Substance answers !

Hello there,

I have a question about substances: Is there any chance to load the substances in run-time? I mean not from Unity editor, but for example from Windows standalone build load .sbar file (from external location) and generate the textures? If not, is there any plan for the future?

Thanks.

 

Does anyone have a problems in unity 4.3 with massive(like 200+ procedural materials with 4 textures each 512x512) substance archives?
The problem is, when i select the substance archive, unity editor loads all the textures from the procedural materials that belong to that archive into memory (judging by task manager) and when it reaches around 2gig it crashes, with no exception. This problem appeared in unity 4.3.
Even if i split the archive into multiple archives with less procedural materials on each, it still loads them all into memory and crashes if i perform reimport for the archives ( which i need to do after creating some more procedural materials in archive from code ).
Any help, please?

Update:
It appears that if procedural materials are set to build on level load mode, they use a lot less memory in editor.

 

Hi

Indeed, having a single SBSAR files with 200+ material instances is a bit too much. As the real underlying asset is the SBSAR, it is the expected behavior that clicking on it triggers the generation of all related material instances before displaying the Inspector. You should create several copies of the SBSAR file and assign/recreate small batches of instances to each copy so that it's more easily manageable by the Editor. A user with a strong Unity/Substance kung-fu created a script to help with this task, available in this topic.

If you have a small 4.2 repro project that opens and generates fine in 4.2 but crashes in 4.3, I'd be glad to get a copy of it so that I could look into this.

Best Regards,
Eric

 

I don't have a 4.2 project.
The thing is, i wrote a manager that has references to all needed archives and manages their procedural materials in some way(generates/deletes), so even if i split the original 200+ archive into several smaller archives, the manager still needs the references to all of them(for my needs). But by having the references, the manager triggers loading of the procedural material textures into memory, and crashes the editor.
It seems that i will have to workaround this problem by setting the procedural material's load behavior to 'None' or 'Build on level load', as those 2 behaviors have a small footprint on editor's memory usage for each procedural material ( few kb per procedural material), extract the textures using bitmap exporting and use those textures with regular unity materials.

 

As far as I know it's possible with Unity Bundle.

 

Is it possible to mimic ExportBitmaps functionality which appears when clicking a cog in procedural material but without having to select a folder manually each time? i have found this thread, seems that it is not possible atm, can anyone shed some light on this issue?

UPDATE: So my solution for skipping the modal window that appears when invoking ExportBitmaps method is to simulate button press on the opened modal window (Select Folder in my case). I don't know if it is possible on mac, but i've managed to do it on windows.

 

I have this strange problem where a *.sbsar I adapted from the pod example of Substance Designer 4 (I added a glossiness map) is not working correctly in Unity, more specifically with the latest version of Marmoset Skyshop. As the Marmoset shaders expect the gloss map as the alpha channel of the specular output, I created a RGB-A Merge node with the specular color map (as RGB) and the glossiness map (as A) which outputs to the specular output of the substance. So far so good, everything works in the Substance Designer. I verified that the alpha channel really does include the correct (glossiness) information.

When I publish the substance as a *.sbsar and import it in Unity I get two issues:

1. If I set the Unity Bumped Specular shader on the substance material, the specular is *automagically* wired into the diffuse alpha channel. This is expected. However when I set the Marmoset Bumped Specular IBL, the specular map is not *automagically* wired into the Specular(RGB) Gloss(A) slot of the shader. I read in the Marmoset changelog that Substances now work out of the box with Marmoset shaders.

2. So even if this is not what I expected, I check "generate all outputs" and should be able to set the diffuse (A) to "Source (A)" and the specular (A) to "Source (A)", too. This should stop any automatic and retain the glossiness map in the specular output. Then I would continue to drop the generated specular output on the correct slot of the Marmoset shader Specular (RGB) Gloss (A). Problem is, that the alpha channel of the specular is what looks like a greyscale version of the diffuse (might also be a greyscale of the specular RGB). The alpha channel of the specular is somehow overwritten even when I set it to source (A) and the glossiness map in that channel is lost in unity. If I double-click the *.sbsar and inspect it in Substance Designer 4, it clearly show the correct glossiness map in the alpha channel of the specular though. Is this a bug?

