Author Topic: Substance Designer - any good for realistic textures and practical workflow?  (Read 5270 times)

2016-07-27, 11:27:59

Rhodesy

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I often struggle away making tileable brick and paving textures eventually arriving at a reasonable result but when I come back to them I usually think I could have done better. More recently I had a license of Mighty Tiles for Photoshop which really helped distribute individual bricks and pavers over a large texture and it also generated masks for grout and spec that I could manipulate further in photoshop. But alas this is no longer and my license expired. I'm really annoyed that the developer just pulled the plug with no way of keeping the existing software. I'm on C4D so no Omni tiles for me.

So im looking for a new tileable solution for arch viz materials and have noted substance designer from afar which seems to have rapidly progressed in a very short time! When I looked at it originally it was very nice but the results did look a bit procedural CG rather than photoreal. However, googling stuff now and watching some videos, some of the results are looking very impressive but I have a few questions for anyone else that uses it...

1. Many of the examples I've seen only seem to show a small sample area / cube which if exported out for use in Corona for example just wouldnt be enough area. Is the workflow for this just to work on a smaller area and then generate out large maps at the end when you have got the look right? Is it easy to scale the working preview up and down as your working on it to see it as a larger map?

2. Do the results stand up to scrutiny once used in Corona? I know there is the ongoing debate about the PBR material which sounds like its being implemented in Corona, but in general is it possible to get excellent tileable results that are indistinguishable to real materials in Corona? Certainly some of the best examples I've seen online are really terrific - if a little small on the area size but I suppose it gives a good close up of the detail.

3. Some of the resulting node graphs are monumental!! But once you get into the workflow does this become less challenging and easier to understand?

4. Can you specify a random pattern of three fixed sized pavers? or can you only have either regular or completely random sizes (ranged)? This would be critical for some paving systems.

5. Did you guys just teach yourselves or purchase some of these video tuts that are touted about - any recomendations?

Thanks for any input you might have on this,
Rob

2017-05-22, 16:51:00
Reply #1

peterguthrie

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I'd also be very interesed if anyone has had experience of using substance as a mightytiles replacement

2017-05-27, 03:52:00
Reply #2

JoeVallard

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Here is an example material they have.

On the top left they started with a uniform color and transformed it into a single tileable square, which they manipulated into the Center pattern which contains 2 different shapes.
On the bottom left they just used a simple tile and on the bottom right the over layed the previous pattern on top of the tiles, which results in 3 different sized rectangles.

I haven't tried much of it myself as theres alot of nodes you have to learn, it really does require some planning and experimenting as well.
This guy https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvrzoT49CiRy1hvgbfkklQA/videos has some really good videos on how he created alot of materials in Substance might check some of them out.

2017-06-01, 19:18:51
Reply #3

viscorbel

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I'm on the fence as well.
I love procedural stuff and the node based workflow. It seems like the potential is huge... but nothing I've seen from substance has been convincingly photorealistic, it always looks 'gamey' or 'stylized'
There is not a single example on their official site that I would love to put in my scenes. Even after searching for examples all over I can't find anything realistic except the occasional brick wall.


2017-06-01, 20:13:51
Reply #4

romullus

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Did you see that thread on polycount: http://polycount.com/discussion/155851/weekly-substance-challenge
There are some really impressive examples.
I'm not Corona Team member. Everything i say, is my personal opinion only.
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2017-06-02, 11:38:49
Reply #5

Rhodesy

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The biggest grip for me is that there are indeed some really impressive materials on substance source considering most of them are procedural. But they are as about as much use as a texture map from the early 2000s due to the fact that the tiling area is just so small. All the examples show a beautiful shader ball with bags of detail but even in the tightly cropped scene along side it you can see the tiling. The same goes for the example posted above, just on that cube we have two tiles. It is possible to track down the tiler node and add more tiles but all of the noises dont scale accurately with it and you end up with a big splodge but a nicely divided splodge. And this is if you open the substance up - if you just want to use the .sbar in your host program I've not seen one yet which lets you adjust the scale in the exposed parameters.

For them to be taken seriously for Arch viz they need to include a built in scaler slider which will handle all aspects of the scaling so we can get a few different real world scales out of it. They can render 8K maps now which is more than enough for a decent tilable area whilst keeping a high level of detail. They now need to make that area useable.

Another issue I can't seem to find a way around is creating tiles with fixed measurements - like a tegular paver with three paving sizes randomly placed. Substance just seems to let you randomise sizes but arbitrarily rather than feeding in set tile sizes to randomly lay down.