Another Gedd Exclusive News Release!
Joe.Cotter
Posts: 3,362
in The Commons
J/k, sort of anyways. But do have some interesting news. It appears Alegorithmic includes IRay in Substance Designer in the new 5.3 release. This bodes well for texture artists and for people looking for IRay textured models. Alegorithmic also released a video on Using the Nvidia iRay Renderer. So, anyone else out there find this news interesting?
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So, I guess the natural followup question is, if/when we will be able to use Substances in DAZ Studio directly?
An interesting thing to notice here is how easy it is to test materials with various HDRIs, simply drag and drop pretty much.
With the same render engine (IRay) in Substance Designer and in DAZ Studio, this should provide a very nice environment for developing materials that one can see what the end result should be right in the design environment.
Me! It will make a huge difference to be able to see things in Iray as we work on them. Can't wait for them to add it into painter.
Substance Painter has some nice physics based brushes.
Ok, so another tidbit related to this. I logged into the Allegorithmic forums and asked the question anyone here looking to use this to create materials should want to know, can Substance Designer export .mdl files, and the answer is, yes. So, materials created in SD should be directly importable to the DAZ environment.
A quick note on what Substance Designer is vs Substance Painter for anyone who isn't familiar with them. Substance Designer is for creating procedural materials whereas Substance Painter is a 3D texture painter with tools unlike any others in the industry (like the physics brushes.) Both are different products and both are worth checking out.
Their toolset is top notch and the company is making strides into the industry which could leave them as the pre-eminant texture tool based on quality, price and response to market direction (which is moving very fast nowadays.)
That price thing can't be overstated. Man I love allgorithmic. The best payment plan out there, (Barring, you know, free) and they have so much fun stuff. Between them and blender I'm a happy, happy, camper
Also the tutorials they put out (for free!) Well organized clear and easy to jump to exactly what you want to do.
A player would be super groovy but I have no clue how much work they are. I have my fingers crossed of course but there is no telling about when/if as far as that goes. Our dev team is working like mad men already getting some other things sorted.
" I logged into the Allegorithmic forums and asked the question anyone here looking to use this to create materials should want to know, can Substance Designer export .mdl files, and the answer is, yes. So, materials created in SD should be directly importable to the DAZ environment."
I had heard we were going to be able to but not that it had already been implemented. You would think they would have made a bigger deal about that. Or is it just a big deal to those of us who are not in love with shader mixer? I've sort of been scuffing my feet on my next Iray shaders waiting on this to happen.
"Their toolset is top notch and the company is making strides into the industry which could leave them as the pre-eminant texture tool based on quality, price and response to market direction (which is moving very fast nowadays.)"
The combo of substance and Iray is looking to be a very dominant force in the future. And MDL even more so. As J. Cade said the price is amazing and with the addion of substance share and substance drop you have so much from day one that it is pretty amazing.
Excuse me while I get back into my chair...
Simply amazing stuff. Gedd, thanks for posting this!
Glad you like it. :)
Meanwhile, I thought of a couple more questions to clarify the limits of exporting to .mdl format. Rather then requote everything the questions and answer can be seen here on the Allegorithmic forums. I will mention for Khory and anyone else interested that "Substance Painter will feature IRay rendering sometime next year."
Oh, and I'm impressed at how quickly they answer questions. Same day both this morning and evening.
All of this brings up another question. I wonder how much work it would be to implement substances in DAZ Studio, if it's something the DAZ team could work out with Allegorithmic or if it's even something that would be of benefit for where DAZ sees the companies future. It would seem that perhaps between DAZ Studio and their new game engine product (forget name at the moment) it might be of interest if they could justify the cost of implementing it.
Considering these bullet points from the Substance pages:
Realtime in-app Substance textures tweaking
Light
100x smaller texture files for faster downloads and faster starts
Dynamic
Enables runtime texture modifications
I'm sure many people would love to see that type of functionality in a DAZ/IRay environment. But of course I have no idea of how difficult it would be either technically or license wise, so... Even without direct DAZ Studio integration this is definately headed in a good direction. :)
Adding a substance player seems so logical. But I have no idea how complex it would be or any potential costs etc. It is however something that would make pretty much anyone go "Sqwweeeee!" Especialy the parts like being able to adjust a dirt level or aging as you go. I can't help but think that more integration is logical. We will just have to wait and see. But it would add amazing flexability to so many types of products.
At first I was kind of bummed that painter is getting Iray later. It is so easy to use. But since I tend to focus on shaders so often I suspect that I am better of with them starting with designer. Yea..how all about me is that?
BTW.. I can't get that link to work for some reason.
Link should be fixed, try now.
I have no idea how to even begin with something like this, but I did get curious and went to the main site. I see it can be used with iClone6 (which I have to start learning this year) and is integrated with a lot of programs. It looks really interesting Gedd! (The prices were good, $20 a month or purchase outright $300 if I recall correctly.)
Alot (most) of substances you can download at Allegorithmic don't work with iClone and not all features are supported by iClone.
I think a Substance Player for DS would have to come from Allegorithmic - it would be nice to have.
Iray/MDL support is a new feature this week (or end of last perhaps) - SD 5.3 - though I think there has been a public beta for a while.
I'm curious, in the video you linked, it said render in an unlimited resolution; what exactly was that?
