InstaMAT - the Substance Designer/Painter alternative we have been waiting for?

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Managed to get my license at 2am uk time…

Excited to try it…

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I haven’t gotten past the “Print my Invoice” page. No email confirming the purchase.

I had to click resend email twice last night, I know this happened to a couple of people here too.

Keep trying, it looks to good not to!

I tried InstaMat with the Substance Painter MeetMat sample, baking is fast. Meet Mat has only 3 texture set and I set the resolution to 4K. Sadly the painting is kind of laggy with this sample, and it’s not really complex sample. Also you can not load your own baked maps yet. So I’ll keep using Substance Painter until they improve the features and performance.

They need more videos on the layer painting feature, it’s not really clear how to do anything, coming from Substance Painter,it is confusing to even understand their layer structure - documentation is poor about this area.

You can’t use a baked tangents space normal map as a input to generate other maps, something you can do in SP.

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In theory, the baked maps should be in the Package Management panel, but I’ve tried a couple of times and they weren’t there. It didn’t matter if I told the program to save them in the current project or in a file. I can load my own textures just fine, but I have no idea how to access the baked maps. Crazy to hear that painting is laggy on an RTX 4090

:slight_smile: slight_smile:
bout the performance while painting:
I just got word back, that a bug snuck into the release, that is already being adressed.

Thing is: You can actually still get realy snappy performance.

Tried it on my 3090 workstation with a mesh wuth 11 udim tiles at 4k.
While performance initially really laggy, you can simply switch preview to 2k or evn 1k during initial painting and also lower the color from 16bit to 8 bit, as well as lower the quality from very high to low and you can smoothly paint across all 11 udim tiles.

Its just for preview, your paint strokes are still being recorded at the maximum size you specified in the project.
So, once you get to higher details, you up the preview resolution and then you can just hide or unhide tiles you work on and can smoothly paint in 4k.
And thats all with the performance bug snuck in…

I used to paint in mudbox for udim assets and it used a similar system when painting with 4k udim tiles of loading/unloading and I doubt substance is faster with11 4k udims.

Even better: Instead of completely hiding the tiles, you can also assign different values to them. You can divide by 2 or 4 on a per tile basis, so you look at smaller preview sizes of those tiles, but still get an idea of overall picture, while working on a few tiles at full res only…

That being said:
There are a few other things that still need better introductory tutorials or simply some more love in the manual and a few things still missing, but overall I still think its very promising.

Can´t talk about the instalod experience being described here (no good feedback), but the support team is crazy active and fast right now, I don´t think anyone there slept a lot since release…:slight_smile:

Also, I really don´t think they aim at getting bought, they are really passionate about it and they could have sold instalod years ago and haven´t.

Website backends aren´t really something to be concerned about at this point, they are simply not a multi billion dollar company like adobe, that have whole departments devoted to just website management…

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Well… apart from the software itself… if someone wants to “sell something”… then the “shop” should work and should be somekind of “safe”… and also a little but user friendly… :person_shrugging:

…and we are not talking about a tremendious overrun of possible customers here… because there are “shop and deliver systems” and even services for this… :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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Awesome info. Thanks for sharing. Can you lock brush size so the size stays the same when you zoom in or out in the viewport?

Few questions:

Does this soft store stroke positions so you can alter texture size to higher, or even change UV, or its just painting on bitmaps?

I’ll test it again in the future. This app still need alot of polish, you can’t even automatically load UDIMs textures file like you can in Blender or Substance Painter.

They have my SwatBot test file which has 92 UDIMs, so they can stress their app for performance :stuck_out_tongue:

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I’m pretty sure it does. It’s not locked to UVs or initial map size.

While I love that their nodes and painting software are tightly linked, something I’ve wanted (and asked) in Substance ever since the start, after half an hour of testing I don’t think the painting side of it is sufficient for my needs.
I’ll stick with Painter and 3DCoat (for when more handpainting is required), but I’ll keep checking in on InstaMAT as they develop it further!

Note that all the talk of ‘free’ should be taken with a grain of salt. As that can always be revoked or rephrased, you should be comfortable with the actual price of the software if you’re going to invest any time in it, otherwise you might come to depend on it and be in for a rude surprise when they change their eula.

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I agree. You make a very good point. So far I find Blender good enough for my needs so I would probably wait for a year before giving it a spin. They hopefully would have ironed out things by then.

Blender can already do pretty advanced procedural materials with shader/geo nodes, so when they have ironed out those issues you could probably do all you want in blender anyway.

It do seems like it’s much easier and faster to do cool stuff in InstaMAT though, we’ll see if the license stays fair.

Instamat live stream started just now…:
Some issues are already being adressed.

(not affiliated, just a fan)

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Given that they’re already explicitly collecting and selling usage and personal data, I wouldn’t worry too much about the license getting worse, you can’t really get much worse than that :wink:

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Substance Painter/Designer etc has the option of collecting and sending user data.
substance painter collecting data
InstaMat is not deviating from the commercial line in this regard.

The commercial license of InstaMAT has no collecting of data?
I might buy that just to test with traffic shaping tools if it is correct or not and if this tool needs to be online after registration.

Key word being “option”

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Looks like UDIM painting performance got super charged :sunglasses: I can’t wait to see their Blender integration.

Plus they are working on a bevel shader feature.

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reading thru their license;

What I find strange is the need to put their logo into my software/games. (pioneer/game license) I haven´t seen the Logo waiver option for purchase.

Edit; okay there are SDKs out there which demand In-game Credits like for example Bink Video or Oodle Compression but a Texturing tool!? that´s a new one for me.

This point in their license is void the moment they wrote it in;

2.6 This Agreement and the licenses granted by it may not be assigned, sublicensed, or otherwise transferred
by LICENSEE without the prior written consent of LICENSOR.

The EU law dictates that software licenses can be transferred between users and the author of software cannot oppose a resale.

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