some info about substance designer

[Maximus]

Hey guys, im scratching my head around this software.
Now, i've watched a lot of videos tryin to grasp the concept and the usability of this software in projects, and the most common question that pops in my mind is.. why? why should i use this?

It looks very complex for the end result, compared to just use a way cheaper/user friendly route that might be 3dcoat or even photoshop or mudbox. But i believe i am missing something here, thats why i am asking, maybe someone of you has some deep insight and knowledge about this software.

What I gathered so far is that you basically can create procedural textures and export them as substance (proprietary format), for them to be imported into your 3d application of choice. Now needless to say that this would be completely useless for Softimage users because as far as i know, there is no Substance reader/importer/plugin for softimage, so whatever you create in Substance must be exported at best in normal files like jpg/bitmap/png/etc, losing the procedural ability. Am i right about this?

Anyone have experience with this software and can weight in to some pros and cons? I honestly dont see a reason to approach to this software so far, but i feel i might be wrong and missing somethin

Thank you

[NNois]

Well don't use it if you can see why it's cool.
I think that's the kind of software you can see the benefits in the first 5 minutes. If you don't say "whouahh" ... pass ;-)

[Angel 07]

In Substance Designer you can create the texture without any skills in hand painting. This is the main advantage of it. For creating texture you connecting different nodes and combine results. Of course, some base data for these textures needed. For example, normal map or ao-map, but these maps can be baked in many different applications (and in Substance Designer too).

[gaboraa]

Simply you create series of nodes which you can easily change anything later on when needed like normals, height/bump, roughness ior, diffuse etc easily with just adjusting some parameters you exposed to the end user or in your case yourself. It is heavily used in texturing industry and considered indispensable if you do texturing. For example Naughty dog uses it extensively in Uncharted 4.

As you say it a little bit daunting to use for it requires lots of thinking and planning while creating textures. Don't forget you can use Bitmap2Matarial if you don't want to create materials from scratch all by yourself.

[rray]

Those 3 products should be merged into one product imo

[druitre]

I feel like rray - I want to believe it is indispensable allright, but there's something about the product that makes me wonder what to do where with it. Or with what part of it. Or why it is split into three parts anyway. Just one step away from brilliance?

[gaboraa]

I couldn't agree with you more. They should be combined into one app.

[sirdavid32]

I guess you have to grasp the beauty of procedural-once-build-always-deploy concept with texture parameters.
May not seem like much but that´s a huge grip for coders on the game, to be able to tackle texture parameters on the fly
by call....it´s juicy.

On the other hand, RT, CUDA, VR...you name it: why stay on "static" 1k or 2k texture (even mip) when you can param everything
and get sizes under 120 kbs procedural vs 250 kb average 1 k texture....

Starting to see the "big picture" here?