Adobe Substance Designer is my main tool to do materials. Using it for decades and still can’t even express how much I hate it in polite words. Even nodes managing is so much inconvenient comparing to Blender. I hate “exposing” vs Blender pink drivers. Hate how prone to slightest mistake Designer is. Hate gray to color converting nodes. Hate radians to degrees conversions. Hate lack of “make unique”
Does anyone ever tried to make something similar in Blender using shader and geometry node editors?
I only really need a “slope blur” or “loop” pixel processor. Doesn’t even need anything to be tiling . Since it can be done in the very end on already rendered images by AI.
But the “slope blur” i.e gradually fading 1 pixel loops in UV distorting based on input noise is absolutely core thing.
Blender is Blender based Blender. It’s not Maya, not Max, not Cinema 4D, not ZBrush, not Rhino, not Houdini and not Substance Designer amongst great many other things it also is not.
Do you mean to ask if anyone has ever tried to make materials in Blender? Yes, I believe a few folks have. I believe, the estimate was somewhere between 1 and 3 million people, who use Blender. But that was a few years ago.
Is Blender as convenient and “powerful” for most use cases for texturing and material creation as Substance products?.. My opinion is that Blender is not as good as a tool for specifically texturing and making materials as Substance products. This is if we compare the tools. It’s not as much that Blender would be a bad tool for this, but Substance software seems to be quite good in many respects and seems to have some nice and useful functionality. It is specifically dedicated to materials after all and seems to be one of the preferred and most popular tools amongst professionals. This is also assuming the user is fully capable of using all existing functionality of the software. I think most people who can use both software packages will tend to agree to this view.
There are also few use cases and circumstances where Blender is more capable and a more reasonable choice for creating materials. Just a few probably. There must be. And there are a lot of situations where users might simply not need as much functionality as Substance products have for their materials. Me, for example. I can comfortably create all my materials using only Blender and Photoshop, I simply don’t need Substance for what I do. It all depends on your goals and circumstances.
Blender still does have A LOT of tools for work with materials. Procedural node based materials and textures, texture painting, baking functionality and so on. It’s awesome. It’s more than enough for a lot of stuff.
Thank you a lot MartinZ
for your thoughts .
I just think I can do lots of things I do in Designer easier with Blender shader nodes . And rendering final image is sometimes quicker with actual 3d details scattered by GN vs Substance Designer’s " shape splatter" node. There is cryptomatte for perfect masking and so much of other cool things.
The only thing I lack is that "slope blur " from Designer that can shift pixels in direction set by noise gradient . It’s basically a number of small short distance UV displacements gradually fading in each next one. I think I could do it myself actually with vector math and mix nodes . Just wonder perhaps someone already tried it.
Any blur in material nodes is a sore subject. So many requests for it for so many years… There is a technical reason it doesn’t exist, because of how raytracing works so nobody figured out a good way other than displacing texture coordinates with noise. It depends on samples and is grainy. But if that works for you, you can do that with anything, not necessarily with noise.
I think it should be possible to have poor man’s slope blur in Blender easily. Maybe ask on Blender Stack Exchange. It would be a good question for there. If you describe the issue clearly(you really have to describe stuff in detail, provide context, examples, images and so on for Blender Stack Exchange to work well), you should get a solution in no time. It will of course still be limited in the same way as any other DIY blur in material nodes is.
So cool and so elegant solution . But what I need is a bit different thing. The “slope blur” in Substance Designer is not exactly blur. It’s subtle image warp done in number (32) of small steps when each next step is mixed over previous one with some fading factor .
The mixing is easy to do , UV warp by some vector is too. But I have no idea how to make grayscale bumps return down slope vectors for pixels . My guess it’s a sort of height to normal map conversion happening deep inside warp nodes . SDesigner does it through some “Sobel” or “kernel” math probably.
it’s too deep and complex for my “art education” style geometry knowledge I am afraid .
ps. BTW does anyone know whats that edge detection shader in last video ? Is it pointiness or something independent of mesh tessellation ?
Yes, this is what I was talking about - it’s just displacing texture coordinates with noise. It works, yes. But it’s not the same as in the compositor and its quality depends on sampling. It’s not very efficient, that’s all. This might be a slight inconvenience when working with complex procedural textures because you have to have more samples when baking while without it, procedural stuff bakes significantly faster with only a few samples.
The nearest thing I can think of right now that has been attempting something in this sort of direction is Fluent Materializer by CG Thoughts. It’s a procedural materials creator and combiner using Blender nodes with easy baking.
There might be others I am not awear of. There does seem to be so much potential in Blenders material system for texture creation and painting. I am guessing that as it seems with sculpting feature improvements a lot is waiting on the broader core system updates to become more established and bedded over the next few releases.
But it looks like the priorities shifted a bit from when that article was written…
A lot can be done in the procedural department indeed , you might look into OSL also, which got looping functionalities…
But rather than trying to hack solutions into blender it better to use it for simpler case when it’s enough, and keep designer at hand when you need more advanced textures.
Doing materials in blender comes with a few advantages despite the limitations so it’s always useful to know your ways around that !
I’ve yet to understand why raytracing has anything to do with adding a node that does a basic blur on bitmap images used in a shader.
so nobody figured out a good way other than displacing texture coordinates with noise
I mean, basically every image editor on the planet has figured out how to do this without displacing texture coordinates with noise…
I suspect what you’re ultimately getting at is “Blender hasn’t figured out how to make a blur node that applies universally, in all cases, with all shader inputs and outputs, including everything in Eevee and Cycles.”
Which seems to result in: therefore, you get nothing.
It’s handy for a number of things. At it’s most basic, it’s great for producing edge wear on bricks, stones, and whatnot. Play around with it a bit, and you can produce a nice painterly effect with it.
And there are a lot of situations where users might simply not need as much functionality as Substance products have for their materials. Me, for example. I can comfortably create all my materials using only Blender and Photoshop, I simply don’t need Substance for what I do. It all depends on your goals and circumstances.
):
