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

[Kent Trammell]

Lots of great feedback in this thread. My 2¢:

I’ve never used any of substance’s apps but I’m very familiar with the work they accomplish. The procedural abilities of Designer are bar-none from what I can tell. Artists have been doing crazy impressive things with it for years.

It’s very likely I would have purchased and learned it myself if I wasn’t a Blender instructor (and thus motivated to do everything with Blender). On that note, I have high hopes that Blender will soon incorporate similarly intuitive procedural tools with Simon Thommes working for the institute. It’s a bonus of being a Blender user: The features/tools always come eventually.

As for Painter, it seems like a very good app and probably worth the $105. I’m less convinced it’s “the best” out there with Mari being another incredible painting app. Blender’s painting has always been a bit skeletal in terms of features but I’m able to brute-force it to do what I need.

Hope there’s something helpful in that..

PS:

When I watch a video and hear: “Do this and perform that and you will get this result, I don’t know why but it works” — I can’t take that video seriously.

I’m totally guilty of this 😬 I agree to an extent but man, there’s so much complexity in simply knowing the functions of Blender’s immense toolset. To also know why/how each tool does what it does…vector math, complex algebra, alphabet-soup-formulas of light behavior, etc…It’s a tall order. Not to make an excuse for myself and other instructors – we all need to keep learning! Just remember that we’re human too, I guess that’s my point.