtube for PBR materials tutorial, the Allegorithmic team has a really good in depth tutorial on their website
Probably not what you want but If your client wants more than is available on stock / aerial mapped geometry and is willing to pay for it then the last (and probably the best) solution is to get down there at street level and photograph all the buildings in a pre planned shot and model them up as assets. You could also use something like Rail Clone for background or distant detail.
As for texturing, I would use decals (careful of copyright infringement here) from the photo shoot in combination with Smart Materials from Substance Painter for quickly doing each building. Here is an example of one workflow.
If this is out of your comfort zone then I would look at various urban asset creators and ask them for a quote. Look on places like Unreal Marketplace and Unity Asset store as many of these urban asset packs are from CG studios that also do higher end Arch Viz work. As an example I looked on UE4 Marketplace and found this (too low quality for VFX) asset and if you google the author you will find they are a 3D studio that also does higher end architectural work.
I'd kill for a well featured 2D vector animation app. CoreAnimator was the closest thing (albeit extremely limited) and just didn't have the user base to take off.
And in my wildest possible dreams, something like a lite version of <em>Substance Painter</em> or a bespoke app to interface with it.
So the resulting height would be adding the 3 channels and what goes into which channel is irrelevant, just the combined value? This shouldn't be too hard to do in any image manipulation software, assuming I've understood your specific case then this should do it: HeightmapTools (mediafire.com). Did it fairly quick in substance designer, as I mention in the included readme you can use it via substance player which is free, available at Substance Player | Substance 3D.
Yeah everything was modeled in blender and then textured in substance painter. However there are free alternatives to substance painter. albeit with a learning curve. such as ArmorPaint
Hello fellow 3D Artist! Did you know that i am 3D Artist too? MacroLab3D is just my hobby (sadly, it is not profitable to be my new job yet). And to answer your question - i recommend using Substance Designer to create mind blowingly detailed textures from scratch. It is scalable (tileable) and without any distractive unwanted flaws which you will usually find in a regular photo based texture. And for the references you can use my gifs ;)
Other comments are correct. Adding to this:
$20/month for Substance Painter, that will make it easier to do all of this, but alas not free.
There’s Substance Painter which is great & industry standard but it can be an overkill or price too much. https://www.substance3d.com/products/substance-painter/
And there’s ArmorPaint which free, somehow good, but little clunky https://armorpaint.org/
As a student you can get one year free access to Substance Painter, Designer, and Alchemist. This is more of interest to those interested in the video game career route, but still great programs either way.
Substance painter is a texture painting software. Works pretty similarly to photoshop but specifically designed for texturing 3d models (all real time etc).
Linked the website if you want to check it out
All meshes have shaders, the materials are just the settings for a shader, textures are the per pixel settings for a material.
Shaders -> Materials -> Textures.
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>For example, If I have a chair that I want to be wooden; do I use a texture image of wood, or make a shader similar to wood.
The Unity BPR shader is already a shader that looks like wood, it just needs a wood texture and the proper metallic, and smoothness settings.
The default material in Unity uses PBR, the PBR stands for Physics Based Shading. It is the only shader you need if you are making realistic games.
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> Or what if I wanted to make a object that looks like it has random markings. Would it be better to do a shader graph to make that instead of making marks in a photo editing program or something
It is better to do it in a photo editing tool. Adding scratches to your textures.
You can use a shader, if in shader graph you use the PBR shader it is like you are copying all Unity's code, then adding your own code on top of it. Like a PBR+ shader.
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For performance it is better to re-use shaders than make new ones.
The only time I would recommend using a shader to add scratches, is if you wanted random, unique scratches on every single object. But remember that the new math you add to the shader, will cost more performance.
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> And last example, a small button, with no real special features. Just a smooth button with a small smudge of dust here and there.
Dust is done using the smoothness texture
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If you have chance look up Substance Painter. It is software for creating textures. Almost all it's materials only use the PBR shader, and from it you will see things like Wood, Marble, Metal, and even Skin.
Head to www.substance3d.com and create an account.
Next, click "My Account" and then "Partnership". In the section "Link Your Steam Account" try seeing if it will let you link your account and then click "Sync My Licenses". If you're lucky, your Steam licenses will be imported to Substance 3d and then you'll get a full year of maintenance instead of just 2020. If this works you'll see a section titled "My Steam Licensees" with a license key download and regular Substance installer downloads.
For an indie subscription, I believe you sign up under the "Licenses" tab. It is a bit confusing, I'm not 100% sure myself. I don't like the fact they call it "upgrade your licenses" as if it might get rid of the perpetual ones.
Free if you are student/teacher.
