For Unity Pro: 40% Discount on Substance Designer 1.2 and 2.0

The people who bought V1, do they have to pay for V2?

And users who buy V2, will they have to pay for V3?

I'm asking this because the jump from V1.2 to V2 seems to come rather quickly and sometimes companies are doing this in the beginning because they want to get certain critical enhancements out to their customers quickly, then they also give it out more or less for free, with later on charging for the big version numbers something in the 30%-50% areas. Sometimes companies also aren't fond of giving out enhancements beside of fixes and instead charge you for each more significant feature release.

Which leads for certain users to a update trap, they update the tools they need the most and other tools, you don't need on a daily basis, can get outdated rather quickly, more if it's a tool which develops quickly. That's the reason i'm asking.

Btw i'm new to procedural textures beeing generated this way. Are the substances a propritary format or is it somehow open? If not, does there exist something like a open standard format as well? Although each engine for sure has its own features, i guess, like with every media type, there also do exist similarities and basic concepts to which you can break it down by defining certain axioms.

 

Great news.

 

proprietary and creatable through the substance designer only

 

Hmmm, so with creating substances you're also tied to Substance Designer only.

I don't know, if it would cost $100 or $200 i wouldn't mind but for the regular $1000, and it will be regular priced again for the updates once the introduction period for Unity customers is over, it simply sounds overpriced to me.

Looking at the other licences Allegorithmic offers it doesn't seem to be a nice company as well. They have these old school licences which try to charge you for everything here and there. You're not allowed to sell this, can't use it in that context unless you buy licence x, and so on, it's this greedy milking you for everything attitude. Now they want to alter a few things for Unity users as well but my alarm bells ring when a company already dared coming up with such issues. Also the "…make us rich …" statement from Jerc sounds kind of alarming in this context.

In comparison my full Modo licence costed less. The first procedural texture tool i bought is still powerful enough for me but discontinued since years and so sadly there exists no OSX version. Ranging from $30 up to $300 (limited indie version up to studio licence) it was flexible and reasonable priced. The main aspect it lacked was its missing integration into Unity and the benefits which otherwise result from that.

Personally and without a project which justifies it, it is not worth 10 times the price and i think i'm more looking for the Pixelmator of Procedural Texturing instead of the Photoshop version of it. Maybe a V2 Designer Lite comes closer to that. Maybe Allegorithmic sees/tries to establish themself as a monopolist, at least the product is priced/licenced this way.

It would have been so much better if this would have been part of Unity like it sounded like in the beginning. I'm wondering how and finally when the also once promised 2D engine for V3 will shape up in detail.

 

The other licenses on our website are for middleware, you can't really compare these to a software offer, it's a different market with different rules, but on the software side, the only limitation with Designer for now is that you can't sell your substances, and this issue will be solved quickly and he EULA changed.
As you pointed it, there are a lot of other procedural creation software out there, but they lack the real-time component allowing for a in-engine usage, may it be Unity, UDK or anything else.

And I didn't say "make us rich", even though I wish I was

 

Dont understand the discussion. Why cant people be happy and just pay for great software. Developers of new software must be alowed to get rich. Absurd, thats what it is... Dont want it dont pay for it.... I will buy it because it will save me x amount of hours and i will gain for it in every project i do.

 

The normal price is a little bit much IMO (just a little bit), but with the discount it's pricing is in keeping with the competition.

Genetica Pro (doesn't do animations): $399
Genetica Studio (does animations): $899
FilterForge: $399

None of the others give the possibility of runtime modification inside Unity or give you the file size reduction that Substances will allow. I have a Genetica Pro license, and while it's good software, I don't see myself using it anymore now that I have Designer.

The B2M filter actually does a really good job of generating maps and gives you a lot of controls to tweak the output. At $149 it's half the price of CrazyBump ($299), seems to give comparable results, saves you size in your build (you only store the diffuse and the others are generated at runtime, instead of packaging all the generated maps), and has a faster workflow because you can see what it's going to look like in Unity without jumping back and forth between programs to when you make an adjustment.

For popular web games, Designer could pay for itself in a couple of months due to CDN bandwidth fee reduction. For casual users, it's a lot harder to justify. Casual users should probably just buy a couple Substances that they need for their project.

As a company I've liked Allegorithmic for a while. MapZone was great software, and free. They've listened to their customers and put one of their revenue streams at risk by changing the EULA and allowing us to sell Substances we create. They've been active answering questions (both sales related and technical) in these forums. The one time I emailed them, they replied quickly and were friendly.


TLDR: Designer is priced competitively with the competition, the integration with Unity rocks, the company is cool.

