Qixel suite / substance painter/ mari ???

[stevesideas]

There was another thread on a similar subject but I just wanted to know which one was more suited to high poly painting. It seems Qixel and substance are for gaming assets. You need to have a low poly and high poly version of your mesh in order to create the normals and AO etc for the final low poly version.

I would love to have all the features of Qixel where you can use AO masks and create damage etc but I don't think you can do this with just a high poly mesh.

Can anyone help me out or provide any more info as to what painting software would be best. I really would like to up the quality of my textures.

[Bathyscaph]

I can't give you the exact answer you're looking for but I can say that I've used both the Quixel tools and the Substance Tools.

I think they both have merits and both companies are good companies that are worth supporting. Quixel has offered free upgrades to the new tools for existing customers and also made some of their older tools free for everyone. Allegorithmic has great technology and a good community of artists behind it.

I can say that Quixel is entirely built around Photoshop, so if that is where you feel comfortable then it is a really great tool. From my experience, there is a decent amount of lag because you will essentially be using the Quixel tools to automate and oversee the creation and management of hundreds of Photoshop layers and the scene files are complex and the scripting is not super fast. With that said though, the tools are brilliant and if you have to give 50 objects a similar treatment it is like magic. Great tool.

Substance Painter seems like the future to me. It's come a long way in a short amount of time. I would recommend picking up the Substance Indie pack which will let you try their whole suite. It's frequently on sale from Steam or directly through Allegorithmic. I love building materials with Substance Designer and have yet to really dig deep into Substance Painter but it's on my to-do list.

Most of my work with these tools has been with traditional game style assets. Like you though, I intend to use them for high-poly work. I think it should be quite possible to generate a lower-res painting asset for working with these tools and of course, they both do their magic based partly on the normal map data so you'd need to generate a normal map for your high-res asset. It's a good amount of setup because you have to have your UVs laid out nicely, etc. but for important pieces I think it is worth it.

[stevesideas]

Thanks for taking the time to answer.

I actually had a quick look at 3d coat. They seem to have introduced PBR materials. I've still yet to read up on exactly what these are but it looks like they support edge scratches etc. Only in beta at the moment but I purchased the previous version so I may just give this a go for now. It doesn't look as complex as quixel or SP but it might just do for me the high poly meshes I need to work on.

[Mokiki]

If you have steam you could also take a look for the mari indie version for around 140€ (dont know the dollar price).

http://store.steampowered.com/app/289550/

These are the limitations:

Project file (.mra) linked to Steam account / cannot be shared with other users
The UDIM patch count is limited to 2 patches per object
The object count is limited to 3 objects
Export texture resolution size limited to 4k and 8-bit color per channel
Allowed export formats: .psd, .png, .tga, .jpg
Output formats no longer available .exr, .tif, .tiff, .hdr, .dds, and .ptx
Python scripting disabled
Custom shaders not allowed

If you can live with the 4k max resolution and 2 udims I think it has some great value.

[beestee]

Allegorithmic just upped the revenue qualifications for their indie licensing from $10K to $100K with Substance Designer 5.

http://www.cgchannel.com/2015/02/all...ce-designer-5/

[stevesideas]

That's good news

[RobH22]

I've been playing with the new Quixel, 3DCoat 4.5 Beta (PBR materials) and Substance Designer. I've found that they are all really aimed at game development. I don't do games but I like the material creation tools they all have. Each is different but they all have merits. 3DCoat 4.5 is very buggy right now but it will get there. The version 4.5 is a Beta so you can't complain but it's pretty powerful. Quixel crashes like crazy so I can't too far along but it has some power. Substance Designer is really stable but I'm having trouble reproducing the look I have in SD in Max.

I've found for any of them that ask for a low-rez model to bake to, that you don't need to create that. If if you want to bake, just copy your prime model and rename it to "LO" (or whatever) and continue on. Bake the same model to the same model. However, if you always use hi-poly models and don't use lo-poly models there isn't much reason to bake anyway. Baking is a way to get that lower poly mesh to exhibit features of the high poly version.

So what I'm interested in is just using the material creation tools. The biggest problem I'm having with Substance Designer and 3DCoat is that I can't figure out a good workflow for connecting the maps. Besides the obvious normal, diffuse and base, you have a different naming scheme. You can sort of be intuitive and surmise that PBR 'Glossiness' goes to Vraymtl 'Refl. gloss.' and PBR 'Metallic' goes to Vraymtl 'Refl map' but for me it's not working out. I can't get what I see in Substance Designer or 3DCoat to look the same in Max. I've tried all kinds of connection variations and I'm just not getting it. I've searched the web and found no one talking about or showing their workflow.

I'd love it if someone posted a few screen shots of a PBR 'metallic/roughness' map connected to Vraymtl and duplicating the look. Someone has to have figured this out but I can't find them.

[vlado]

Do they have a description of their material model somewhere? While it may not be quite possible to map things directly to a VRayMtl material, it is probably not too difficult to create an OSL shader that mimics their materials.

Best regards,
Vlado

[RobH22]

I'll have to research that. I'm not a programmer (but it looks like I'm slowly having to become one) and I'm not sure what a "description" of their material would look like. Is that code or plain text or something else? I'm starting to gather more vocabulary also to assist my efforts. I'm not even sure what OSL is either.

Mimicking their shaders is not the issue. Sure, we can do that. What's attractive about their shader system is that there are a huge number of pre-built shaders available that are very complex and infinitely modifiable. It could be a real time-saver on the front end and a fantastic tweaking workflow on the back-end when the client makes adjustments. But, the only way that it becomes efficient would be if the connections to a Vraymtl could be made quickly and reliably. If it's going to take hours to monkey around with it, then the benefit is lost.

I've posted on their site and asked the same questions but have no answers yet. Maybe it's not a realistic expectation that Vray can play nice with Substance Designer.

[joconnell]

Do they have a description of their material model somewhere? While it may not be quite possible to map things directly to a VRayMtl material, it is probably not too difficult to create an OSL shader that mimics their materials.

Best regards,
Vlado

It's the disney pbr as the standard one vlado, but they allow you to use any osl shader in their viewports hence me asking about the vray material in osl from the maya installer. I think the only thing might be getting the name of their channels to wire up correctly with the vray material inputs - they definitely have a traditional spec / gloss shader model to go on top of the metal / gloss from the disney approach though. They're working on a few more shaders at the minute with blinn, phong and cook on the way I think - the two current ones should be just plain text osl though.

[vlado]

but they allow you to use any osl shader in their viewports hence me asking about the vray material in osl from the maya installer.

I think they have GLSL support, not OSL...

Best regards,
Vlado

[joconnell]

D'oh, more read, less type from me

[pg1]

might be some useful info about substance in this link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LP7HgIMv4Qo

[RobH22]

might be some useful info about substance in this link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LP7HgIMv4Qo

That's a really good video and thanks for finding it. I thought I had found them all. I bookmarked this one for future reference.

It's fantastic for learning about PBR and SD. Now if I could just get someone to help me plug it all into a Vraymtl life would be sweet. That vid, as good as it is, doesn't mention Max, Maya or any integration.

[nborel]

Andrei has started working on a shader for maya (unfortunately): http://www.undoz.com/blog/2014/10/26...ed-shader.html
He has a shader network working to replicate pbr shader but unfortunately I'm not familiar enough with Maya to understand why he uses some of the nodes.
Maybe someone could have a look and explain how to recreate this shader for max???

(tried using the output from smart materials (3d-coat) into 3dsmax and vray but couldn't get the looks to match just yet.)