20$ per month.. or 220 per year... so its not cheap and you know there are other ways to get it....
https://www.substance3d.com/subscribe/
I don’t have a good guide specifically for using PBR, but Allegorithmic has a great PBR booklet here. Even though it gives you the option to buy it on Amazon, right below there’s a couple links where you can read the pdf for free. It goes over the general theory behind physical rendering and it has great overviews for the two main PBR workflows. I’ve learned a ton from it.
Like mentioned - go to your account on substance3d.com - in the Licenses tab find your product - to the far right you will see the current builds as well as a link that says "All Builds" - on that all builds page you will find every version of SP. You may need to contact them to find out which of those will work with your license.
https://www.substance3d.com/contact/
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Daf
https://www.substance3d.com/education/
I'm surprised that they still have it. Adobe normally does not offer these kinds of things. Also, look at Steam versions of Substance, they are very cheap.
There are no technical limitations with the trial version - it can not be used for commercial means however. See about half-way down in the "Definitions" section: https://www.substance3d.com/legal/general-terms-conditions/
“Evaluation License” means a License granted to the User for a limited version of the Software (“the Evaluation Software”) for a limited duration, generally of thirty (30) days unless agreed expressly otherwise by Allegorithmic (“the Evaluation Term”), to enable the User to evaluate the Software in connection with the User’s internal business purposes to determine whether to purchase the non-evaluation version of the Software. Commercial Use, publishing or redistribution of the Software, the Substance files or the Licensee Content is strictly forbidden under an Evaluation License.
substance painter isnt essential at all! Any image editing app like photoshop or gimp can also texture very well especially for more low poly stuff. Substance painter does make realistic texturing very quick and easy tho and is also used often in the industry so its a good skill to have. Substance painter is also free for students so if u have like a college email or something, u can easily get it for free for like a year which is what i'm using right now. Heres a link to check out more: https://www.substance3d.com/education/ .
You fill out this form, make an account, and they will likely give one to you I believe.
https://www.substance3d.com/education/
There are tons of educational licenses out there so definitely let your curiosity run wild, its an exciting field and lots of fun
Substance Painter just makes the whole texturing process a breeze. If you're a student you can sign up for a free license here. Would highly recommend learning it
Substance Painter allows you to work at 4k, or theoretically at 8k if you'd like (you'd need quite the rig for that!) It's software widely used by most modern game artists, and while it's mainly for Physically Based Rendering, (which is a different shading model to what source uses) it's still very useful. It does still share a lot of features with 3D coat, such as smart masks and materials, 3D painting and so on, though I have to admity point of comparison for 3DC is perhaps a couple of years out of date. If your intended designs are more about illustration, Painter might be more than you need, but I imagine it could get the job done quite well. You can try the software out for 30 days free to see if it's what you're looking for. https://www.substance3d.com/subscribe/
Do those landscapes have to be accurate to the real world?
I thought of your post when I saw this earlier : https://www.artstation.com/emrecancubukcu/store/J6Mj/satellite-view-material-100-substance-designer
The results are pretty kickass, but you need Substance Designer.
You could always buy a montly subscription for $20/month here then pay $10 for the shader. Pretty cheap overall for an amazing piece of software + one hell of a shader.
Hello!
Can you upload your log on our contact form here: https://www.substance3d.com/contact/ , we may be able to help or to find and fix the issue you currently have :)
The basic rundown is you need the file called RPG-Map-Generator.sbsar from the link in my post or the author's gumroad that's linked somewhere in the comments. Then download and install the free substance app https://www.substance3d.com/substance-player/. Once you do this you can just double click on the generator file to open it in the software. Like you would click on a word document to open it in Word. If there's something you're stuck with give me the details and I'll help you when I wake up tomorrow.
Indeed, you'll need to do the process 5 times sadly (can't purchase more than 1 indie license at a tme currently.)
Be sure to contact us at https://www.substance3d.com/contact/ if you need more pricing details :)
Sorry, I completely forgot to answer that.
It's definitely possible to get an internship in any of those.
I also forgot to list a company that does really good stuff in france: Allegorithmic. They work on Substance painter, which you may know about. It's basically a texturing software but extremly advanced, and integrating nice visualization too. They have skills for sure.
The French startups I know are mostly in Paris, Allegorithmic is in Clermont-Ferrand I think. There is always the remote working possibility, but I wouldn't advise it. At least personnally I get bored working home and unproductive.
I really don't know if I should stick with AMD GPUs for workstation things. I have a R9 290 and every 3D software I own uses some sort of Nvidia tech (CUDA, RTX) that accelerates things like render and baking. So they either default to OpenGL (GPU) or CPU if you don't have an Nvidia card, both are slow alternatives.
For example Substance Painter now uses RTX which makes baking only take 1-2 seconds on a RTX 2060! If you have an AMD card, it just defaults to CPU instead and will take more than a minute to bake.
