Search Unity

  1. Megacity Metro Demo now available. Download now.
    Dismiss Notice
  2. Unity support for visionOS is now available. Learn more in our blog post.
    Dismiss Notice

Substance answers !

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by Jerc, Apr 20, 2011.

Thread Status:
Not open for further replies.
  1. Jerc

    Jerc

    Joined:
    Sep 24, 2010
    Posts:
    300
    Alright, there has been quite a bit of chat about Substance lately, what is it exactly ? What can I do with it ? What is its purpose in Unity ?...

    I'll try to give you a precise overview of what you should expect and how and when you should use it in your projects.


    What is it ?

    > Substance is primarily here to help you build lighter scenes (think mobile and web publishing) and produce faster .

    > A Substance is a set of textures linked to a Substance material, those textures are different from your traditional texture:

    * They are parametric, which means you can change dramatically the look of the textures by tweaking included parameters.
    * They are lightweight assets, typically a few KB per Substance.
    * They are resolution independent, you can use Substances at any resolution from 32 to 2048.
    * They can be dynamic, you can animate the parameters in real time by script in your scene.
    * They can include an input, transforming the Substance into a Smart Filter, allowing you to boost existing bitmaps while still keeping the file size low (see the part on the B2M filter below)​


    When should I use it ?

    > If you want to publish a web based project with high quality content but don't want the customer/player to wait ages for the player to load.

    > If you want to create quickly a lot of assets with infinite variations, like an open world game.

    > If you don't have the time or skills to create your textures yourself.

    > If you want to dynamically change the way your objects look when the player, a npc, time itself or anything else interacts with it, like in the Airstream Demo that will be made available when Substance is released for Unity.


    How do I use it ?

    * You can use freely all the Substances that are provided for free on the Unity Asset Store.
    * You can buy premade Substances on the Unity Asset Store (for now only available on Turbosquid and the Allegorithmic Webstore)
    * You can buy smart filters to “boost” your existing bitmaps and reduce material size.
    * You can create your own Substances with Substance Designer.​


    That last point is the key, really.

    I see Substance Designer like a big sandbox where you can create almost anything in terms of texture and effect and I hope the Unity community will use its full potential and impress us with new textures, filters and tools very soon. :)

    Speaking of which, we just released our first “Smart Filter”. I guess most of you have already heard of or used Crazybump before, well the Bitmap2Material filter does pretty much the same job, except...

    It has more control over the results, more features, like the ability to automatically make your texture seamless, or create randomized variations of your texture, and you can do all this inside of Unity, no need for another software anymore, just a few drag and drop in the editor and you're done !

    And last but not least, only your base texture is stored when you cook your project, the other channels are generated at run time, which means even more player size saving :)

    You can find a trial version on Turbosquid and very soon on the Unity Asset Store !


    My point is, this B2M filter was created in 2 weeks using Designer, no code or scripting involved, only a few nodes in a graph... so when I'm browsing through these forums, I'm pretty sure you guys can come up with even more powerful and original filters and I just can't wait to see that happen :)

    I guess all this may sound like an ad, well, in a way it is. But I meant this post to enlighten people on what you can achieve with Substances and avoid typical misunderstandings about new technologies..

    Please use this thread if you have questions, feedback or ideas about Substance. I'll check in daily and try to answer all your questions.





    Jeremie
    Tech.Artist - Community Manager
    Allegorithmic
     
    Last edited: Jul 20, 2011
    Xepherys likes this.
  2. n0mad

    n0mad

    Joined:
    Jan 27, 2009
    Posts:
    3,732
    Sounds awesome :)
     
  3. RandAlThor

    RandAlThor

    Joined:
    Dec 2, 2007
    Posts:
    1,293
    How much will the Substance Designer cost for us Unity users?
     
  4. Frank Oz

    Frank Oz

    Joined:
    Oct 13, 2010
    Posts:
    1,560
    Even if they do a discount, I don't see it being much less than it's current $990 for a standard license.
     
  5. Jerc

    Jerc

    Joined:
    Sep 24, 2010
    Posts:
    300
    I can assure you there will be significant discounts for Unity users :)

    We are still working out all the details with Unity and I'll give you the exact pricing as sson as I can.
     