My only solution to this problem was to create a output (for instance glossiness, but can be anything else than diffuse or specular) in Substance Designer, put exactly the specular RGB in the RGB of that map and the glossiness greyscale in the A of that output, I can use that output with generate all outputs and manually drop it into the Specular RGB (gloss A) slot of the Marmoset Bumped Specular IBL shader.

This is really driving me nuts, I hope you understand what's wrong and are not lost in the text above. Am I doing anything wrong with generate outputs? Are there any special steps I missed in the process? Any experience on this issue how you put glossiness of a substance into Marmoset shader is very, very welcome!


Unity Specular RGB


Unity Specular A (This is wrong!)


Substance Designer 4 Specular A (This is correct and presumably lost even when using "Generate all outputs" and Source (A) for the Specular output!

 

Hello all, I'm posting here since this seems like a very Unity-specific problem. This substance I made does not seem to work correctly in Unity, but works fine in Substance Designer/Player. Here is an image to demonstrate:



The top left shows what it looks like in SD/SP. The bottom left is what I get in Unity. I've also asked for help on the allegorithmic forums with an sbs file attached:

http://forum.allegorithmic.com/index.php/topic,787.0.html

Thank you for your time.

 

Hi dixitalgorismi. I'm having exactly the same problem. Have you found a solution?

 

Hello,

This has been identified as a bug and will be fixed in Unity 4.5

Cheers,

Wes

 

I'm having a problem with blue substances. I have a substance on a mesh that is in a prefab that gets instantiated. No mater what setting I use in the substance, when I instantiate the prefab the substance is blue and has not been generated. What is the procedure to use substances that are on instantiated objects?

 

@arkon, sounds like worth bug reporting. The blue substance means the procedural stuff has not generated yet. However, imho I don't think Unity should render it in any frames, until it is generated. maybe there are tricks or workarounds too...

 

If I were to create a model asset that utilizes a substance file for the texture, when a user without Substance Designer loads the asset into Unity would they get access to all of its substance controls?

 

Yes that's correct! You just have to give them a substance archive (.sbar) file.

edit: I should add, because this gets me every time: you may not see the substance parameters in the unity inspector unless you click on the icon to the left of the "shader" label. There should really be a disclosure triangle there.

 

You just have to make sure that you expose the parameters that you want them to have access to. Also make sure that it is a substance file that you created or has clear redistribution rights.

 

Hello makeshiftwings, Trying to use this code but getting the error in the console of

"InvalidCastException: Cannot cast from source type to destination type.
AnimateLiquid.Awake () (at Assets/AnimateLiquid.cs:10)"

i'm new to this, so any help would be great

 

It seems that generating a procedural texture (modifying a substance parameter and then regenerating a texture) is not supported on mobile platforms? Is this correct? I've tried all the different substance build options but our project crashes when run on a device (Nexus 4 in this case).

The error message is: 05-03 19:55:35.314: A/libc(25520): Fatal signal 11 (SIGSEGV) at 0x00000004 (code=1), thread 25618 (UnitySubstanceT)

 

I get the message "Failed to apply substance texture outputs", this is happening when I'm rebuilding the material in runtime, this will sometimes occur very late after I have rebuilt it or immediately.

I'm using instantiate to create new instances if that helps, the work around method stopped creating new instances unfortunately.
Thanks.

 

Hey guys... I have a question in regards to using Substances in Unity at much higher than 2048. For my current project, I have character models that use very high res textures (4096x4096) and it is needed for this for close ups during battles and in engine cutscenes. Do you guys have any plans in the future to raise this limit to allow for higher fidelity effects? It would be awesome to see this limit removed.

I am really enjoying Substance designer

 

I've asked this before but never got an answer, though maybe the Substance folk have an answer. Unity now allows Custom Material Inspectors: https://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Components/SL-CustomMaterialEditors.html

But if you use one with a Substance, it doesn't display any of the substance properties (the "Procedural Properties" section). Is there any way to get a custom material inspector to work with a Substance?

