Substance Designer 6 Now Available

Substance Designer 6 comes with new filters dedicated to scan processing to help you build a complete workflow for creating clean, ready-to-use tiling materials adapted to photogrammetry.

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Substance Designer 6 also introduces three major, long-awaited features: Curve Node, Text Node and 32-bit floating point compositing.

The bakers also get some love as they have been deeply modified to support up to 8K bakes and non-uniform (non-square) ratios. These architecture changes will unlock many more features down the road.

We are also working on exciting new features for the Substance UE4 plugin! We will have more to share on this soon.

Cheers,

Will we be able to edit exposed curve node values in unreal?

I am excited to update Designer! Can’t wait to get my hands dirty in these new nodes! :slight_smile:

Meh… i don’t even use it much. Only bought the package for B2M and Substance Painter.

In SD, you can’t expose the curve values as a parameter so this will not translate to UE4. We are working on the plugin now to support for the new features in Substance Engine 6.

Cheers,

Thanks! We are working on the UE4 plugin now to support the new features such as text input editable in UE4.

Cheers,

Do you know if there are any plans to expose curve values in the future? ?

I just started learning substance designer and whenever I try to import a .sbsar file into UE4 I get an error, “Substance: invalid assembly, cannot import file.”. I tried downloading a substance from share and importing that which worked fine but if I import that into SD6 and then export it to a new .sbsar then I can’t import that either despite making no changes. I am on UE4.13. I came across a forum thread that said I had to change my substance engine but V4 through V6 makes no difference.

I found this thread through Google, and I just wanted to add here (although it has nothing to do with Unreal) that when exporting an SBSAR from SD6 and importing it into Unity I experience the Unity version of this exact same error. It is: “Failed to retrieve a single SBSASM file in the archive… Did you use the Substance cooker to generated the archive ?”. This could suggest something changed in the archive format that makes the plugins no longer able to read it?

I have also tried the compatibility modes and so on.

For the message directly above me, New nodes aren’t working in Unity yet. Compatibility mode just highlights the node connections that it can’t handle, remove the nodes with highlighted output connections and that fixes the imports in Unity (this unfortunately means no normal maps from my testing).

as for UE4, I’m not sure I’m encountering the same issue and will be running tests shortly to see if the same steps (removing the nodes that are handled differently inside of Substance Designer 6 fixes my import issues.) I’ll let you know if the result is the same.

I have confirmed that at least in the Linux build of Unreal Engine 4 from the github repository with the substance plugin does not support the modified nodes, After removing the normal maps from the Substance that I was looking to use, the error is no longer present and can be imported into Unreal just fine, These substances with the new nodes also do not work in substance painter, which kind of makes having Substance designer 6 at the current moment largely useless to me, don’t get me wrong it’s a great program, and once the new plugin version is released and painter is updated it will continue being amazing, but at this second, use compatibility mode, remove any node whose output line to the next node is orange, and publish the material.

as a work around for now, if you know the resolution settings that you need for your textures before hand, you can still use the classic baking method to get your metallic map, basecolor maps, and normal maps, and use them that way, but it confines you to making any adjustments to your texture and hardbaking it, so if you need to weak it later you’ll have to reopen substance designer and tweak it and re-export your materials. In engines that support hot refreshing textures this isn’t so bad, especially on a dual head workstation, substance on one screen, your Engines editor on the other and tweak, export, let the engine reload the textures, and the bake times with this method are fast, at least on my work machine…

Once the new plugins are available, Just make note of the settings for seeds and parameters you used when you baked the image textures and then you can change out the static images with the substance materials and you’ll already know the parameters or at least close to what you’ll need when you do. It’s not ideal. but it’s the workaround I’m currently using to keep my workflow moving rather than let this halt my progress,

That’s what I meant when I said I tried the compatibility modes… it does not show any colored lines or boxes. As far as I know I’m only using Substance Designer 5 functionality.

This could also explain why the Unreal version doesn’t support premade SBSARs downloaded from share, source, or textures.com.