Subscription Advantage Pack for 3ds Max 2011 and 3ds Max Design 2011

[glorybound]

http://area.autodesk.com/blogs/ken/3...ysx_substances

[mike_kennedy]

Nice bonus this year....

[JeffG2]

But will Vray support the "Substances"?

[vlado]

Yes; they work fine.

Best regards,
Vlado

[stevesideas]

Is anyone else having problems accessing the page to download this upgrade ?

[stevesideas]

.........just read...released end of Sep. Very nice

[duke2]

Glad to see they haven't flipped anyone the bird and made features Max OR Max Design only.

[duke2]

Also that Substance thing will be bloody brilliant for getting rid of tiling artifacts (although by now everyone has their tricks and setups!).

[plastic_]

It's still tiled procedural textures as far as I see.

[glorybound]

It has been released! I am downloading It now.

[beestee]

It's still tiled procedural textures as far as I see.

But, you can set the map size anywhere from 1px X 1px all the way up to 262144px X 262144px if you so desire. The reason that it is handled this way is so game engines can easily import the textures. As George (duke) said above, it is brilliant.

I wonder how or if the *.sbsar package library can be expanded by end users.

EDIT: After playing with it for a while, many of the maps do not have a simple way to control scale despite being able to control resolution, so tiling can quickly become an issue. But I was able to make one of the culprits look somewhat usable by using a simple noise map to blend two of the same substance maps with differening random seeds and W axis rotations. Here is a quick result:



Rendered with VRay 1.5 SP5.

And the editor view:

[lukx]

how is IRay ?

[glorybound]

I played with IRay a little, but when I applied a material with a texture map it went black. I'll play more when I get a chance, unless someone has time first, and report back.

[duke2]

No designer for Substance. Useless are Simbiont without Darktree. I'm out.

[beestee]

I didn't realize that Allegorithmic Substances is a standalone commercial product:

http://www.allegorithmic.com/?PAGE=NEWS

Some interesting tidbits about Allegorithimic and their product...

-A lot of the "substances" included with the Max Sub. Adv. Pack are available on turbosquid for 5 bucks a pop.

-They plan to open a marketplace soon for purchasing additional "substances."

-They do have a substance designer available, for a price.

-They developed Image Synth which is sold by Luxology.

Honestly, I can't see myself dumping a bunch of time and money into using something like this without better inegration of the procedural aspects that drive it. I don't really care for having a myriad of variations on a 10 ft X 10 ft texture, I would much rather have a single non-procedural texture that represents a much larger area. Granted I will find use for some of the channels that these textures provide as grunge and dirt maps, but I don't really have any use for them as they were intended. I would be much happier with an Image Synth style texture that computes at rendertime using the procedural calculations to form an infinitely non-tiling texture.