I’ve had a look at it and am debating whether or not I should get it, it looks pretty good, but does it really matter if your models aren’t perfect looking, cause most people probably don’t sit with their faces glued to the TV. And from a distance even passable models look good. I know it would be cool to go in and paint on dirt and scratches and all that cool stuff, but is it really worth it? And is it any better than just painting in zbrush? How good is the substance plugin for unreal, what kind of things can you do with it?
Pros:
Painting your model in real time is a lot of fun
PBR workflow that lets you paint colour, height, roughness and metallic together or separately
Baking capabilities
Layer based system for each of your material ID’s
Non destructive, in that you can upscale and downscale with ease
Projection painting is awesome
Tight integration with Substance Designer - use substances created in Designer in Painter, also can download substances from Substance Share site
Generators and filters save a lot of time
Great training videos on YT by Wes
Most indie friendly price and purchasing plan that I’ve seen…ever
Cons:
Mainly just the UE4 Substance plugin. Plugin currently only supports up to 2k and duplicates all inputs (albedo, normal, rough, metal) when you create a material instance from a parameter change
Outputs in most cases have to be amalgamated in Designer (or another tool)
UE4 and Painter render differently so what you see in both might be a tad different, Unity took steps to match the Substance renderer, not sure if Epic plan to do this for UE4
Thanks for the reply, was just watching some tuts on it earlier and it does look very impressive and easy to use. I especially liked the auto paint scratches tool. It looked amazing. Doing the same thing manually, as I used to takes at least an hour depending on how complex your models are. When you say there’s a difference in the rendering, is it a minor difference? Cause it would be really annoying to spend hours making something look perfect and then bring it into the engine and see something completely different.
I’d recommend simply downloading the trial of Substance Painter and taking it for a run. You’ll be able to see it in action for yourself this way. Personally, I’ve been using it for a while now and absolutely love it. Though, I do find it can crash more than I’d care for sometimes. It is in active development still, though, and updates are released frequently.
I think it’s minor but ultimately down to how perceptive your peepers are. I’m also basing this off the fact that recently Unity announced they were matching the substance viewport.
Thanks for the replies, I’m gonna give the demo a shot.
Substance Painter is cool but don’t forget to have a look at the Quixel Suite aswell.
Concur with this. Quixel was crash city for me. The Substance experience is many times more pleasant.