Substance. Advise?
Soto
Posts: 1,450
Hi.
I am planning on buying a good 3D painting software.
Quixel is Windows only so that`s a no. Seems like Substance is the most popular anyway. But there are too many options, so I don`t know what to do.
There is Substance (subscription) with the option to own the software after 12 $19.90 payments and $49 at cancel.
There is the Substance Pack Indie at $197 on Steam (currently 51% off)
Is there an advantage from one to the other? I buy games at Steam, but I`m unsure if this Indie Pack is a good idea and will allow me to upgrade in a future at Allegoritmic, or if it`s outdated, or if it will limit me in any way compared to buying directly at Allegoritmic (which at $299, will not happen).
Then the monthly subscription lists an access to Substance Source (30 assets to download every month) which the Substance Pack doesn`t. Are those good with Iray? Allowed to texture products to sell here?
Then I also heard you have to wait I don`t know how many months to get the copy of the softwares aftter you completed the 12 payments, and you get the version at the moment of subscribing regardless of if there were updates allong the way...
Too many questions and decisions for someone who spends 20 minutes picking a cereal at the supermarket.
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Comments
What are yiou wanting to paint? Substance painter does not, yet, support painting across mutrliple maps or UDIMs so it requires remapping to paint a Daz human - this has been feature that was planned for a long time. 3D Coat has paint tools that don't suffer from that, thought it is more expensive and possibly not as nice (depoending on taste)
That`s good to know and a serious turn off. One of the things I wanted to do at some point was to texture or add details to Genesis characters, but mostly texture objects or clothing. I am impressed with the metalic scratches and borders shown in most examples, but that seems like a serious limitation to me, especially for such a big texturing software.
Basically I`d like a texturing solution that allows me to include those mesh-based details that would be so hard manually and add so much realism, baking ambient occlussion and layer edit things... I confess I`m not even sure I need all software included in the pack for this.
Blender is an option, and it's free, though a fairly steep learning curve. I use Mudbox at around $10 a month, it handles UDIM well, you just need to name the uv tiles according to its system. Has sculpting, painting, sculpt using diffuse maps, extract normals from multires sculpt. I haven't tried substance painter so I can't compare. I believe zbrush also has a cheaper 'Core' option now.
3DCoat sometimes has a sale in the summer. They may have had it already, I don't know for sure. When they do have sales, the pro is normally 100 off, which still makes it 279 bucks US, but if it paints on the maps that Daz figures have, it might be worth it - plus the extra features (tho if you have Zbrush, it's probably rendundant ;)). 3D Coat is on Steam also, but I don't know how much it is there. It also does all the types of painting you showed above.
Check for a 3D Coat sale mid to late July.
Laurie
Just want to say Substance is widely used amongst PA's and is a fabulous tool especially with Iray We do almost all of our texturing in Substance Painter now. There are way to many tools to turn it down.
Echoing Frank. I'm a big Substance user (sounds dodgy when you say it like that!) I had to make some small changes in my workflow to accomodate it (in terms of surfaces and UV maps), but I wouldn't be without it.
Substance painter 2.1 supports UDIM (as separate texture sets).
https://www.allegorithmic.com/blog/substance-painter-21-here
Not to paint across a whole model, though - as far as I am aware you can still paint on only one "texture set" at a time.
I use Substance, too, and that drawback is annoying. But I like it so much I work around it.
One big work around is using a lot of procedural elements, which ignore silly material boundaries.
Don't discount Mudbox as an option as well. I use it as a supplement to Substance when I need to paint across UDIMs. Other than that, Substance is my go-to.
I'm really hoping to get Mudbox once my art income stops bottoming out on the freeway
(Platinum club + Dropbox + Photoshop is manageable but still scraping by)
I had let my sub to it lapse since the direction of it was up in the air, but resubbed because I needed something with commercial allowance, and Mari is out of my price range. It seems it will be getting some updates for the 2018 version though, but I'm not holding my breath that it'll be anything substantial.
I have the whole set (Bitmap2Material, Substance Builder and Substance Painter) and I feel it's worth it.