Reply To: Quixel Mixer beta for free

[odunov]

I looked into Quixel Mixer just now. Seems like a nice and easy to use software (I’ll definitely download it in the coming weeks) but from what I’ve seen, it relies on external textures a lot. In comparison, you can pretty much create everything from scratch with Substance Designer without relying on any external files. 

I’m thinking mixer can be great if you need to be quick, keep things photorealistic and can afford to buy external files (unless they come free which sounds too good to be true :D) or scan stuff yourself. Procedural texturing is possible Blender too (you can check the Shader Forge course, or this short video https://twitter.com/simonthommes/status/1088382226671251458 ) Even though you can do incredible stuff with it, it doesn’t have the same node capability and there’s a steep learning curve. I don’t see either software replacing Designer in the immediate future.

Adobe’s acquisition is indeed worrying but I doubt that things are going to change overnight. I’d suggest to you to at least give Designer a try. As a start, Allegorithmic has lots of videos that teach how to use Designer and texturing in general on YouTube. There’s a considerable amount of material on texturing here on CG Cookie too.

And let’s say, in a year or two things go sideways for Allegorthmic and there’s a definite alternative for Designer, you’ll only need to learn a new software and adjust your workflow. I’m guessing that would be easier than learning how to create proper textures. 

If you don’t like subscriptions, you can get perpetual licenses for Allegorthmic software for cheap whenever there’s a major sale on Steam (I hope that doesn’t change because Adobe is in charge now :D)