 

anyone know of good tutorials?

tutorials in building a substance from scratch, or editing 1 that's already been made?

 

Hello,

We have our latest series on Substance Designer 4 which covers all aspects of Substance on how to use Substance Designer. Please take a look at this series and if you have any questions, please let me know.


https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB0wXHrWAmCwLRTzdb-RxadGk_xBBQKar

Cheers,

Wes

 

This is a good question. I will speak with the developers to see if this works. We are upgrading the Unity plugin for 4.5 so there may be changes for features such as custom inspectors for materials.

Cheers,

Wes

 

Hello,

Awesome to hear you are enjoying Substance. The current Unity build is using the Substance CPU engine and the reason for the 2K cap in resolution. The GPU engine allows for 4K resolution. The Unity plugin is only built for the CPU. I can check with the developers to see if a GPU version is in the works. I know that we are working on an updated version for Unity 4.5.

Cheers,

Wes

 

The user would not need Substance Designer. If you author a custom substance with Substance Designer, you can distribute that substance (.sbsar) to Unity users and the exposed parameters you create are accessible.

Cheers,

Wes

 

HI again,

So I need help with this problem,

I can't open/import .sbsar files, I see the files as white pages. (This happens with ALL sbsar files)
See image: .

Things I already tried:
- Install unity on another computer and import a sbsar file, happened the same thing;
- Re-install unity on my computer;
- I sent a sbsar file to a friends computer (with Windows 8.1) and it worked there.

My Specs:
- I have Windows 8.1 on main computer and Windows 8.0 on the computer i tried.
- Unity updated to the last version.
- Windows is updated.

Please, I have a school project to do and I need this working.

Thank you,
João Palma

 

@widden Check the path of your project. It doesn't support paths with "non-US" characters such as diacritics (é, è, à...) or anything like that. This is probably due to your Windows user folder (which matches your name on Windows 8 ). I moved all my Unity projects to a root folder such as "C:\Unity Projects" to avoid those type of issues.

 

That would be a GODSEND.

 

Is there a way to have textures generated through a substance have a "bypass srgb sampling" option like Unity textures do in the "advanced" option? When working in linear space rendering, this would be helpful.

EDIT: Also, it would be really cool if colors could be exposed like images can be.

 

Hey, I just came across a pretty big issue that is limiting my use of Substance in Unity.

For exposed textures in a substance, I cannot use textures generated by other substances, only "regular" bitmaps. I don't see why this should be the case, and it's limiting my use of substances in the way that I want to use them. Hopefully this can be addressed, because the benefits for using substances in my project is immense, but this is severely limiting me.

 

Hello,
we are using substance in our android game in order to change color of the cars textures in runtime. We are using two sbsar for each car (one for the body and one for the wheels).
Everything works like it should in the editor, but on some android device (LGP700, Samsung tab2), if there are more than 2 cars (so more than 4 different substances) it crashes immediately after loading the app, without error messages. Replacing substance materials with standard materials everything works like it should.
We are using Unity 4.3.3.
how to fix this issue?
Thanks,
Michele Di Lena

 

The official Allegorithmic forums get very little traffic, and no one has been able to help me there. Hopefully someone here can.
I'm trying to use external inputs for a substance in order to keep the file size reasonable with a large number of copies of the substance (since each object with its own settings needs a separate copy of the substance).
When baking I set the maps to Linked so it would export them, then I left the inputs inside the graph blank so I could plug the external bit maps in manually inside Unity.
On the whole this works fine, but for some reason my Position map alone does not work. The substance just acts as if it isn't there and does all the subsequent graph computations wrong (like having dirt just blindly cover the whole thing rather than going from the bottom up or top down).
If I just embed the Position map directly into the substance, it works fine.
I'm trying to make an asset, and this issue has stopped my work dead in its tracks. I can't find the solution anywhere, and I'm concerned it's just a huge bug in SD and/or Unity itself.