  6. dissidently

    dissidently

    Joined:
    Dec 8, 2010
    Posts:
    286
    @Jerc u been attending the Unity Technologies school of hyperbole marketing?

    I came to this thread VERY curious as to what "substance" you're talking about. Maybe I live in a vacuum, but I had no idea "substance" was the name of a product created by a "substance designer" until half way down your post.

    Well, not entirely true, I got so exasperated by the hyperbole in your first "answer" that I wondered down the thread and came across Frank's comment about Substance Designer being $990. That's when I got curious enough to at least get past your initial "answer".

    btw your self referential comment about there being a lot of chat about it lately... maybe in your world... but I missed the memo/s completely. Comments like that are off putting. A little smug and unnecessary.

    For the first two paragraphs I had no idea what you were on about. And no idea you were attached to Allegorithmic until I read your signature right at the end of my perusal's... it's at that point I clicked... "oh, this must be the product of this company..."

    Substance is a very odd name. From what I gather there's 3 components.

    Substance Designer: The king pin, makes Substance Materials.
    Substance Materials: The Knight, creates Substance Textures.
    Substance Textures: The pawns that go out and do the work.

    Since you refer to the last two as both being "Substance" it's incredibly confusing to read.

    I'd suggest this: sMaterials and sTextures or some other more descriptive and accurate way of referring to them that doesn't leave a man scratching at what's left of the substances on his head.

    This first "answer" looks like a Unity Technologies marketing spiel. It's not an answer to "What is it?" it's an abstract concept of what it DOES. But it get's contradicted by your very next "answer"...

    I'm not an English major, so I can't tell you what it is about the phrasing that grates me in technical terms... but it seems your first "answer" is talking about a solo product (perhaps Substance Designer) whilst your second answer is talking about multiples of something that are a child of a something that comes in multiples but is also Substance. Which seems odd to me, like Substance means three different things in two different states, in the way you use it.

    The rest of your post continues to make me scratch my head.

    Clearly Substance, whatever it is, is best described visually. Alongside some performance numbers and size numbers.

    And the Price! Since ....

    Selling Substance Designer seems to be the main purpose of the thread.

    Here's a suggestion. On how to sell to a community with something like this... assuming this is possible...

    Create a web interface to your software. Allow anyone to use Substance Designer for free to create sTextures and sMaterials for their games.
    Call it:
    Substance Designer Online
    how do you benefit?
    Users of Substance Designer Online download and pay for their sTextures and sMaterials via Asset Store once they've tweaked them to the desired state. At 3 different pricing points.

    1. Unique Use: Only they can use it. Once they've bought the sTexture/sMaterials it's deleted from Asset Store, it was only visible to them, they had a 48 exclusive to buy it from the Asset Store, before it slides down to option 2. below. It's at a high price.
    2. Limited Use: Can only be sold 20 times, to non competing users of Unity, as decided by the designer. Lower Price
    3. Unlimited Use: Everyone can download the sTextures and sMaterials for free, forever. User that designed it gets it free.

    Everyone wins. On multiple fronts.

    What do you think?
     
  7. runevision

    runevision

    Joined:
    Nov 28, 2007
    Posts:
    1,892
    The Substance engine is not supported on mobiles so it won't help make anything lighter there. Substances can still be baked for mobiles though so the workflow advantages still apply but not the savings in file size or the dynamic parameter changes at runtime.

    Rune
     
  8. dissidently

    dissidently

    Joined:
    Dec 8, 2010
    Posts:
    286
    wow. so a * is required. Now I know why this is in the Gossip section.
     
  9. Quietus2

    Quietus2

    Joined:
    Mar 28, 2008
    Posts:
    2,058


    If you're looking for a good overview of the technology, the devblogs and interviews from the game RoboBlitz are a good source. All their textures were procedural resulting in an incredibly small distribution size. Only 50m iirc.
     
  10. Dreamora

    Dreamora

    Joined:
    Apr 5, 2008
    Posts:
    26,601
    Any chance its going to be supported by the end of this year or mid next year when apple completely phases out pre OES2 hw support for approval?
    Or does the engine update RTs instead of "bake at loadup"?
     