See blog: https://www.substance3d.com/blog/substance-painter-summer-2019
Blender is also implementing RTX, so I wonder if ProRender on current AMD cards can match RTX in speed.
Unity uses ProRender, though I think there are rumours to also implement RTX for lightmap baking too.
I know the R5 2600 doesn't cost a lot of money and can be a great bargain, but if this is purely for lightmapping and baking, it is an odd choice.
Lightmaps and baking these days are much faster on a low-end RTX GPU and no longer has the problem of CPU lightmapping where identical adjacent faces (i.e a row of walls) have different shades (when it is suppose to be a single colour) is the limitation of CPU threads running at different place and time.
https://www.substance3d.com/blog/substance-painter-summer-2019 https://blogs.unity3d.com/en/2019/05/20/gpu-lightmapper-a-technical-deep-dive/
Not related but also a good read: https://code.blender.org/2019/07/accelerating-cycles-using-nvidia-rtx/
I was planning to get a 3950X to replace my i7 6700K (with R9 290) but having learnt that a mid-tier GPU would only take 1 second to bake while a CPU or non-RTX GPU will take 60 seconds and does not have the bugs associated with CPU lightmapping, I think GPU for 3D creation is the best thing right now.
My aging R9 290 is almost twice as fast than my overclocked i7 6700K in Unity3D lightmapping (Beta/preview) right now with no shading errors that is only present in CPU lightmapping. Now if I were to buy a RTX GPU for Substance Painter, that would be a killer (it defaults to standard CPU baking if no Pascal/Turing GPU is present).
Now I only wish Unreal Engine 4 would have a proper native GPU lightmapping built-in. You had to use some 3rd-party hack for it to work.
For an in depth explanation of the various types of texture (even more than the ones you're seen at that link!) and the reason why they are used you can look here https://www.substance3d.com/pbr-guide
It's fairly technical, but not too much, it Explains concepts that are very useful and important to artists. The first pdf is more focused on theory, the second has an explanation for the texture types, I recommend reading both as it is a very informative text. The info in there is generic, it applies to basically any 3D application with physically based rendering.
Currently you can buy it from Steam for $149.99 or get a subscription for $19.90 (Indie) a month, that comes with all three substance programs and a monthly allotment of points to purchase materials from Substance Source.
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There is also a 30 day free trial here:
https://www.substance3d.com/buy/download
I did try this although maybe it really is my camera/lighting set up causing the poor performance.
This is the kind of tutorial I was following https://www.substance3d.com/blog/scan-anything-dave-riganelli-and-his-homemade-scanbox
Do you have any other recommendations to improve this?
Unfortunately i don't have an rtx so all i have to go on is the substance blog that details it here
https://www.substance3d.com/blog/substance-painter-summer-2019
If you want the most control over your textures, consider looking into substance designer. You could start with a material from substance source (paid service) and modify it to suit your needs:
https://source.substance3d.com/allassets?category=Wood
There is also a free collection of substance materials made by the community:
https://share.substance3d.com/libraries?by_category_id=31
Substance also just released Project Alchemist which is designed to create full materials from a single image, but I haven't used it yet:
Thanks! To summarize and add to that list:
- Much faster baking mostly on RTX cards
- Older NVIDIA cards get a bit of speed increase too using Optix denoiser for bakes
- Non-Nvidia gets a smaller speed increase via CPU ray tracing
- new baker visualizer
- Updates to Python API
- 40 new smart materials and 20 new smart masks
[Source]
And agreed. It's pretty meh. I'll never turn down a faster bake, but many of the "new" materials are just ported from Substance Share and personally I have most of them already. The new smart masks though are super welcome. Can't wait to experiment with those.
I guess we're still waiting for those earth shattering features Allegorithmic said they could now add thanks to being Adobe-owned. This has been a pretty slow year so far for big updates to SP and SD. Perhaps they're muzzled on bigger features until Adobe MAX this November?
All that matters is the Substance license, which you can read here:
https://www.substance3d.com/legal/general-terms-and-conditions
Not mentioning money anywhere in your game while putting up a Patreon does not absolve you from those license terms especially if your Patreon is in any way connected to your "free" games. This is irrespective of the territory.
From the Adobe interview with CIG devs.
You can cancel the subscription whenever you want. Stuff that you got from substance source stays in your account even after cancelled subscription.
https://www.substance3d.com/faq-substance
If some credits are left unused don't know what happens to those.
The $49 offer when you cancel your subscription is still valid, but it's only available the moment you cancel your sub. If you declined it by mistake, please contact us here: https://www.substance3d.com/new/contact
He means physically based rendering. Here is an explanation by allegorithmic https://www.substance3d.com/pbr-guide
I think he is right, while you're model and texture is great and looks totally correct, it feels a bit artificial if you observe it closer.