 

Are you using grayscale position maps or full x/y/z? If doing grayscale, try making that input a color input and using a gradient node to convert it to grayscale. I remember some comment somewhere about problems w/ grayscale inputs. You might want to search for that and maybe they had a solution.

 

Yes, thank you! I've been working on this all day without progress.
You were right, all I had to do was convert the Position from a Grayscale to RGB.
So basically Grayscale inputs don't work with Unity. That does indeed seem like a bug, but at least there's a simple way around it.

 

I've browsed through this thread but still don't have a clear idea what Substance Designer, Painter, Indie all DO exactly, so I'll post some concrete questions that hopefully can be answered clearly by users/Allegorithmic.

1. Let's say I model a house. Can I use Substance Software to texture it with cracked and weathered bricks without having any starting brick texture? (Meaning, I have no brick jpg, png, gif or any other brick image file sitting on my hard drive).

2. Do substances cause a performance hit or compatibility issues on mobile devices, especially some older devices?

3. If I launch a mobile game using bitmap textures that takes up 50 mb of space on the App Store, can I use Substance Software with procedural textures to reduce my game's download size to, say, 10 mb?

4. Is Substance Painter required to apply the results of Substance Designer to a model?

5. Does Bitmap2Material take an existing bitmap and turn it into a procedural substance?

6. Is there a unified software that combines all the functionality of Substance Designer, Substance Painter, and B2M, or do I constantly need to be opening and closing applications in order to produce one usable substance?

7. Do substances work with Unity Free?

8. If I buy the Substance Software for Unity, can I use it with PC, Maya, UE4, etc, or do I have to buy a separate license for each software/platform?

9. Mainly I'm tired of having to buy individual bitmap texture packs to apply to my game models, especially if I'm looking for a very specific texture, e.g. a "stone walkway with various sized stones, that is weathered and cracked, with green and brown moss growing out of every other crack." Will Substance Software solve all my texture problems and I never have to buy a bitmap texture pack ever again? Hallelujah!

Thanks for any clarifications!

 

I've been using the substance database in my latest game and I too would like these answers as I keep getting this nagging feeling I'm using them wrong. For example I used 4 substances on a model of a ship that gets instantiated at runtime in the scene. No mater what settings I use the ship appears all blue for a couple of seconds in the scene before the substances activate. Very annoying.

 

1. Yes. For this you'd use Substance Designer to create one, or buy a pre-authored brick substance that will allow to you create various brick textures by tweaking the exposed values.

2. There may be a startup hit as the textures are generated from the substance. After that it shouldn't be any different than a normal texture.

3. Yes, if textures account for 40+MB of your download size.

4. No. It's a totally different product that really doesn't have a lot to do with substances, other than that it can use them. It doesn't output substances at all, just texture map sets.

5. No. It takes an existing bitmap and generates various textures like diffuse, normal, height, etc from that bitmap. But it can do so at runtime, so all you have to include in your build is the diffuse, and it will generate the others, so can reduce your download size.

6. No, but they are really different products. Substance Designer is the only one that creates substances. B2M is a substance like the ones created by SD (just very advanced). Substance Painter is really just a texture painting app, but allows you to paint full materials (albedo, normal, spec, roughness, metalic, etc) at once and can use substances as an input.

7. Yes.

8. You can use it with anything that supports substances. You actually don't use SD directly with Unity/UE4/Maya, etc. You create the substance in SD, then import that into whatever software supports it.

9. It could. If you're good at creating procedural materials. It's really just a different way of doing game textures. If you were good at texture art, you would never have to buy another bitmap texture pack again because you could create your own. Same w/ SD. If you're good at creating procedural textures, then you'll never have to buy one again because you can create your own. It's just a different way of creating them that is non-destructive and allows you to tweak things inside the game engine/3d software that uses them while keeping all the different maps it generates (spec/gloss/metalic/albedo/etc) in sync.


B2M is the way to go if you just want to create full materials from images from CGTextures and the like. It'll make a single image into a lot of different maps for you to use. Since it's a substance, it'll work in whatever package supports substances.