  11. Jerc

    Jerc

    Joined:
    Sep 24, 2010
    Posts:
    300
    @dissidently

    I'm no marketing guy, I'm an artist working at Allegorithmic and trying to clear things up while of course praising the software since I love what I do, I think we are doing it right and I truly think other would benefit from using it.

    Substance is a new feature coming in 3.4 and I saw a few threads on these forums where people were wondering how exactly it would be integrated and what was the reason behind Unity integrating it. My post was just meant to give answers to these people.and I didn't mean to be exhaustive.

    When I talk about Substance, I'm talking about the technology as a whole, and Substances are the actual materials created using that technology. I understand it may not be very clear to someone who's never heard of it, hope this cleared things up :)

    About your suggestion on the pricing model, We are actually currently looking at ways to port some sort of web version of our tools, but for now we are just following the common trail with standalone tools.


    Now about the mobile support, we are actively working on an Android and iOs versions, those are shaping up nicely and as soon as its ready, it will be available for Unity, just not in 3.4 yet :)
     
  12. sawfish

    sawfish

    Joined:
    Feb 12, 2011
    Posts:
    314
    Thank you, Jerc, for coming on the forums to share with us this information. Don't mind the trolls, many of us know what your product is and were interested in hearing about how it will be implemented within Unity 3.4
     
  13. Frank Oz

    Frank Oz

    Joined:
    Oct 13, 2010
    Posts:
    1,560
    One major problem I see.

    For materials to correctly rasterize at runtime, or do their fancy features, you're gonna need to include them in full. Since according to a UT post further up, this part of the features doesn't apply to mobiles, and desktops don't really need that much saved space, it leaves webplayers. We all know those are the absolute easiest to get hold of and to pull apart. So that would mean any expensive materials you bought for your game, will be free for certain types to simple take like they would a regular texture. Only unlike a regular texture, a material can do far more, so is quite a big loss for expensive or custom materials you'll lose if you use them.

    Same applies to standalones of course too, but to a lesser extend cause they'd generally not be as easy to get to as a webplayer on someones website free for all to use, or as a demo that many use webplayers for.

    So will there be anything done in 3.4 to possibly address this problem?
     
  14. Quietus2

    Quietus2

    Joined:
    Mar 28, 2008
    Posts:
    2,058
    I totally disagree.

    We're for the most part not making box games here, rather downloadable content. Saying that the technology isn't worth it for standalone builds is silly. It's the difference between say a 400m or a 30m download on the Mac app store or steam.
     
  15. multivac

    multivac

    Joined:
    Oct 27, 2009
    Posts:
    133
    As much as I understand, the software just filters the base diffuse to generate spec, normal and other maps?
    Who generates their normals and spec from diffuse however? To have anything near acceptable quality, they need to be baked from highres geo or at least manipulated by hand, otherwise you just end up with a bumpy,shiny mess.
    Might be ok for grass or metals, but not actual props, I think.
     
  16. Frank Oz

    Frank Oz

    Joined:
    Oct 13, 2010
    Posts:
    1,560
    That's just one filter, it does a whole lot more than that and regardless of my own views toward things like this and Genetica, it can do some useful things, hence my concern that some materials will be highly sought after, and the fact they'll be so easy to pull out of other people's stuff, you get the lot, not just the end result (unless that's all they use and not the material itself).
     
  17. Frank Oz

    Frank Oz

    Joined:
    Oct 13, 2010
    Posts:
    1,560
    Way to focus on the unimportant part and ignore the problem at hand, you pay $50 for a super useful material. Little Joe easily rips it from your webdemo for free, in its complete and usable entirety. It's more than just a single simple texture, it could be capable of all kinds of effects and features, across all manner of textures and situations, and you basically just bought it for him and his friends.
     
  18. Dreamora

    Dreamora

    Joined:
    Apr 5, 2008
    Posts:
    26,601
    and?

    lets assume unity encrypted it. Great will take a week then a cracker has brute forced cracked the AES256 or whatever key used for decryption, creates a 1 click too -> back to start


    Protection exists only through law, any other measure is just there to motivate crackers to break it if its usefull software or data, its not there to protect it in the end.

    Also you expect the client stuff to be protected better than unity itself as it seams.


