I’ve been eyeing substance painter since Black Friday. It’s $99 as of now. I’ve seriously been considering picking it up since the price is so low.
My question is, how well does it fit in the Blender pipeline? Is it really a time saver?
I’m still pretty new in my Blender 3D artist hobby, but I’m really taking it seriously and will be willing to learn it (substance painter) when I get to that point.
Can someone who primarily uses Blender, but who regularly uses Substance Painter speak to this?
I don’t mind paying for a piece of software that’s going to help…I just hate to buy it and then 4-6 months later realize I don’t need/use/like it.
I decided to go with Live. You can use all Substance software, and still get the license when you paid enough. + you get access to substance source, which offers really nice materials.
Yes, it is a huge time saver if you know how to use it. Depends on what kind of job you do.
My desire/hope is to make 3D animated shorts. Games are not out of the question, but as of now, not where my desire currently is.
Substance Painter is what I’m really looking at…and maybe the Pack. I guess a more focused question is, what does the software offer as far as ease/timesaving over how it might be done in Blender, or that Blender can’t do or at least do well?
designer has a wide range of uses from procedural material creation, procedural filters, 2D effects and node based filter creation (using visual programing).
in designer you basically create a “substance” which can be scaled and interactively changed on the target program.
the target program can be any software which understands the “substance” data. Some examples are substance painter, Unity, Unreal Engine, most proprietary 3d suites.
Blender however doesn’t directly support substances. You need to convert them to bitmaps.
So to answer your question, painter is a very good painting and baking tool. It has basic materials you can use and edit. But it shines when you create custom substances in designer and then import those substances to painter. There are some basic tools which allow you to create materials inside painter. But it is not as flexible as designer. You can still save those materials created in painter and create your own library so it can be used without designer. You can also directly save layers and finished paints as a bundle called “Smart Materials” which is very handy.
One of the best features of painter is the ability to work non destructively. Even after you paint and add a bunch of layers and filters you can go back to blender edit your UVs + topology or you high poly mesh and then go back to painter and your painted model will transfer all the data to your new base model. Its pretty good.
Also with this sıbstance workflow painting a model becomes super fast because you use the material as a base and focus on adding details. For example you paint a sword model, for it you create a steel material save it as a template (as a material or smart material); then when you load a new model for a new sword or a dagger, you can just import you steel material from you previous model change some settings / add some filters and you have a new model created from the base steel material. This kind of workflow greatly improves the speed.
This can be achieved by using cycles library of pre made materials and customizing them. But painters non destructive workflow and easy baking tools greatly improve the experience.
But don’t forget; you can’t import substances to blender. You convert them to bitmaps and bitmaps can take a lot of resources which can effect your render times.