Substance Designer is for creating procedural textures, so it can create them at any resolution. The nice thing about this is that it doesn't take any more video memory for a small textured area or a very large one with procedurals. The downside is that it only works with a repetitive type of texture.
What would be a nice option would be a shader that incorporates layers of procedural textures with masks, where the masks are the only thing that cover large portions of or the full object. This type of approach would keep down texture space in video memory but at a cost of computing the shader at runtime.
I can invision a development environment in the future that would incorporate a single development path that would be able to adjust for different environments based on memory available vs processing power to go from a range of compute shader at runtime through partial precomputed to fully precomputed. Who knows if it will actually happen though.
Ahh, ty, I used procedural textures in blender; I wonder if that is apossibility as more power becomes available; it's just as likely that they'll figure something else to do with the extra processing power.
Substance Designeer can modulate its output according to things like occlusion or concavity, it isn't simply a tiling pattern.
Yes that's true, thank you for the clarification Richard.
However, those modulations work in an environment when working with the substance rather then an exported .mdl file from what I understand. The output (exported .mdl file for instance) has to be either stretched across the entire mesh or those modulations get lost when tiled if I understand correctly. That is one of the advantages of an environment that directly supports substances, or so I thought.
Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
The thing is, I'm not sure exactly how this is handled between Substance Designer and exporting to an .mdl file yet. I haven't played with it to see and I haven't seen definitive documentation on it yet. I know that the Substance Designer team said that substances "are flattened into an .mdl file on export" and that public parameters, i.e. being adjustable after export isn't supported, but I'm not sure what the exact limitations are. In a fully enclosed environment like Cycles and Blender I know that maps are directly addressable in the Shader so one can create a shader that will work across objects to say focus procedural scratches on convex areas but it's this type of functionality that I'm not sure how or if it will carry over once flattened to .mdl to work in an external render engine environment.
To try and clarify, Blender can hand off a cavity/curvature map* on the fly to the render engine environment through the shader. Typically, if we export maps the map is no longer dynamically generated but rather an 'image' is created that is then addressed. It is this dynamically generated functionality vs exporting an image to go along with the shader that I am referring to. A dynamicalliy generated map means that a shader can be used on different objects and the requisite map will be generated and integrated at runtime. Of course this map will be different and the resulting effect may vary quite a bit from object to object, so without making certain parameters public, this would be of limited use but it may still effect the memory vs processing equation. I'm still researching this at the moment so I don't know.
Hopefully this makes some sense.
* If anyone is looking for this in Blender v2.74, it's called 'Pointiness' on the Geometry shader node.
Pretty sure by flatten they mean turn into .png files for each of the outputs that you have added to the substance. I was going to check and make sure I was sure but there is a glitch in saving that is preventing that.
The exported MDL only gets you half way there anyway. For use in D|S a shader must be built around the file. The bricks come in, but unconnected (at least, everything I've tried works this way). Simple MDLs are no trouble wiring up, but others aren't so obvious.
By "flattened" I take that to mean there are no export declarations and any values are hard-coded. That makes sense for an automatic tool, and if that's the case, it's not the end of the world. Much of the battle with MDL is figuring out how to construct the functions. It would at least provide a head start.
Using the Nvidia iRay Renderer does anyone else think that the voice sounds like Jonathan from Blneder Cookie
Not quite, but similar.
@Khory and Tobor, that's pretty much the impression I had other then the bricks coming in unconnected. I hadn't considered it, but am not surprised. My experience with this type of thing is that untill it's fully tested, there's no way to predict the gotchas that one would run across. As to the glitch, I saw in the forums someone saying they were having problems and there wasn't an answer any of the times I checked back so that gave me the impression it was an unsolved issue.
It's early in the game so all of this is no surprise, just cross our fingers that it will all work out how we hope it will.
Well, if it is flattening to a PNG, that's hardly useful IMO. It's the PBR settings that we're after, and those cannot be transcribed in an image. We already have plenty of procedural-to-image applications, like Filter Forge, and I understand this is also the domain to the Allegorithmic applications. But in Iray-land, we need those MDL functions, even if the settings are hard-coded. We can turn those values into variables and export them for use in Shader Mixer.
So this is why I'm hoping the term "flattened" is in regard to the declarative aspects of the MDL file itself, rather than solely a baked PNG image.
It isn't an MDL editing program or writing program so I expect the presets that it generates to be fairly basic. The settings could easily be 100 percent map driven and that is pretty much what I am expecting. Keep in mind that using the Iray view port what you see is what you get as far as the final MDL output in any program. There really shouldn't need to be any tweaking if it is created properly.
Not sure I follow. I understand it may produce Iray presets without user parameters, but that's not the end of the world, as MDL files can be manually edited to change that. It's a far cry better than stumbling around with the few MDL examples that are out there.
Other than for textures, I'm trying to understand how the "flattening" applies to PNG files Maybe we're talking about two different things, but the thread on the Allegorithmic site is referring to MDL. Yes, you could take their MDL preset and baked textures into D|S, but in a better world you still want to tweak if yuo're using D|S for the final render. A "flattened" MDL (no user parameters exposed) is a good start, but I want it all. The "all" is using their engine to figure out the more obtuse aspects of MDL syntax and functions. That may not be their intention, but that's mine.