    But now back on topic: Really looking forward to it, be it just for the "relaxing fun of toying with parameters to see the outcome" ;)
     
  19. niosop2

    niosop2

    Joined:
    Jul 23, 2009
    Posts:
    1,059
    That particular substance generates them from the diffuse. The software itself is a really powerful procedural texture system that you can do all kinds of stuff with. If you've never worked with procedural texture systems like Substance Designer, Genetica, or MaPZone then try downloading MaPZone (it's free at http://www.mapzoneeditor.com/) and give it a try.
     
  20. rumblemonkey

    rumblemonkey

    Joined:
    Mar 25, 2011
    Posts:
    280
    This looks very interesting, and I will probably want it. I'm gradually building a fairly large game, in terms of content, but I want to distribute online, so anything that lowers the size of that download for customers is a huge plus- in short, it's not "just about web games" by any means.

    I look forward to seeing the first test demonstrations and playing around with the tools.
     
  21. Frank Oz

    Frank Oz

    Joined:
    Oct 13, 2010
    Posts:
    1,560

    "But now back on topic:"


    This is how a valid question is answered? LOL, Clearly IQ's have fallen between 3.3 and 3.4. What you're basically saying dreamora, is why bother locking your front door whatsoever, cause someone might just put a sledge hammer to it anyway.

    But whatever, I'm done with this.
     
  22. Broken-Toy

    Broken-Toy

    Joined:
    Jan 16, 2010
    Posts:
    455
    I've been following Allegorhithmic since MapZone, I'm a big fan of your stuff. Now for the killer question, because I care: How is it a Unity feature, if we need to purchase the full feature separately?

    Substance Designer I can, to some extent, and it's really pushing the line, see as a standalone tool because there is content produced out of it (new templates), but Smart Filters? If I get this right, Smart Filters are procedural functionnalities to use bitmaps as input, rather than a content-creation tool in and of itself, so I think bundling them separately from the core of Substance is hardly justified, at least from a user's perspective.

    My 0.02$
     
    Last edited: Apr 20, 2011
  23. Quietus2

    Quietus2

    Joined:
    Mar 28, 2008
    Posts:
    2,058
    Silly goose, that's not the unimportant part it's the most important part. It's the reason for the technology.

    What you are discussing is a problem with all games that rely on a fancy interpreter. Unity, XNA, Java, etc. It would exist whether the textures were procedural or output from modo renders. It's off-topic as it has nothing to do with this middleware. It's not something they have control over.
     
  24. stimarco

    stimarco

    Joined:
    Oct 17, 2007
    Posts:
    721
    Disclaimer: I'm currently working on the Substance-related docs for UT and Allegorithmic.

    Right, now I've got that out of the way...

    Substance Designer is the editor component: it's how you assemble the directed (node) graphs that represent a Substance.

    A Substance is fundamentally a type of program: that graph you create defines how the Substance will be rendered.

    A texture is just a component of a material. In other words: "Rendered Material = Texture(s) + Shader(s)".

    A Shader takes textures as input and combines them in strange and wonderful ways to produce the final rendered material. A complex Shader may take a Texture and use it as a look-up table to use in a mathematical transformation process—e.g. a texture designated as displacement map would be used to deform the underlying model itself.

    A Substance feeds texture data to the Shader, but does not require a PNG or JPEG file unless you really want, or need, one. It can use a simple noise or any other procedural process—you can build separate node graphs for those too—to form the basis of any number of textures.

    The Unity integration work involves nailing in the Substance rendering engine which reads Substance files and renders them on-demand. (The files it can read are the same "SBSAR" files you can already use in the latest versions of Maya and 3D Studio Max.)

    Substances are built using directed graphs. A graph can contain any number of "nodes", including "Blur", "Transform", "Remap Colours", "Modify HSV", and so on. (Chances are, if it's an effect you can create in Photoshop, you can create it in a Substance too.)

    Smart Filters are just Substances which accept images, SVG (vector) images, and even other Substances as inputs to their graphs, instead of generating an image entirely within their own graph. As all Substances are, essentially, small programs, a "Smart Filter" is conceptually the same thing as a Javascript or C# method or function: a way to encapsulate common functions.

    (If you've been following the threads on the visual scripting tools now available for Unity, or if you've used Unreal's Kismet visual scripting tool, a "Smart Filter" is exactly the same concept as "SubSequences".)

    E.g. I can define a Substance which takes a colour input bitmap, generates a Perlin Noise texture, and uses the latter to apply a Blur filter, to the former, with the amount of blurring defined by the intensity of the generated noise texture. I can then save that Substance, name it "Selective Noise Blur", and reuse it in other Substances as a single, self-contained node. And I can also access it directly in Unity and pass any image I want to it as input.


    Re. Mobile device support:

    Unity's support for Substances, like its support for the Mono scripting engine, Beast lightmapping and the PhysX physics, relies on close cooperation between development teams working for different companies. For Unity to support Substances on mobile platforms, Allegorithmic must first get their Substance rendering engine to work on mobile platforms. Only then can UT include that support in their engine. But it's such an obvious market to aim for, this is bound to be implemented sooner rather than later, but there's always some lag in integrating new features in a middleware library like the Substance engine. This is an inevitable consequence of how development works.
     
    Last edited: Apr 21, 2011
  25. tatoforever

    tatoforever

    Joined:
    Apr 16, 2009
    Posts:
    4,364
    @stimarco,
    I don't think you've answered Werewraith killer question.
    Anyway, here is my point:
    If i want to create models or textures, i can chose whatever 2D/3D package i like and theres a tons of free tools by the way (which isn't the case with Substance designer). Theres not two substance designers, theres no alternative to substance designer, anyone willing to create substances needs to buy that Substance designer.
     
  26. MatthewJCollins

    MatthewJCollins

    Joined:
    Dec 3, 2009
    Posts:
    372


    I'm kind of surprised by some of the responses here. Personally, I'm blown away by this. I can imagine some incredibly awesome dynamic environments using substances. If there is a "significant" discount on Substance Designer for Unity Pro users as has been mentioned, I will likely be picking up a copy of that to make my own substances as well. Fantastic stuff!
     
  27. Jerc

    Jerc

    Joined:
    Sep 24, 2010
    Posts:
    300
    Just to clarify the crypting and hacking your content out of the Web Player issue, we do not include the Substance file when cooking the project, it's only binary data that's included in the final cooked project, so no worries :)

    Now about the killer question :)

    Substance is introducing a new file format that can do stuff that the others can't, we can't just give away a product that required several years of development with every compatible engine or software.

    It's a feature in the way that this new format is now supported and fully integrated. Like the .max or the .psd format are supported, you still need 3dsMax and Photoshop to create these.
    And if you want prebuilt 3D models you will find some basic stuff for free and if you want more advanced models you will have to buy it on Turbosquid or whatever. It's pretty much the same with Substances.

    And yes, there will be big discounts and few surprises along the way for Unity users ;)
     
  28. Broken-Toy

    Broken-Toy

    Joined:
    Jan 16, 2010
    Posts:
    455
    First of all, thank you for your reply.

    I see this kind of offer as a very unusual where Unity is concerned, as they successfully separated different middleware features for different licenses in the past (Beast and Umbra having certain features only available for Pro users). The more advanced middleware features are certainly not given away for free, but are included within the price of the Unity Pro license so this is transparent to us end-users.

    As a Pro user myself, I consider that when I purchase or renew this Pro license with Unity, this includes any and all middleware claimed as a Unity feature. From an end-user's perspective it's hard to justify why would Substance be different than the other middleware on the pricing aspect and why their features can't stay inside the scope of the Unity license purchase, as opposed to having to complexify the process and pour extra money on extra features related directly to the engine.

    Unity Pro is supposed to be the "full engine", short of console licenses and source code access. Your proposal with Substance is going directly against this no-nonsense licensing which makes Unity Pro so appealing in the first place, and I think that's part of where the unease in this thread comes from. Well it is for me anyway.
     
  29. bigkahuna

    bigkahuna

    Joined:
    Apr 30, 2006
    Posts:
    5,434
    +1

    I really hope 3.4 will have more to add to Unity than just another portal to another asset vendor.
     
  30. Jerc

    Jerc

    Joined:
    Sep 24, 2010
    Posts:
    300
    I understand your point, although I think the investment is worth it.

    Umbra and Beast are automated processes that makes your life easier, but Substance, it's really just a new type of asset, like sound, 3d models, animations... you need a software to produce these, and this software can be cheap, but it can't be free when we are talking about a whole new technology.

    I'd love it to be free, but I would be out of a job :D
     
  31. Thomas-Pasieka

    Thomas-Pasieka

    Joined:
    Sep 19, 2005
    Posts:
    2,174
    Indeed. I have to shake my head to some of the responses here. To me it seems like an excellent tool which many will have great use for. Looking forward to it myself.

    Thomas P.
     
  32. bigkahuna

    bigkahuna

    Joined:
    Apr 30, 2006
    Posts:
    5,434
    Substance looks very cool, it's just that I had hoped that -other- improvements / fixes would also be announced by now.
     
    Last edited: Apr 21, 2011
  33. dissidently

    dissidently

    Joined:
    Dec 8, 2010
    Posts:
    286
    @Jerc

    Let me help you out.... a little: and you can correct me where I'm wrong.

    What is it?

    Substance is a Procedural Texture and Materials Generator and Packager.

    When Should I use it?

    When you're NOT in need of Procedural Textures and Materials for iOS and Andoid

    How do I use it?

    By BUYING Substance Designer.

    The caveats to those answers are not the answers themselves. As many of the posts above are pointing out.

    Start with the TRUTH and then embellish the smaller realities as you see fit. This way people will trust you. And you won't need any marketing skills, knowledge or techniques. Just the truth will be FINE!

    The other way, they find out what's wrong somewhere else, and then assume most of what you say is wrong. And you don't want that.

    ps "a picture tells a thousand words" is probably never truer than a captioned shot of some Substance materials and textures in action... the captions being their size in KB and dimensions.
     
    Last edited: Apr 21, 2011
  34. maxfax2009

    maxfax2009

    Joined:
    Feb 4, 2009
    Posts:
    410
    http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/..._Be_Integrated_Into_Unity_Dev_Environment.php

    So the stand alone designer will cost?

    Hopefully one day iPhone will have this, one can hope!
     
    Last edited: Apr 21, 2011
  35. Jerc

    Jerc

    Joined:
    Sep 24, 2010
    Posts:
    300
    You're right on this one.
    I'm so used to it now that I sometime forget the basics, forgive me :)

    The Airstream demo I'm presenting in the video posted by Dele just a few posts above will be shipped with Unity 3.4 as a showcase of what Substance can achieve.

    I can give you a few facts about it already :

    The demo uses around 70 textures, all of them animated in real time for the aging effect.

    . As static compressed DDS, they would fit in 11.7 MB

    . As Substances they fit in 0.3 MB

    Making the demo a 2 MB download instead of a 13.4 MB download.
     
  36. stimarco

    stimarco

    Joined:
    Oct 17, 2007
    Posts:
    721
    Please do list all the credible alternatives to Photoshop, Dreamweaver, InDesign, Flash, then. I'm quite the fan of Pixelmator, Fuse, and, er, Pages, but only Pixelmator comes anywhere near close to matching its Adobe counterpart (Photoshop) in any way, shape, or form. (Although Flux is nearly there for HTML5 / CSS3 work.)

    And what, pray, would be the alternative to Unity itself? Again: there isn't a credible one (yet). The others all lack one or more features Unity boasts.

    Every technology has to start somewhere, and I'm hardly going to criticise Allegorithmic for not wanting to give away their crown jewels for free.

    That said, Substances, by their very nature, are far more flexible than traditional bitmap textures, so expect to see a veritable avalanche of them on sites like Turbosquid, the Unity Asset Store, and Allegorithmic's own store. For 90% of your texturing needs—even for big-budget projects—you'll probably be able to just grab some Substances online instead of asking an artist to painstaking build yet another "Concrete (diffuse)" material by hand. Allegorithmic aren't putting any limitations on what artists can do with their Substance files.

    The Substance Designer app is already available for $99 to students and faculty members; a special edition, a discount, or possibly a bundle deal, aimed at Unity users, is also likely to happen at some point; it's just good business sense. I honestly have no idea what (if anything) is actually planned, but I'd be surprised if they didn't do something along these lines.

    So, yes, you will need Substance Designer if you need to make custom Substances and there's nothing available for you to use off the shelf. But, as Substances become more widespread, that need will become less and less. The current argument that buying off-the-shelf textures results in games that look very similar to each other will no longer apply.
     
    Last edited: Apr 21, 2011
  37. sybixsus2

    sybixsus2

    Joined:
    Feb 16, 2009
    Posts:
    943
    I think perhaps some of the criticism is valid but aimed at the wrong people. It's not Allegorithmic's fault that this has been marketed as a huge new feature being added to Unity. It's also not their fault that the only two major features added between 3.0 and 3.4 (so far) are two new ways for UT to make money. They are valid criticisms (although I'm sure the community will never reach a consensus on how valid, any more than we ever reached a consensus on whether not enabling shadows in Unity (free) was right) but it's not Allegorithmic's responsiblity to give UT their best tools for free. At the end of the day, UT made the developers of fMod, Beast and Umbra an offer that was good enough to let them "give away" significant chunks of their top products. Evidently they didn't offer that kind of deal to Allegorithmic. Perhaps they spoiled us with the goodies in 3.0 and now we're all spoiled children that we're not even getting significant bug fixes in the next four updates. I can certainly say that my judgement on when/whether to upgrade to 4.0 will be affected by the rapid speed at which so-called major updates came out, offering very little in the way of new features or bug-fixes, but I can equally respect those who think otherwise. But again, it's not Allegorithmic's fault.
     
  38. pkid

    pkid

    Joined:
    Jul 10, 2009
    Posts:
    201
    I think the best way to look at it is to think of it like photoshop. Just because unity might be able to accept psd files wouldn't mean that you would get photoshop with unity. Plus I checked out the substances on turbosquid and there are over 500 that you can buy for about $5 each and they are customizable, so you can use substances without having to buy an expensive tool.
     
  39. bigkahuna

    bigkahuna

    Joined:
    Apr 30, 2006
    Posts:
    5,434
    Well put. But the press release that came out some months ago does lead one to believe that this technology would be included at no additional charge, and no one, neither at UT nor Allegorithmic, said anything to the contrary until this thread started. Given this, I think the disappointed reactions you're seeing aren't at all surprising. Perhaps this thread should have been started by a UT staff member so UT issues could have been addressed by UT staff. But since you hardly see anyone from UT here except Andeeee, that wasn't likely to happen.

    I too will "wait and see" how things progress with 3.x before considering spending money to upgrade to 4.x. (I just had the editor crash on me 4x in less than an hour, so bug fixes definitely are something I'm concerned about.) It's not that UT isn't capable of bringing us the tools we want or isn't capable of fixing the bugs that prevent us from doing the things we need to do. Over the years they have more than proven they can do it. The issue is how motivated they are to do it, and only time will tell us the answer to that question.
     
  40. maxfax2009

    maxfax2009

    Joined:
    Feb 4, 2009
    Posts:
    410
    Well I cant wait for this great tool :) Come on 3.4 :)
     
  41. pkid

    pkid

    Joined:
    Jul 10, 2009
    Posts:
    201
    I really think that if people had a better understanding of how you use substances vs substance designer they would be happy to see substances in unity even though substance designer will not be included for free. Creating a new substance with substance designer takes time and skill and even if it were given out freely I can't imagine very many people would learn the tool and make their own substances from scratch. What people would probably do is go and find one of the hundreds of pre made substances you can buy for $5 and use those in their game. I think a lot of people wrongly think that since they will not have substance designer they will not be able to have substances in their game and that is not the case. Having substances in unity even without a free substance designer will be a great feature.
     
  42. WinningGuy

    WinningGuy

    Joined:
    Aug 10, 2009
    Posts:
    884
    Then where would the long winded and vulgar conspiracy theory rants be placed?
     
  43. niosop2

    niosop2

    Joined:
    Jul 23, 2009
    Posts:
    1,059
    Definitely, it's like having .FBX or .PSD support. Unity doesn't give you modeling or painting tools, but allows you to import and then modify (to some degree) those from other programs. Same with substances. Just one more tool that is available for you to use if you want, and to ignore if you don't.

    I'm excited about it and as long as the Designer discount is significant enough, they'll have a new customer. I'd probably be willing to go up to $200 for Designer. Maybe they'll offer a competitive upgrade for Genetica users or something.
     
  44. tatoforever

    tatoforever

    Joined:
    Apr 16, 2009
    Posts:
    4,364
    I have no problems in buying Substance Designer to create custom substances for my project as it is a must have for our game. But it was marketed a while ago that those tools will be available freely.

    Anyway, as long as we get a significant discount I'm fine putting money on it.
     
  45. RandAlThor

    RandAlThor

    Joined:
    Dec 2, 2007
    Posts:
    1,293
    I would love to see this coming soon to Unity and even will buy the designer if i can afford it.

    No one will be foreced to buy the designer and everyone can use all the old ways to make and use materials and textures.

    So i can not understand all the worrys from some peoples here.
    If you do not like it then do not use it. If you want some options more then sometimes you have to pay for it.
    This is the real world where you do not get everything as a present.

    Back to Substance, hope that i can see this in 3.4 soon and that in a future update there will be suppurt for the iPhone so that we can have shorter apps.
     
  46. ippdev

    ippdev

    Joined:
    Feb 7, 2010
    Posts:
    3,850
    I too am truly looking forward to this and I ain't no slouch at creating my own textures nor am I bereft of tools to create my own multimaps. However, the possibilities with Substance are awe inspiring. Howzabout turning Ben Grimm - the human into Ben Grimm - The Thing and change the skin texture to an orange cracked rock texture. Howzabout a wizard turning a desert into lush green pasture with a stamp of the staff on the ground? An entire city can be aged at extreme fast forward rates. Werewolf transformation? Turning to a ghost? Rotting in fast forward time zombies. The Midas touch? Done! The trolls and naysayers are not very creative, as I could sit here for an hour and think of cool stuff to try with this set of tools without flexing a muscle. Would I fork over for a tool where I could create and control such procedurals? Yes. The caveat is I believe a fundamental form of Substance Editor should be inside the Unity UI and usable through the Inspector. This should give me some fundamentals like normal map generation, basic texture alteration and color/gamma/brightness-contrast controls. The rest of the goodies could then be purchased for those wanting to push the limits and get all the eye candy add-on filters and full pipeline. From what Jerc has stated they are considering a price cut for Pro users, as well they should. I am thinking a price point between 100 and 250 USD would be appropriate..hoping of course for it to be closer to 100USD. Or two ounces of silver:)

    BTH
     
  47. aigam

    aigam

    Joined:
    Dec 31, 2005
    Posts:
    170
    It looks really fantastic.

    4 questions:
    -Textures are calculated in real time or in the loading and baked?
    -How fast it is? How much extra cpu or loading time it takes? (for the video it seems pretty fast)
    -It has minium requeriment? (maybe it uses special shaders)
    -we can get a non procedural texture and reproduce it as a procedural texture?

    It is a killer extra feature for unity! I hope we can check it pretty son!
     
  48. artzfx

    artzfx

    Joined:
    Apr 28, 2008
    Posts:
    572
    Roll on the Substance mobile support! Very glad Allegorithmic and UT decided to implement this.
     
  49. jashan

    jashan

    Joined:
    Mar 9, 2007
    Posts:
    3,307
    Just for clarification: So that means that with Unity 3.4, most likely what we can do is:

    a) Use the full feature set of substances on anything but mobile (well, I care about Mac and PC, and whenever Linux will be supported, Linux)
    b) Bake substances (probably losing any "dynamic modification features") for mobile builds - so using sustances for mobile in Unity 3.4 will be "kind of like" creating the textures with something like Genetica except that it will be much more integrated into the editor (which means a major workflow improvement)

    Right?

    Then, as soon as Substances are properly supported on mobiles (as Jerc said will likely be happening some day hopefully not too far in the future), and another release of Unity becomes available (hopefully, that would be 3.5), we'll be able to use Substances fully even on mobile devices (possibly with some performance restrictions to pay attention to).

    Sounds cool to me! And thanks Jerc for posting that info. I'm really looking forward to Substance support even though it'll probably nullify my Genetica investment.

    Btw: How soon is "soon" regarding the Mac version of the Substance designer? Is that something we could still hope for this year?
     
  50. ippdev

    ippdev

    Joined:
    Feb 7, 2010
    Posts:
    3,850
    I second that question about when for the Mac. As well if there is any word on the functionality we will be able to access without external editors that would be helpful.


    Best Regards
    BTH
     
Thread Status:
Not open for further replies.