Substance Designer is a node based editor for creating substances in the first place. It's very powerful, and I can create cool substances even though I suck at painting/drawing. So it's great for a technical user like me who has no artistic skills. The created substances can be used in any 3D software that supports substances, including Substance Painter.

Substance Painter is a texture painting application that allows you to paint multiple textures at once. So you can paint your albedo, normal, specular and gloss all at once so they match up. It can use substances, but doesn't create or output them, it outputs a set of texture maps.

Allegorithmic offers trial versions of all of them, so pick them up and give them a try and see what best fits your abilities and needs.

EDIT: Picking up a pack of Substances might also be an option. It's just like buying a texture pack, except there's sliders to modify each of the substances so each substance is really like 100 slightly (or completely) different textures. They have some free substances available that you could download to see how they work and how much use you can get out of each one.

 

Thanks niosop! Some more questions as I read your response in depth:

10. Can Procedural Substances be combined with some sort of atlasing to save on draw calls? Let's say I have 3 different rocks, each with their own procedurally generated substance. If I don't do some sort of workaround, it will be 1 draw call per rock right? What if I want to use different substances on each rock, but get 1 draw call max for all 3 rocks?

11. By "get good at creating procedural materials" do you mean it takes an artist's skill level to create substances? Do I need to know how to paint landscapes from scratch, etc. I am more of a coder than an artist, so I'm thinking of using substances to save time, not invest 6 months to learn how to paint first.

Thanks for your fast and helpful answers!

 

Since I'm starting from a base image, going this route won't save me any of 50 mb app size right? I'm assuming the base image has to be included in the build.

 

Ahh, this is reassuring. Hypothetically, with your nonexistent artistic skills, do you think you could start from absolutely nothing and create a "stone walkway with various sized stones, that is weathered and cracked, with green and brown moss growing out of every other crack" texture that looks AAA?

 

SD allows you to link substances into another substance graph. So in SD you'd bring your three substances in, link them all to your new graph, scale and transform them so each output to a quadrant of your new output and then layout the UVs of the rocks into quadrant they belong to, which would give you your texture atlas.

Using Substance Designer is different than painting. I'm a programmer, not an artist, but SD fits well with me since you're programmatically creating the textures using a node based editor. It's a great tool for technical artists and coders. If you've ever used something like Mapzone or Genetica then it's similar (but better). It's going to take some time to get good with it (like any other tool) but it's a different skillset than a traditional texture artist.

As far as B2M saving build size, it depends. If you were using diffuse, normal and specular textures, and you use B2M to generate the normal and specular from the diffuse, then you've saved 2/3 of the download size by generating them instead of including them. If you were only using diffuse in the first place, then B2M wouldn't save you anything.

Yes, I believe that I could. I wouldn't though. I spent the money on the Substance Database (expensive but handy, and a great learning tool since you can look at how they created each one), so what I'd likely do is bring in a stone substance and some that had some sort of cracking/stone type layout and something that had moss, and combine them to create exactly what I wanted. Then I'd expose the various parameters in the substance (stone size, crack amount, moss amount, stone color, moss color, etc) and bring it into Unity and tweak it in place to get it to look good with the surrounding objects. Even starting from scratch, I'd have a MUCH better chance of getting something that looks good out of it than if I tried to do it in Photoshop from scratch.

Like I said, download some of the free substances and play with them to get an idea of what's possible. There's also a gallery on the Allegorithmic site of Substances they have for sale that will give you an idea. Then watch some youtube videos (they have some great tutorial series), and then download the trial and play with it yourself to see if it's a good fit for you or not. I'm a great believer in procedural textures, since it fits the way my brain works, but it's not for everyone.

 

So to be perfectly realistic and save time/effort (since I don't have a lot of time nor texturing skills), I would not only need to buy these Substance Software, but also buy pre-made substances. I suspect this is where most of the expense will lie? As I recall, the substance database costs over a thousand dollars or so...

