© Abhishek Kumar 2020
A. KumarBeginning PBR Texturinghttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-5899-6_6

6. Substance Suite and Substance Painter

Abhishek Kumar1 
(1)
Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, India
 

Substance Painter is a real-time 3D texturing and painting application. Substance Painter allows users to create PBR-based textures using hand-painting as well as procedural workflows. It was originally developed for use in films and games, but currently it is widely used in the architecture, product design, and automobile design industries. This application is almost universally used in the video game industry for texturing assets. In addition, several big film studios are also introducing Substance Painter into their pipelines.

Why Substance?

There are several competing software applications in the field of real-time 3D texturing. Software like Mari, the Quixel suite, Quixel Mixer, BodyPaint 3D, ArmorPaint, etc., are some of the most prominent competitors to Substance Painter. Some of them are even free such as ArmorPaint and Quixel Mixer (free for the entire year of 2020). The question is, which software should you pick, and is it worth paying for a premium software application when there are free alternatives available? Well, I picked Substance Painter because it is way ahead of all the software, for the following reasons:

  • Procedural workflow: By far Substance Painter has the strongest procedural workflow. There are hundreds of tools, filters, generators, procedural maps, smart masks, etc., that give Substance Painter a huge advantage.

  • Direct integration with Substance Designer: Substance Designer is a texture authoring tool that allows users to create complex textures from scratch using mathematical functions and nodes. Once you have created something in Designer, it can be easily exported into Substance Painter for use as a material. Along with all the exposed parameters, you get a huge number of varieties and almost infinite randomized variations of them.

  • Industry standard: Substance Painter is the industry standard when it comes to texturing for games, architecture, product design, and automobile design. Substance has been widely used in the game industry and is slowly making its way into the film industry as well. So, this is the prime time to learn and master this software.

  • Huge community: Substance has a large and helpful community on Substance Share that is constantly creating and sharing tools, materials, filters, etc., as shown in Figure 6-1. Artists also create guides and tutorials on YouTube and other web sites. You can also find premium-quality assets and tutorials to buy.

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Figure 6-1

Substance Share has a large library of resources available for free

Uses of Other Substance Suite Applications

There are four products in the Substance Suite package: Substance Painter, Substance Designer, Substance Alchemist, and access to Substance Source. Each one serves a unique purpose and has a specific role in the texturing pipeline.

Substance Source

Substance Source is a library of premium materials meticulously created by experts using Substance Designer, which gives them a lot of flexibility (Figure 6-2). A Substance subscription comes with 30 credits per month; this allows you to download 30 assets per month, and the credits stack up month after month as long as the subscription is active. Materials can be downloaded and used directly by any other Substance application or product that supports Substance files.
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Figure 6-2

Substance Source is a premium material library

Substance Source is the most affordable material library simply because it is included in the Substance subscription, and you can absolutely get your money’s worth from this entire subscription. If you have a student license of Substance, then you can still download the free materials by clicking the Free Assets section.

Substance Alchemist

Substance Alchemist is a dedicated scan processing and material creation tool that is simpler to use than Designer. With it you can create materials by processing a single image or by processing a multi-angle scan of a surface. Users can also create new materials by merging existing materials and running filters and effects on them. This allows users to create a huge library of materials in a short time.

The left side of the Substance Alchemist (Figure 6-3) contains the shelf where all the resources are stored, and on the top-left side of the screen are modes that you can switch between: Explore, Inspire, Create, and Manage. Figure 6-4 shows an example creation.
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Figure 6-3

Default UI of Substance Alchemist

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Figure 6-4

Example of Substance Alchemist creation

Substance Designer

Substance Designer is a material authoring tool that allows users to create materials from scratch using nodes and mathematical functions (Figure 6-5). This gives users absolute control over what they want to create. Substance Designer is also used to create other tools for Substance Painter such as filters and generators.
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Figure 6-5

Default UI of Substance Designer

Substance Designer can create very detailed and realistic materials with the help of nodes. Although the node tree may look daunting at first, it is not all that complicated when you get the gist of how it works (Figure 6-6).
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Figure 6-6

A node tree inside Substance Designer

This was an introduction to the software available in the Substance Suite package. Next let’s see the hardware configuration required to run Substance Painter.

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