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Your experiences with Substance Painter


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I wonder, Substance Painter, is it worth the money (and time investement to learn the program) for meshmakers in SL?
Who of you has experience with the program? What is your opinion?

So far I work mainly in Photoshop to texture my meshes. Besides I use Body Paint in c4d.

Anybody around who knows both Body Paint and Substance Painter?  Does SP add any value above Body Paint?

 

 

 

 

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I have the program -- and Substance Designer as well -- but I had no chance to work with it yet because I am busy working on a long term project. I can only offer an opinion not backed with actual experience: based on what I see about the program and users' comments, Substance Painter is the 3D painting tool with the best quality, features and price ratio on the market. Allegorithmic has a very favorable pricing policy for hobbists and independent game developers and is on par with other tools which costs hundreds of dollars. It has features which greatly simplifies the workflow, its particles painting is a feature not available in any other 3D texturing tool and it allows to work on textures in a non destructive way. Painter essentially is the Photoshop of 3D texturing and is used by professionals. Painter can produce textures of excellent quality.

That said, there are some things to consider: the learning curve is steep. There are many video tutorials not much written documentation. Previous experience with Photoshop can help a lot because you need to understand how filters can be used and how to work with channels and brushes. Also, Painter can create lots of maps and effects which can't be used in SL.

Despite the fact that I do not actively use them, I am big fan of Allegorithmic tools. So much so that I have created a community on Google+ frequented by pros, hobbists and a few SL users: https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/108955098539774060748 . There is also a good exchange of free Substance materials of excellent quality which can be used in Painter.

You may also want to read this review for another opinion: http://bit.ly/1GVHYGd

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Thanks for your reply.

I have been reading a some more in the meanwhile. What really seems interesting to me is the particle painting. A lot of other things I see, can be done in Bodypaint as well. Comments from C4D users are very different, some are very enthousiast, but there seem to be some downsides as well. The most important one for me is that SP doesn't export very well to Photoshop, the layers from SP seem to come out flattened.

A steep learning curve...hmmz. I was thinking maybe to download the free 30 days trial, but when you have to learn a lot before you get the pleasure out of it, I'm not sure it is worth the time investment.

I still don't master most features in Bodypaint...Studying your tools can be very helpful, but the result comes always in the end. But when you want  to realise your ideas you need them from the start. There are often too many ideas in the way to take the time to study new techniques. That causes that I mainly try to realise them it with the means that are at my disposal. 
When you look at those shiny polished tutorials it seemed all so easy...

 

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The fact that SP has the same features of other texturing tools is not surprising because at the end they all have one task to do. What makes a difference is how they do it. I suggest you look into SP's non-destructive workflow, which I believe is one of its strong point.

As for the steep learning curve, it all depends on your previous experience with other tools. I have a very basic experience with Photoshop but I suppose those who have some may find the way SP works more familiar. An understanding of what filters do and how to applly them certainly helps.

For the Photoshop export I can't say much. I have never seen any comment about it in the community I moderate. You may want to ask in the community if anyone had problems with it.

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Indigo Mertel wrote:

For the Photoshop export I can't say much. I have never seen any comment about it in the community I moderate. You may want to ask in the community if anyone had problems with it.

I came across that in a discussion on the Steam forum. A texture artist is there explaining what extra steps he has to take because of lack of export support. Then one of the developpers replies that it is very complicated to build an exporter for Photoshop, the current one was build on request of one of their customers.

That says a lot to me: the developers did not think about Photoshop in the first place, when they started building SP. The most know texturing program. It might not be a letdown for other users, but for me a good integration with Photoshop is a basic requirement. I sell my Photoshop files with my meshes in SL. "Photoshop friendly" is my key word.

In Bodypaint I can just open my Photoshop file, I can work with my existing layers, open and close them, add new layers, paint a bit in BP, save the file, open it again in Photoshop, add something that is easier to do in Photoshop, save it, open it again in Bodypaint, and so on, all non-destructive.

An big asset for SP is their viewport. You can just paint without having to render your model all the time to see the sharp details of what you are doing.

I'm still not sure, but so far I get the idea that it is more interesting for people who make things for for example Unity or Unreal, then for SL. It might become handy in SL 2.0. But when other SL creators can convince me otherwise, of course I'll adjust my opinion.

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