[My SL Fashion]

Another pouty fish face.  whyyy?

[Substance Designer and Second Life]

I think it's off sale by now, but maybe this will help some people decide in the future.  I use Substance Designer to make textures for my personal builds in SL.  I love it, but you should know things going into it:

 

• It's a complicated program, much like Photoshop is.  There will be a LOT of learning to do.  
• Much of the program is focused toward game makers and 3d artists who have .sbs support directly in their product, so not all of the features will be useful to you.
• SL does not support .sbs subtance files, of course, so you'll have to export your textures to regular files.  
• You'll need to use the channel mixer node in Substance Designer if you want to put emissive, gloss, or environment maps into the alpha channels of your diffuse, normal, or specular maps, respectively.
• The 3D preview window does not really look the way things do in SL, so you'll want to use the "Local texture" feature of SL to preview your textures in-world
• ...but be aware there is a crash bug specific to SD, local textures in SL, and anything except .bmp files
• ...which means you can't preview emissive, gloss, or environment maps easily because bmp has no alpha

Lastly, it comes with a copy of Bitmap2Material "Lite" included, which doesn't have quite as much customization, but is still quite handy.

Now, all that said, I really like the program and I use it daily.  It's now my go-to for texture creation, instead of Photoshop.  I continually find new ways to construct textures in SD by generating various patterns, noises, and filters, with the occlusion or curvature maps baked from my 3d models used as blending masks for effects like weathering, rust, specular shine, etc.  It's really handy to see the general results of your texture graph in the preview window, adjusting sliders back and forth until you have the look you want.  I'm a fan, and I still haven't tapped this program's full potential.