Announcing Substance Designer 5

The new age of procedural art is coming on March 4th! Substance Designer 5 greatly enhances procedural texture creation with new tools and workflows.

PIXEL PROCESSOR
DYNAMIC GRADIENT - Use Images as gradients
BEVEL - Hardsurface details for normal map in minutes
NEW BLENDING MODES
TRI-PLANAR PROJECTION - Apply any image to mesh with no visible seams
RANDOM INPUT FX-MAP - Easy splat maps
NEW TEMPLATE SYSTEM
DEPENDENCY MANAGER
BAKING IMPROVEMENTS - Transfer Map from Mesh

Check out Substance Designer 5
https://www.allegorithmic.com/products/substance-designer#major_release

-33% on Upgrades until March 4th! Preorder now and receive Substance Designer 4 in the meantime.

Cheers,

Wes

 

Well for Allegorithmic but is sadly that after many years Unity don't have a default shader editor.

 

Is Substance Designer the only product getting a major version upgrade or will there be an upgrade path for those of us who have the Indie Suite with Designer / Painter / B2M?

 

Painter is too new to get a major (paid) upgrade already, and B2M got its latest upgrade not that long ago. Probably unlikely. Synchronising all three products to have major upgrades at the same time would be unusual too, not to mention suspicious

 

I'm surprised it has been so long since Substance Designer 4 came out. When I went to link up my Steam account, in preparation for the upgrade, I noticed too that the maximum income for the indie license was increased to $100,000. That change really needs to be announced better as it could attract more developers.

 

The pixel processing is going to be super useful. Upgraded

My Illuminati senses tingled at the release date. Can't quite pinpoint why.

 

I was assuming this was the case... was just making sure. The next question would be... if I have the Indie bundle, do I qualify for the standalone SD4 upgrade or would it have to be the new pricing?

 

If you have SD4, I don't see why you wouldn't get the same upgrade price for the individual app

At least two of the new features are going to make things easier for me, and the new indie income limit is a nice surprise. Looking forward to seeing what timesavers I can make with it.

 

You could try logging into the site with your account and visiting the upgrade page.

https://www.allegorithmic.com/buy/upgrade

 

Sure did and just upgraded.

 

Wesm, you should work with Unity guys and get the documentation updated, as it's still the same docs from ages ago where many features weren't supported. For example the docs still says you can't have substance bake on runtime on Android and IOS, while I read on your forum that you can since 4.3.

 

Bump that. @wesm I also think there needs to be more code-focused documentation and at least one good code-oriented tutorial in the Unity documentation / the Unity learning area. Procedural materials seem to be such a useful thing, but totally underused by devs.

There is an old Unity substance example project which might profit from a slight overhaul as well.

 

Oh wow, I didn't notice that!
Thanks for pointing it out!

 

I agree about the 100k news, should have been announced better or with more drum rolls, since it's also a big marketing thing. I only noticed it now from random Steam news feed click

"And finally, another exciting news: The revenue limit for the Indie version has been raised to $100 000/year for all Allegorithmic software!"

 

I wish UT would change the substance limit to 4k, especially for stuff like Arch Viz...

 

^Just wondering: is this (substances corruption) really an issue or has it been solved?

 

I have not used substances since then, we were set back weeks by that little mishap, and I have made sure only created textures (nothing dynamic) is used since.
Sorry I cannot help you further, but it was not an isolated incident, many other people on the forums had this problem as well, caused by the same thing.
It also corrupted multiple scenes, about 5 so you can understand why I have avoided using them since.

 

Could you be more specific about where in the forums this problem is being discussed? I've searched around after reading your comment, but all references to corrupt substances/textures seem to be a bit old, and there are lots of patches concerning substances in the release notes from unity v. 4.3-4.6...

 

Never heard about it either. I guess you have already submitted multiple bugreports with the corrupted scenes included as it has happened already 5 times?

 

@WendelinReich it was a long time ago, bit hard to find now, as we didn't know the cause at first, people were just mentioning that they had this scene corruption with a certain error, it wasn't until later we discovered it was caused by the use of Allegorithmic Substances.
This I believe is similar though:
https://forum.allegorithmic.com/index.php?topic=1670.0

 

Wes, I'm loving SD5, fantastic release - Designer is turning out to be one very sexy beast.

I don't suppose you know of any ETA on when the new features will be supported in Unity?

 

Unity should buy Allegorithmic and integrate it into Unity. Can't say I wouldn't be thrilled about such development.

 

@darkhog The only problem with Unity buying Allegorithmic is that they do not only make Substance Designer, Allegorithmic make many different programs and tools, most of which will not work natively with Unity, they would always have to be standalone, most of the substance programs would never integrate with Unity, and even if they were to rewrite them from scratch to all work natively with Unity, we would have to wait even longer for Unity 6, than we did for 5.

 

Unity buys allegorithmic, new license forbids people to use work created with substance tool to be used in unreal engine

Problem solved!

 

Then buy Substance off Allegorithmic.

 

Been looking at trying substance designer/painter but in my mind it does seem like a resource drain to dynamically create textures like this at runtime. Not saying PBR is a bad thing because it looks cool to me but maybe only for certain projects. Might be wrong in how I understand it's process but I can see how problems as mentioned by Labyrith Studios can happen. I guess the other way to look at it is that bugs happen and they didn't sit on their hands when they found out.

Is there not a way to bake it all down to normal textures and maps so you can have all those great effects in the more traditional texture format? I'm yet to try it out properly so I could be talking out of my clapham junction.

 

yeah SD can export as bitmaps... as .png and whatnot

and i guess the substances in Unity can be generated and cached
i just started using SD so i dont know all about it..

iam impressed with SD!

but in SD5 iam having problems importing SOME substances to Unity5..
im guessing it has something to do with Unity 5 and SD5 coming out a day apart
maybe im just screwing up? lol
https://forum.allegorithmic.com/index.php?topic=4256.0

well, if you export the substances as .png the dynamic texture problem shouldnt happen right??
.. but i guess that gets rid of some of the advantages of SD...
but for me, i dont really know how else to make textures, i used to use cgtextures.com and edit them maybe, but they tend to turn out way crappier than what i quickly made in SD ... and i was limited to what photos exist (like there was only 1 decent bronze texture, for bronze sword/armor)

 

From the Unity 5 release notes...

 

ooohh okay... lol oops

.. could still use the new features to make textures, and then export as bitmap.. so thats cool

i dont really need it to be a dynamic substance anyway...

 

If it hadn't been in the known issues section I likely wouldn't have found it either. Those release notes are massive.

 

Any idea on when or how long it will be until new substance upgrades are usable inside of unity 5? Just wondering.