Something I forgot to mention in my last post was that a lot of added functionality for DS comes from outside developers creating plugins. LAMH, Reality, etc… If the market was viable, it would probably be more likely that an outside developer would develop a plugin then DS develop it in-house.
Shaders allow one to use bitmap, normal maps, ao.. etc inside the shader already btw, and they can be dynamic. You might be thinking of the shaders exposed through the DS interface, not custom built shaders. What my point was, is one can provide a lot of the functionality shown using Substance Designer by using the tools to create custom shaders that are already available inside DS, not that the surface materials in the basic interface could do that. I don’t know if one can use vector (SVG) formats in current shaders but I’m guessing that if one goes right to coded shaders one could, they would loose the graphical interface however. I’m not the best to be comparing though as I haven’t played with custom shaders yet inside DS but have only watched some of the training videos so far (and skimmed some other reference materials.)
The interesting thing with Substance Designer is that it is used by other engines, Maya, Unity, etc… so it could provide a way to create shaders that would transfer between various work environments. That could be the real selling point.
Edit: I realized your reference to ‘dynamic’ might refer to the creation process of the shader, in that one can see during the development cycle the various parameter modifications. The built in tools are dynamic for the final result in that the shader can have variable inputs for various channels of the shader, but during the creation process itself that is not the case afiak. This is also a valid point. It could definitely make the creation of shaders more efficient.
