This not only means the death of having to use programs like Photoshop for textures, but it also guarantees a permanent monopoly for Allegorithmic in this area (since you don’t hear much about Filter Forge these days, Spiral Graphics has gone out of business, and FOSS has produced nothing worthwhile).
By the looks of things, this update brings curves, text, new generators and noise editing features, new image manipulation features (such as crop), new filters (such as equalize), 8K texture maps, and more. I could care less about the whole iRay thing, but the good news is that it’s far from their only focus.
Now of course the whole idea of them having monopolized the market may sound scary to some, but it does look like they are putting a serious effort into development, listening to users, and making it affordable for indies and small studios (not just large ones). That’s not to mention that there’s still an option to get a permanent license as opposed to paying by the month forever.
As for me, Genetica 4 is still getting everything I need done in the texture department, but SD now has a few of the final things I’ve been waiting on before seriously considering a switch. With them on the verge on having everything and the kitchen sink now for textures, is it to now be considered the ultimate texture making tool?
Designer is a procedural texture creating program. There is no handpainting, but like MmAaXx said you could create textures wich look like stylized hand-painted textures, even though i believe its easier to just handpaint them.
Substance Painter is the program where you paint on the model, but even Painter seems not optimal for stylized handpainting style unless you mean stylized PBR textures.
For pure diffuse painting i would suggest to use 3D Coat since it has a better brush engine.
Well…
obviously it’s not good for that, since you don’t actually paint in designer
But Substance Painter totally will be(Though since you dont use pbr… I don’t see what it offers that blender doesn’t when it comes to handpainting)
Just because its built-in rendering engine is designed for PBR doesn’t mean the textures created can only be used for realistic materials (just ignore what Iray spits out then, as it has no power to dictate just what you do with the created image itself).
Photoshop is FAR from being dead for texture creation. Even discounting the Quixel Suite (which runs off of PS) a lot of professionals still use it for the creative control it provides.
But yes, Allegorithmic does some fine work indeed. I already owned Substance Painter since before but I have now bought Designer as well.
I disagree. Photoshop can be used for texture creation but compared to Mari, 3dCoat, Substance and Quixel it is really slow.
I am talking 5-10 times slower. Which imho makes it useless and semi-dead. Unless you texture Buildings which have very flat and quadratic UVs, Photoshop is very limited.
How do you deal with seams?
How do you paint over several UV islands which are separated on the UV but together on the model?
You can’t.
There is no preview and you work blind. You can’t paint on more than one channel at the same time, there are no mesh driven procedural masks, no baking etc…
We are reaching a point where 8K UDIMS becomes the new standard, how do you deal with that amount of data when you can only open one texture at a time?
Photoshop was never an ideal solution and Adobe never did ANYTHING for 3d artist except putting their shitty 3d mode in.
Professionals who use Photoshop and only Photoshop for their textures are stuck in the past.
My guess is that Mari and Substance are the future and PS will be thrown out of the pipeline completely.