My thoughts on first glance at Substance

Hey Guys,

So a few days ago I met up with the guys from Allegorithmic on my to look at adopting some of their pipeline for my own art. I ended up getting a complete walk through of Substance Designer 4 and the Substance Painter Alpha version by some of their tech guys and figured I would share some of my own thoughts.

The substance designer is a neat piece of kit. The idea is you make core materials (from cool noise generators or textures), then plug in a mesh, and a normal map (and maybe extras like a height map or world space normals, ao, cavity, etc) and use a node based system to get your final textures (it can figure out spec, gloss, diffuse all together). The neat part is that you can swap meshes and textures and get the same quality and material definition on a bunch of different assets using similar techniques (like making 150 guns really quickly). Non destructive workflow seemed to be pushed hard as well. If your AD needs one of the metals recalculated to have higher spec, you can batch export the materials all at once. It is also ready for version control software like perforce. The whole thing is built ready for physically based rendering, and supports custom shaders  (glsl) and channels.

The painter (which flaunts the new and fancy particle painting system seen here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmEawPCAtEQ ) was also very cool. On the surface it features all the basics you would expect from a painting program, but with 3d painting on the forefront. You can paint layers, etc etc, and even paint in different channels based on materials (like painting gold material on a part of a model which automatically paints in the right gloss, spec, diffuse, etc). You can set up custom channels and pull materials right out of substance. One really neat thing is that nothing is ever rasterized. If your AD needs to change a material that you painted before layering up damage, overlays, etc you can update your model and not lose any work.  Finally the particle painting was neat, especially for explicit textures. Setup and adjustments of your own seemed very similar to basic scripting that sets up custom parameters for the artist to tweak.

Anyway, it was a cool meeting and I plan to check out the personal version myself. Here are some final thoughts/TLDR

-Targeted at AAA pipeline integration, used already in quite a few places
-Substance makes making lots of the same final textures easier by automating the material masking
-Priority of benefits is Productivity>Overall texture size(not run time) > actual runtime benefits (there are not many)
-the painter is looking to be a strong 3d painting contender
-particle painting is useful for explicit details

Some final thoughts:


For me personally, I think that if I were to tackle a large project or environment on my own (with some ready defined materials, it would be great. The painter I cannot wait for but I have yet to work with Mari much so I cannot say how it competes. 
It will however stay in the back of my mind for later :)