Mari Indie or Substance Painter?

Hirazi Blue · Post by **Hirazi Blue** » 13 Dec 2015, 09:45

Sweet and simple: I would like to hear your opinions on which one to choose between Mari Indie and Substance Painter...

Grubber · Post by **Grubber** » 13 Dec 2015, 10:47

I am not sure about Mari Indie limitations, but I think Mari is the texturing beast. Of course it would need to be tamed

Bullit · Post by **Bullit** » 13 Dec 2015, 13:14

There is also quixel suite but you need to be attached to Adobe.

Rork · Post by **Rork** » 13 Dec 2015, 13:24

Never got comfortable in Mari, used it once on a project and stopped using it. I got along much better with Mudbox.

I just bought Quixel Suite 2, and I have to say it's pretty good for the price. You can get some nice results pretty quickly with all the built-in presets
And because it's all PS layer based, you can always dive in and paint on top if you want.

Hirazi Blue · Post by **Hirazi Blue** » 13 Dec 2015, 13:55

As I do not own Photoshop, the Quixel Suite isn't really an option... ;)

Rork · Post by **Rork** » 13 Dec 2015, 14:07

You do have the creative suite(?), right? If so, you have access to Mudbox painting.

rob

Hirazi Blue · Post by **Hirazi Blue** » 13 Dec 2015, 14:13

Rork wrote:You do have the creative suite(?)

What gave you that idea? I only own a "Maya 2016 with Softimage" bundle...
And this is getting way too off topic.
My question was about Mari Indie and Substance Painter specifically...
;)

Rork · Post by **Rork** » 13 Dec 2015, 14:27

Ah... Thought wrong, sorry ;-)

But my preference would be Substance Painter. It's cheaper, and less complicated imho. Also, it can be extended with the Substance Designer shaders, or Designer itself.

Maximus · Post by **Maximus** » 13 Dec 2015, 15:10

I find myself in kinda same spot as you and i've invested quite a lot of times into tryin those softwares demo and comparing them, here are my thoughts.

Bare with me it depends on what you need mostly, sculpt + paint, paint only, a whole modeling toolkit + paint, retopo, etc.

- Mari: in my opinion is a very good texturing package with lots of solid functions and utilities some of other competitors lack for example an edge detection mask to paint on edges for example rusty effects. It has lots of controls over everything, but im afraid if you dont do texturing for movies or heavy production you wont feel the need to use this software. Also the price is simply outrageous. 1500€ is crazy. The list of features tho, is long. Can really say is the best of the best out there for painting, but it is on a high level range, i'd say not for a single man and freelance project even tho if u have money and time to learn it, it'll be worth. Price as i said is high to me unless texturing is your life main job.

- Painter | Quixel suite. i grouped them into same category because in my opinion these 2 are mostly towards gaming texturing. They both present stability and performance problems, quixel a bit more since it linked to PS and for every action you do it has to process it, and the result can be quite annoying in terms of time wasted. They are good and they dont cost insane amount of money, Quixel being the cheapest one altho the Quixel Material library its simply the best out there. The quality is insane and i'd love to have a standalone of these materials. its one thing that makes me everytime go back at it and give it another try.

It has some bugs and slowdown, hopefully the devs will hammer these down. You need to have a lot of patience to use quixel and learn it, mostly because the workflow is a bit slow compared to a Mari or Mudbox, because you have first to get perfect UV on ur model, then bake 3 maps, tanget space, AO and material ID (or object ID). Without these quixel panics into recognizing the geometry and giving you a smooth painting.

Painter is pretty much the same but with a very clunky interface and lots of clicks all around, i dont like painter even tho its ultra powerful, gives me headache, so many tools and small buttons, tear drop menù, name conventions. Its just over complex for what should be a straightforward process.

- Mudbox. Well..it is probably the king of painting. What you want more for 10$/month? Its painting system is still unmatched in my opinion. Ultra easy to start and go, easy to handle (photoshop layers). it is how things should be, simple and powerful, not overcomplicated. You have all the tools you need, clear interface, clear navigation, no slow downs. Too bad its autodesk? yeah. Its future is uncertain and most likely will be discontinued cause those genius cant develop the jewels they have, softimage ring a bell.

If mudbox was actively developed it would totally destroy any competitor. Even now that got basically 0 attention since years, it shines over all of them except Mari maybe.

- Last but not least, 3dcoat. This package is surprisingly amazing, you get sculpting, crazy UV algorithm for unwrapping, amazing painting with great material library, works with both cuda and openGL, you get painting, you get retopology for 370$. Im oriented to buy 3d coat to be honest, i am watching lots of videos on youtube and i'm totally shocked about how underrated this software is. It has some surface sculpting tools (you basically sculpt with splines and the chop off the geometry on voxels) that not even Zbrush has. Some tools are so good really.. worth a try to give it a shot.

Painting also is very nice, no lag, the pentable is very fluid. takes a bit more to master because its a swiss knife, it can do from sculpting to painting, retopo, etc. Id highly recommend you to try 3d coat.

