Reply To: To Substance or Not To Substance: That is the Question

Hi Shawn, I haven’t used Substance, never felt the need for it, because Blender can do everything I want already, maybe not in the easiest way, but I like figuring out how to make materials in Blender…

Now, because of your question, I decided to test Substance Designer. Here are my findings (but this is only after a ‘few’ hours of using it, so not very trustworthy probably):

SD is extremely powerful and allows you to create amazingly looking materials that would be very hard to make in Blender.

SD has a very high learning curve, think: Animation Nodes difficult, maybe it will take as long to learn as Blender….(that’s probably an exaggeration, but it’s hard to tell after such a short time). At least be aware that you’ll have to learn an entire software, not just an addon!

One thing I particularly liked, is that SD lets you see a 2D version of a selected node at the same time as a 3D version of the entire material.

What annoyed me is that all nodes are ‘collapsed’ and in order to change some parameters in a specific node, you have to select that node and go to a side panel…

Generally, I find the workflow very unintuitive, but that might also be because I am used to Blender’s way of working.

Anyway using SD is not going to be like taking the easy way out; you might reach greater heights, but you’ll still have to climb that mountain in order to get there!

Those are my first impressions, I think that if you are a professional artist only making materials/shading then SD is definitely the way to go. For a hobbyist….well it’s worth the money (in the Steam sale), but without Substance Source, you’ll spend a lot of time before you can make anything decent (I might be wrong there…).

I didn’t test Substance Painter, got enough frustrating hours to get SD to work (mainly due to the fact that they do not support Debian based Linux and fail to mention that anywhere..).