So ultimately in the end, to create decent looking textures, I'd be paying for textures anyway (by buying substances).

I need to figure out if the other benefits are worth that cost, since I only use diffuse maps anyway (I'm always trying to make the smallest mobile builds possible).

I really appreciate all your detailed answers. You should be the FAQ guy for Substance Designer =)

 

Yeah, if you're going for AAA quality, you're going to pay for it in some way. Either by buying stuff to speed it up, or by spending time to do it yourself.

In your situation I'd say give the Substance Designer trial a try. It's going to be the best way to reduce download size, and you may end up loving the way it works (I know I do). The other option might be B2M. If you only use the diffuse channel due to size and not shader performance issues, then it would allow you to use normal/specular/ao maps (and in Unity 5, other PBR inputs) without increasing your build size any. Auto tiling and light cancellation are handy as well.

Dedicate a day to watching SD videos and messing around in the trial and that will give you an idea of whether it clicks with you or not and won't be time wasted. Just a few minutes with the B2M trial should let you know if it will help you or not.

 

Watching the videos now. Everything makes a lot more sense now after your rundown. Thanks again niosop!

 

Very good run down Niosop... also be aware that if you are going to use Substances in game, you are capped to a 2k resolution... so for stuff like high detail characters, you will have to split your model into 2 UV (head and body for this to work). Can anyone at Unity be able to up the res to about 4k for substances? Maybe @Aras can chime in on this topic

 

Hello, I think that this is the place for this question

I have bought some substances designer textures in the Unity asset store, and also bought and own the Indie pack software (Substance designer 4 + Substance Painter 1 + b2m 3) and my question is

Can I in some way mix substance texture I have bought with this MK GLOW shaders? maybe mixing it using substance designer importing the MK Glow as custom shader?

I mean that I want to have the same substance textures with the additional features of the MK Glow shaders (have them in the inspector part) so I have both on the same material/shader

Because as far as I know you can´t have substance + another shader separated in the same 3d model, or maybe I am wrong and could be possible, but I have tried to make it with double material and it does not work as expected, maybe because I am doing it wrong.

Or maybe should I export the 3D model and make the double material texture in a external 3D software or to Substance painter, and then import it again to Unity?

Thanks very much for any help

Best regards

 

Hello, I have this problem :
When I want to change number of bricks on brick generator by using playmaker, the action change only default0 parameter (x number of bricks).
Do you know how to change y values too ?

When I change number of X Instances on tile generator - there are no problems because there is only one value to change (x).
But brick generator have two parameters - x and y (default 0 and default 1).

Mayby on playmaker action (Set procedural float) in Float parameter where user must describe name of parameter (Float Property - Indentifier) I should add some prefix

Oryginaly option is called "Brick_4_Resolution"
Mayby add some prefix like $(default)_$(1) etc .

I was open SetProceduralFloat.cs and found this:

Code (CSharp):

1. substance.SetProceduralFloat(floatProperty.Value, floatValue.Value);

Mayby I Should edit this code to describe prefix...

Please Help!

 

Hopefully I'll get someone from Allegorithmic's ear on this thread. For the last 18 hours I've been trying to use Substance Painter (demo) with a model created in Cinema 4D with no luck whatsoever. The C4D model has a mesh with about 10 textures/materials on it using the Select Polygons tag for each one. I export it from C4D(14) as an FBX and when I load it into Painter all the materials disappear and just get called default material. I've tried exporting as 3ds,dae and everything else painter will load to no avail. In desperation I tried the Polytrans demo and converted the C4D to FBX and this worked albeit with every 5th polygon missing. I don't want to spend $500 on PolyTrans but it proves that C4D and Painter are incompatible. What do i do? I tried Maya but it's way too hard to learn a new 3d Package.

 

I suggest asking stuff about Allegorithmic's software in their own forum:
https://forum.allegorithmic.com/index.php

 

We are having an issue where the roofing_009.sbsar we are using some times ends up black in our builds, very often in fact. We have tried most of the options and it's pretty random. Any insight on why this might be happening. We are on 5.3f
Mike K