Reply To: Amazing Course! Thank you for making it.

Hey there, thanks for checking out the course! So glad you’ve been able to get through it and found it educational! It warms my heart, haha. 😄

Those are great questions, hopefully I’ve got some satisfying answers:

1. InstaMAT: There are a couple reasons I’ve chosen this over others. The positives that I think made this great were that it had the most accessible licensing (free for all users to even use commercially, up to a rather large financial target), as well as its relevance to common texturing workflows in the industry today and its ability to produce results. My goal with this course was to teach core concepts and workflow for game art, the software is merely the tools that get us to where we want to go!

Substance Painter is definitely the most powerful, however is only becoming less and less accessible to the average user. I think requiring users to pay for more software on top of a CGC membership conflicts with the goals of the course and the CGC platform, since other options do exist that are relatively equal in power! I want you all to focus on the concepts and goals of game art, not having to juggle memberships and subscriptions. Let’s see if you even like texturing or game art before you’ve sunken too much investment into the costs!

Quixel Mixer unfortunately didn’t really resonate with me. I know it is free to download, however I have a hard time finding any licensing information on it. As well, my experience with it was that it can’t really deliver textures that don’t already exist within their scans library. I think it’s a great tool for mixing materials and textures that already exist, but in trying to achieve something entirely new, I think users would have a difficult time. You’re pretty locked in to the textures they provide, or textures that have been created elsewhere to get you started. As of writing this if you are to go and download Mixer, you’ll see the file is called Quixel_Mixer_2022.1.1_Beta, which isn’t encouraging for its longevity. It appears it’s already dead.

For those reasons above, I think InstaMAT hit the mark with most accuracy and was the perfect tool to convey the concepts and workflow of creating art for video games. I don’t think learning it as a tool will handicap users in any way, and will give them a great jumping off point if they someday want to learn Substance Painter or Mixer as well! The core principles are the same, just different buttons between the software. This is also just my opinion, but if InstaMAT intends to continue developing the application I think we are going to start to see a divergence of some studios away from the Substance suite, and begin picking up InstaMAT in the years to come. They’ve got some serious promise from what I can see.

2. Portfolio: Ya absolutely! I cannot speak to every other instructor on the platform, but for any courses of mine you are always free to put up your models on portfolio. As long as you made the assets yourself or have adequately credited anyone that has provided you with resources (i.e. using concept art from someone else to make a 3D model from it / using textures provided by the course to texture the model you’ve created).

I think it’s always a good idea to ask first just to clarify as well, so thank you for checking with me! Please always feel free to share what you’ve made if you are following my courses, I’d love to see what you have been able to create! ♥

Chunck 🙂