Overall i'm sticking with mudbox and 3dcoat, they have the most powerful and simlpe painting system out of the market. I just dont like when developers tend to overcomplicate things that should be easy. There is no need to add 120312304 options for easy stuff.

Now you'd probably asking why i didnt take into consideration Zbrush? yeah well, zbrush has the most horrible painting system ever created and frankly i hate the developers for it because they are just lazy. It works on a sub-d level, meaning while on mudbox you just import a cube and start painting on Low geometry (mudbox doesnt care about subd), in Zbrush your texturing output quality depends on how many subdivision you have. So to have best quality you have to subdivide to milions poly just to paint. Its concept is frankly DUMB. And whats most stupid is the fact that they have the tech to do mudbox-like texturing, but they dont want for some reason, years people asking for them to change that system.

Anyway these are my 2 cents, Mudbox | 3d Coat are my fave for painting.

Hirazi Blue · Post by **Hirazi Blue** » 13 Dec 2015, 15:33

Maximus wrote:Mudbox | 3d Coat are my fave for painting.

Thanks for that detailed elaboration, Maximus!!!
Judging from your words I think I will have to stick to 3D Coat as well,
as I already own a copy of that.
I just was curious about "Mari Indie" and "Substance Painter"
as they both are similarly priced just within a price range I could possibly even afford...
;)

rray · Post by **rray** » 13 Dec 2015, 17:36

depending on what you want to do, 4K resolution might not be enough (both mari indie and substance painter have this limit)
(for example a skin pore bump map won't be possible with that when you use a single tile only)

substance devs seem the most "open" to go higher with the max res.

angus_davidson · Post by **angus_davidson** » 13 Dec 2015, 18:11

If your going to work on feature films and only do texturing. mari is the best way to go. However since that rules out most of us...

While I am a big fan of the potential for substance painter (it just really needs to uncomplicate itself) 3d coat is the best to use. Its intuitive and as mentioned previously has superb other features.

Bullit · Post by **Bullit** » 14 Dec 2015, 15:00

Coincidence. I am also looking to 3D coat but for modeling proposes, cutting a mesh(voxels) with just a spline is fantastic.
But i also think it suffers a bit from interface overload.

myara · Post by **myara** » 16 Dec 2015, 18:30

I use 3D Coat + Photoshop for manual painting and Quixel mostly for generating maps and raw textures. I haven't used Mari because it's price exceeds my budget at the moment, and I didn't like Substance Painter that much when I used the trial.

Since you already have 3D Coat I think Photoshop would be a better and cheaper choice. 3DCoat works very well with Photoshop, supporting basic layers and having the option to open the texture or having a projection in Photoshop in one shortcut. The other day I finished 1 low Poly character texture in 1 day thanks to those features, specially the projection one. It would be great if it supported masks and adjustment layers.

mc_axe · Post by **mc_axe** » 16 Dec 2015, 20:55

I gave a go a while back to Mari but i dont remember much, it is really a beast, but it can get really heavy, a bar in the bottom indicating how much HDD space you have speaks by it self, i think it is not even targeted to produce texture maps for real time envs, so i guess it is best for heavy projects, DCC packages, movie making etc. Best feature i found with a quick look is textures with crazy resolutions, ptex, layering, masking etc, i strugled a litl bit with UI.

Now im trying Substance Designer & Painter, cause i want to export some low poly assets in to next gen game engines (like UE4). I found a pretty str8 forward pipeline of production for subdivided meshes, starting with Softimage , i see benefits cause i can skip sculpting completely in some cases. Best features i see are, non destructive, material layering, interesting bakers, substances for example edge wear, particles paint like leaks, a + is that you can see how the end product is going to look like, but mainly at the end you are able to export all maps required for a next gen engine with a simple export. Some plugins for custom substances only work for Maya&Max tho. Those are maily to preview substances within your DCC for example procedural textures. But i can skip that i guess.

I havent checked 3d coat i should take a look.

mc_axe · Post by **mc_axe** » 17 Dec 2015, 16:07

More info on substance after 1 day playing with it: it kills me on 4k, switched on 2k to work, uncompressed 4k input maps killed perfomance (it might be my GPU mem), i had to compress before import. The results are exactly what i was expecting, some really interesting PBR stuff.

My model is an obj with 4 meshes and 4 mats all share same uvs.. I made this to be able to hide some parts. Cause Substance typically has no explorer, it identifys only mats no meshes. So i had 4 texture sets and can switch them on and off,

Later i found that is impossible to paint with the same brush on 2 texture sets that is BAD.

I could use an option to mix all different texture sets that share same UV space in same output. (its frustrating to get 20 maps output for a lamp when u just need 5)
Im missing the focus button on navigation along with component selection..
Its a program for large screens like mari, i work on a small screen so i had to re-arange UI and colapse tabs, but still...right side is horible with lots of scrolling. They should use tabs there as well learn from the king.
Last but not least i wonder if there is a fullscreen paint mode ,, with one shortcut like: hit the SPACE dude

Mari Indie or Substance Painter?

Mari Indie or Substance Painter?

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