Best alternative to Substance Painter?

I love Sub Painter, and I was wondering if there are any alternatives similar? I really dig what SP does and how it handles the whole shebang. Not so much needing a Substance Designer alt, but just the painter portion.

Any free alts?

Love ya thanks!

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This is the only open source one:

It even has a very fast workflow (with the few tools)
But I don’t want to miss saying that these blender addons can do more (together with blender):

and there are a few other helpers (simpler addons).
I am e.g. happier with blender_paint_layers together with grungit.
But with “procedural” something has been going on for some time:

This is my favorite (it’s the fastest procedural texture workflow i know)

Edit : It is better to use Chromium instead of Firefox (problems with fly-out menu) Works great with Dark Reader

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Really I think the best alternative that is opensource is blender. Blender can do layers, you just need to learn how. Take a look at the paint job on this creature monster.
https://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/dragon-creature-monster-3d-1511935
After the painting layers where done, I saved them to disk and merged them using krita.

I might be a little bit cumbersome to switch between krita, having to save and load. But it gets the job done well.

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There’s also Mari by Foundry:

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Upcoming Mixer from Quixel will be free thanks to Epic Games.

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Thank you so so much for he resource links. Cheers! I’m spoiled by Sub Painter…I’ll look at some of these options.

I know exactly how you feel, I’m having the same thoughts. I’ve never tried Substance Painter but from what I’ve seen it really makes texturing easy.
But it’s just too expensive for me right now and I want to have a workflow with completely open-source tools, like Gimp etc.
I’m always really sad when there are new cool tutorials about texturing and they all require Substance Painter :pensive:
I also tried ArmorPaint but couldn’t get any good results since there are not many tutorials/presets etc., but it looks very promising for the future.
In the end I textured everything in my current Projekt in Blender itself, you can actually do quite a lot of things with the built in tools.
The result looks like this: Old silver Mailbox (Lowpoly) - Buy Royalty Free 3D model by master_edd [35bef09] - Sketchfab Store
But its very cumbersome and the node tree looked more than confusing at the end. But I could paint scratches, rust etc. directly in Blender, which is what I wanted.


I really really hope that the developers will create a better workflow for PBR materials, masks, painting etc. in the future, that would be my greatest wish for the next big steps in Blender.

Now, Blender’s Texture Painting is nice…but if they could just recreate Substance Painter exactly, I’d be very happy. Blender 3.0? I don’t put anything past Blender.

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And the wait is over Mixer 2020 is released :partying_face:

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Ooo…checking out now! Thanks for sharing.

EDIT: Holy cow, this is what I was looking for!!! Perfect! Thank you Quixel and Filibis!

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Also don’t forget, or maybe you didn’t know; you can use a slightly limited Mari for non-commercial projects. There is a Mari NC (non-commercial) available on the foundry webpage, the only thing you need to do is make an account there and download it. But the learning curve is quite intense for beginners. Mari is a monster.
Mari and Mixer is basically all you need to create surfaces for everything if you don’t want to spent money on Substance Painter.

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I see there’s no Linux version of Mixer 2020. Oh well it looked interesting, such is life.

It’s still in alpha, but is very promising: Layer Painter

Have you tried Material Maker for texturing?: