Substance answers !

The discount will be available for 3 months after the 3.4 release. I can't tell what will happen after that yet.

 

Jerc, I think you should edit your first post and add a link to this video which shows Substance running inside Unity 3.4:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyAcuus85AA&feature=player_embedded

 

Regarding Substance on mobile, have a look at this demo on Tegra 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GLzVOxC1Cw
This was all done with Unity, and as you can see Substance is in a good way to be working on mobiles

We still need some time to polish and optimize it however, but as you can see it's in the good direction, and will be released in a later version of Unity as soon as it's over.

 

Lets talk about the Substance for IOS.
All i have read says that if i use the Substance material on the IOS it will bake it on build time.
I know that the IOS / Mobile Devices are not powerful enough to generate the textures in realtime but what is about recreating the materials on command / Application or level / fake level loading time.

I like to use the Bitmap2Material Substance to generate a material for my trees.
50 trees with the same texture ... Does not look good.
But whats about generating a random material with Bitmap2Material for each tree to have a more realistic look.

Is there any way to trick the Substance on level load via script or another way?

 

I'm not sure about this one, but I think that if you try to build for iOS, any call to Substance in the scripts will raise an error and prevent you from building.

 

I try to use Substance Designer 1.2.1, and got the pacakage file *SBS, but in Unity 3.4, it is *SBSAR.

How can I get the SBSAR file?

 

Use the publish option instead of the save/save as option in Designer to get an .sbsar.

 

So, this is the "major improvement"? The ability to buy VERY EXPENSIVE (yes, expensive, comparing to it's features) S***ware from third party and include it in your project? This is most abominable bullshit I've heard in my life. May be in future versions Unity will make some other "major improvements", for example "kindly" allow users to buy speed tree, FaceFX, FaceGen and other expensive software for big $$$ and use in their projects. What a delight!
It seems, Unity has hard times, as it's team has nothing more to offer, than to buy expensive S***ware from third party. Instead of adding necessary "must have" features to the engine, such as pathfinding and cut-scene editor, they spent their time on this!
Very disappointing. It seems, Instead buying Unity I have to wait for Cry Engine SDK - they at least have pathfinding and tons of other features.

P.S. to allegorithmic landing: you may not bother answering my post - I am not going to spend my time on useless debates.

 

* HI niosop, Thanks for your quick answer.

When I drag my SBSAR files to my new Unity project in a fold of Textures, it fails to import the pacakage. But when I do it in AirStream Demo, It is OK. Why?

 

No, the improvement is the ability to USE substances, regardless of whether you authored them yourself, bought them, or got them for free. If you tend to buy pre-textured models or just grab random textures and slap them on your own models, then I can see why you wouldn't be impressed. But anyone who has spent hours tweaking textures to get them to look just right, then having to ensure the normal/spec/height/dirt/grunge maps all match up, will appreciate the potential for workflow improvement of being able to tweak them in engine with a couple of sliders.

That's not mentioning the potential space savings. Cutting down the texture size of a web player by even 25% can save hundreds or thousands a month in CDN costs. Add in happier/more users due to the game loading faster and using Substances is a no brainer. The cost of Designer is a little high for the casual user, but for anyone who does a lot of texture work, it's well worth it.

Even if you just get the B2M filter, it's half the price of Crazy Bump and still gives you the space savings of only having to package the diffuse and you get the rest of the maps for free.

 

niosop,

What you mean by tweaking textures? There are much more powerful solutions allowing REALLY apply texture to model, tweak UVs, paint mesh etc. Substance does not have ability to change UVs or way texture is applied to the model - it is all about textures, not models. It may be useful for environment artists, but is absolutely unsuitable for organic forms. I don't know your production pipeline, but I personally need something much more powerful with ability of mesh painting, UV manipulation etc. This is simply an image editor. Yes it allows tweaking some image parameters inside Unity, but one could do it without using some "substances" as they call them. As for texture size compression, there are other ways too, not too complex and even free. If it had mesh painting (even photoshop can do it) or UVs manipulation ability, it could worth $900, but now It is only an image editor. Even UDK has much more powerful built-in material editor, than this S***ware. So, please, don't tell me tales about texture tweaking staff - if you have to apply texture to a model, produce normal maps from detailed mesh, or simply manipulate UVs, you need different software. And additionally there are shaders, which are much more efficient way to change look of objects, than texture generation. Yes, texture generators, like Genetica are necessary tools too, bot nothing special.

P.S. And, by the way, you can import custom models into substance, but if it is a multipart model, or has multipart material applied, you can not use it - only one mesh and one material at a time. What a delight!

 

Yes, tiling textures are rarely suitable for organic forms. But for environment art they are essential. And Substances can be handy for organic forms as well if you layout your UVs properly, although sometimes that's more of a pain than it's worth.

Yes, shaders are better for some things, and should be used for those things. I don't see the point of running a fragment program every frame for a one time change though, and some things are just too heavy for a shader where you have limits on the number of textures you can bind, instructions count limits, varying feature support and performance depending on the end user's video card, etc. I'd rather save the GPU time for things that require it.

I never claimed Designer was the only graphics program you will ever need as you seem to be implying. It will never take the place of Blender/ZBrush in my pipeline. It is just a procedural texture system, but sometimes a procedural texturing system is just what is called for. In those cases, Substances really shine, and can often be used to great effect in conjunction with other tools, which is why there are Substance plugins for Max and Maya.

If you could elaborate on the other ways you can achieve similarly huge texture size reduction without sacrificing quality for free, I'm sure lots of users (including myself) would appreciate it.

I'm not sure what role you think Designer/Substances are trying to fill, but it is NOT a material editor. It's a texture generator to be used in conjunction with your shader editor and material system, or UDK's material editor, or whatever else requires textures.

Anyways, I would highly recommend that you NOT buy Designer as your workflow doesn't seem to have a place for it. For those who do have a use for it, it's a great product, especially with Unity integration.

You asked what I meant by tweaking textures, here's an example. I need a tiling wall texture to cover my tunnels walls. Without Substance integration my workflow would be something like:

Design the texture using whatever method I wanted. ZBrush sculpting and baking normals, then hand painting spec maps on top of that, or procedurally generating one using Genetical, or hand painting everything in photoshop. I take this shiny new texture into Unity, slap it on my walls, hit run and find that it's a little to glossy. So I switch back to Photoshop/Genetica and adjust the specular layer, export it back out, let Unity re-import and check the results. Repeat until it's the way I want it. Do the same thing for grunge/dirt layers to make sure it has a similar amount of wear/dirt as the surrounding textures. Do the same thing for the intensity of the normal map and height maps.

Then as I progress deeper into my sewer/catacombs/whatever, I want the wall texture to become more dirty, more slimy, more worn, whatever. So I repeat the process, saving out a different version, tweaking layers, getting it the way I want.

Repeat as many times for as many different variations as I need. I now have 3 sets of textures (diffuse/normal/spec/height) taking up several MB of disk space.

Workflow with Substances: Author the substance so the amount of spec, dirt, grime, height map intensity, normal map intensity, etc is all exposed via sliders. Import into Unity. Tweak sliders till it looks the way I want w/o leaving Unity. Copy the material and tweak settings for the next section of walls. I now have 12K worth of Substances instead of 12MB of textures, it took me a lot less time (assuming Substance creation time was equal to the time it took to create the texture in my first example), didn't have to jump back and forth between programs, and have a Substance that I can use in the future to easily make a ton of different variations of my wall. I can also sell this Substance much easier than a texture because it can be adjusted by the end user to fit their needs and is a lot more flexible.

Anyways, we'll probably never agree on this (which is fine), but as you seem to have some misconceptions about where Designer fits into the grand scheme of things I figured I'd write this so that others have a clearer picture of where it could help them and where it won't help at all. I'd hate for people to make a fairly expensive purchasing decision with an incorrect understanding of it's capabilities and purpose.

 

Nicely explained niosop.

Being a Filter Forge user, the creation process of Substances is very similar only without the need to render textures at the end.

 

Would/Could you use Substance Designer to create a custom Substance to be used with the goal to offer customizable character models? Now I don't intend for the Substance to handle every aspect of the customized model but in regards to the in game texture that's going to be visible to the player on their character could a well put together Substance change:

- Skin Details: Wrinkles, Blemishes (pimples), Freckles, Various Scars etc
- Custom Colour: Manage the base colour of skin, cloth or armour applied over the texture, possibly use Vector Masks if its a shared textured to define separate areas for various colours.
- Damaged effects: Scratches, dents and hole details appearing at the texture level

If anyone could bring some light to these options or any advice regarding how it would be implemented using Substance Designer then I'd really appreciate it. It seems like a great product and paired with a talented artist I'm sure its could bypass a lot of the regular problems faced with customizable characters.

EDIT: The texture would be a UV mapped texture applied to a single specific mesh.

 

@Robert-Glen

That stuff is the main thing that I intend to use substances for. I haven't had a chance to try it out yet, but I have high hopes.

 

We actually did several demos to studios showing character customization.

The workflow looks like this:

- Import your base texture and a vector mask with different greyscale values for all the different parts of the texture (skin, cloth, head, etc.)

- create small procedural elements like scars, cloth patterns, vectorial wrinkles, scratches.

- Splat these elements either randomly or give the user controls to place them accurately on the model.

- Change the color and overlay patterns of the different parts of the texture using the vector mask.

Expose all these parameters through the mighty Unity GUI and you're done

 

Could these elements go over UV seams ?

 

Similar software ships with a lot of assets, filter forge for example has over 8000 filters to create procedural content with. The workflow with Substance designer looks amazing, but I'm having trouble finding a lot of good information on what actually ships with the full version product. Seeing a lot of pre-created substances that are for sale, how does your company plan to address this big content gap - do you plan to provide in your 2.0 release more built in assets for users to build off of? BTW Your tutorial videos, what few of them there are now, are excellent, making them easier to find on your website would be appreciated

 

There are 120 already made substances which are shipped with the full version, with their sources.

We are also working on administrative and logistics blockers so that users can share/sell/provide for free their substances directly on the asset store and our store.

 

That is very good, you should mention that on your webpage as this is not clear, and really makes me more comfortable about purchasing your software

 

No, it's like working in photoshop, you place your elements but if you place it across a seam it will be cut. We would need some kind of decal like projection system to make it work perfectly.

 

@ Jerc

That's what I was expecting. Would have been too good to be true.

 

Indeed

In fact when you buy a licence you have access to our download part on our support website, and you have there the 120 substances package.

 

Btw, as we're talking about stability a bit today:

How does Substance Designer Lite compare stability wise to other products from you like ImageSynth? I remember that ImageSynth which i got with Modo crashed quite a lot.

 

Will these demos be released into the wilds at any point?

 

We are working on a tutorial for character customization in Unity, and yes we'll release it on the asset store. It should be ready next week if all goes well

 

Wooo hooo =D

 

Since I cannot access the Allegorithmic community section of their website, I'll ask here.
I bought the B2M materiel and think it's pretty cool so far, but am having trouble getting textures on to models in Unity
that are Max multi-sub-object materials. I am really just starting but so far I have one that will take a B2M material
on one object ID and none other and at least one that will not take a B2M material at all.
What do I do with this type of material?

 

Thanks for the great responses. I'm excited to see the character customization demo and will now attempt to find what tutorials are on the site that were mentioned but unlinked too =P

 

This is a Unity specific video I found yesterday which shows the workflow from Designer to Unity http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJqQBP3nYy8&NR=1 Might be helpful to you.

 

You'll be able to test it with the trial version
So far, feedbacks from beta testers say it's really stable, some of them being even surprised it's so stable for a beta.

 

I cannot reproduce your behavior, putting B2M materials on multi ID meshes seems to work here, but you can only affect the procedural material on instances of the mesh in the scene, you can't directly affect it to your .FBX file since it has its own materials already.

I agree that being able to change the materials exported with the FBX to a procedural material would be ideal.

 

Pm sent to keep from cluttering the forum.
Should have done that first.

Edit: User inexperience, working great!

 

It appears that edits to a substance while in Play mode are cancelled when returning to Editor mode.

 

Yes, it's an expected behavior. It's the same with any parameters for materials in Unity: all the values changed in Play mode are cancelled when returning to Editor mode.

 

Any changes I make on other materials while in Play mode persist when back in the Editor.

 

Humm I'll have to ask my guys about it then. But what's sure is that reset after Play mode is the expected behavior, it was a feature required by Unity.

 

Revert on exiting play mode as always been standard behavior in Unity. It does seem to have changed for a couple of things though. A "Save Changes" button would be handy though, so you could tweak in Play mode with all the camera effects applied, then hit save before exiting back to edit mode.

 

I agree with this. We'll see with Unity what they think about it for a future version.

 

I'm only talking about material editing, once a material is on an object in the Editor mode you can change the color,
and other things, depending on what the material has as options, like specular, gloss, reflectivity, and other levels.
Once done in Play mode and returning to Editor mode, the changes remain.

 

Perhaps is an old bug that no body seems affected by but that's how unity behave since ages. Changes to materials aren't serialized, they are persistent (on your project), no matter if you are in play mode or not. Hopefully you can undo them if you don't like your changed but yeah, the normal thing to do is revert back any change during play mode. What i really like to see in future Unity Editor improvements is the detection of changes done in playmode and so highlight somehow the asset (or GO) with different colors and be able to keep those changes. Or a bit more automated like a non-persistent Play mode and a persistent Play mode (to keep all the changes we do during play mode).
I know even if it sounds trivial it's quite tricky. ^^

 

I was wondering if there is anything along the lines of the documentation that Unity has provided in regards to their components/scripting functions etc that Algorithmic has for Substance Designer. I understand that Designer 2 is in the works and some things might be different from the original but I'd really like to get into it and rather then download the a trial and just experiment mindlessly.

I've watched some of the video tutorials from the site and one mentions learning how to expose parameters in another video called "Tweaking" if I've remembered correctly, though I've been unable to find it. I imagined the process would be the same for Unity, enabling some sliders/check boxes to be exposed from within Designer ready for a script to control but I was keen to see it and learn the specifics.

 

We removed the Tweaking video as it was outdated, we will upload a new one very soon.

 

They give specifics in their documentation, but I've not been able to find the video either, so I'd suspect its not been made yet.

Edited noted I see above post made while writing this one >..>

 

You guys are great with response times, thanks again.

Where is the documentation? (EDIT: Thanks larvantholos)

 

On their website, make an account, go to support, downloads, documentation is there

 

Ok, still trying to get my head around the whole substance/designer/material thing.
Bought B2M, like it, has a lot going for it.
Running the 30 day trial of the designer, so far like it, just getting started, sent in my serial number for the discount,
waiting to hear back.
Ok, built the caution stripes substance from the video tutorials, cool, ok.
Now, I'd like to get this substance into Unity, but not sure how to do that, other than exporting the bitmaps,
which isn't what I want.
I want the whole substance in Unity to use like the B2M material.
How is this done?

Edit: Ok, after watching a YouTube video and seeing there is a publish option in the Designer,
I'm guessing it's trial limitation.

 

You can publish also with the trial version, it's exactly the same than normal one but limited to 30 days. You just need to right click on your package in Designer, and chose "Publish..". It will transform it into a .sbsar file, and you can use it in Unity

 

Ah, ok, looked there a number of times and overlooked it, thanks.
Any idea of the turn around on getting my serial number discount returned?

 

Too bad Unity can easily crash when using he sliders on the substance materials,
but I assume that's part of the Windows crashing thing that is in the fix in progress.