 

For those who thinks Substance Designer is too expensive for their needs, keep in mind that a Lite version is arriving for 350$ in the coming weeks.

 

@Jerc
Yup my fault, the statement came from Liatti, still coming from the same company.

Your licence models reminds me of the Virtools times, they also had these crazy and unfriendly barriers in some aspects. I'm glad these days are over and somehow Virtools got what they deserved. Beside of this there do exist enough examples where software is offered for different markets in a pleasant way as well. And if you're honest about that you most probably know this on your own. Treat your customers the way you like to be treated.

Procedural textures are very interesting as long as the workflow, the quality and the performance makes sense. The reduction of the filesizes on a first view is the most obvious benefit but the others aren't less important and grow on you over time. Still, if other routines would be part of the Unity player as well, many users probably would be fine with the generation and the filesize reduction already. And as groovy as steering those substances via parameters is, you also have to find a reasonable usage/need for those features and they aren't needed in many type of games as well. Obviously there also exist games/genres where it's a real benefit.

What will be the limitations of the Lite version?
Will it be offered for a discount as well?
OSX and Win versions?
Again, what do you intend to charge for updates?

 

Well our license model is pretty simple, lite and full version of a software and that's it. The reselling issue is being fixed.

About your questions :

What will be the limitations of the Lite version?
In this first version:
- You won't be able to create your own procedural noises (writing your own mathematical functions). But believe me it's pretty advanced stuff and you might never use it even with the full version since there is already a large library of noises to choose from.
- You can't create functions inside of parameters.
- You can work only on one substance at a time.

Will it be offered for a discount as well?
There shouldn't be a discount on the Lite version.

OSX and Win versions?
Yes!

What do you intend to charge for updates?
We have no plans for releasing paying updates for now. We already have some features and adjustments scheduled for 2.1 and updates will be free as long as it's not a huge new feature that deserves it.

 

Well, browsing through your licence page and googling a bit the history gave me another impression.

Anyway thanks for the informations.

Will OSX and Win be a cross licence?

Why won't there be a discount on the Lite version?

Personally i'm fine with the limitations of that you can't produce your own noise, as long as there is a reasonable set to choose from, and working on one noise only at a given time, not beeing able to define your own functions inside paramters sounds too limiting.

 

Yes the license will be cross platform, one license allows you to use the software on 2 seats, may it be PC or Mac.
There are no plans for a discount on the lite version because it's already quite cheap
About the functions limitation, we have some ideas to give more control over the parameters in the lite versions but it would come in a future (free) update.

 

I think if they'd enabled functions within the Lite version then there'd be little reason to go with the full version. I think Lite will still appeal to a wide audience - a more suitable name might have been Artist's Edition.

I guess you could get an idea of what you're getting by trying out the trial and seeing if function parameters are actually that important to you.

 

@Jerc
There for sure are different opinions about what is cheap and what isn't as well as how to get things started best. Excluding the Lite version from the discount doesn't make sense to me but on the other side it fits to the impression that i got from the product/your company and which i wrote about above. That you have to resolve distribution issues, the comment that you don't charge for small version number updates, which is more than common, ... it all sounds after that you try to squeeze out whatever you think is possible instead of doing it in a reasonable way right from the start.

Anyway let's wait and see how a trial of V2 of Designer Lite turns out in real.

 

Hi Jerc,

How much is Substance Designer Lite? When will it be available?
Can it be used in commercial game dev.? What is missing in Lite ver.?

 

Hi there,

How much is Substance Designer Lite?
- 350$

When will it be available?
- In a few weeks

Can it be used in commercial game dev.?
- Yes!

What is missing in Lite ver.?
- You won't be able to create your own procedural noises (writing your own mathematical functions).
- You can't create functions inside of parameters.
- You can work only on one substance at a time.

 

Thanks for sharing all of this info. I'm very excited by designer and have been looking forward to using Allegorithmic texture generation since I first saw you years ago at GDC. Unfortunately, until you support IOS (and/or Android), I have no reason to purchase your tool.

Please put ALL of your efforts into getting that ASAP. I need your tool right now, immediately. But... without mobile support, it's no good to me other than as a demo.

Gigiwoo

 

Is this purely a matter of efficiency and convenience, or does working with multiple substances make possible results that are otherwise difficult to achieve?

Frank.

 

Lets say that it's easier to work on big scale projects if you can copy and paste elements from one texure to the other.

 

Designer 2.0 is out

 

Got it, installed, activated, happy days, thank you!

 

My concern at the moment is over the state of Unity v3.4.

It totally doesn't run on my computer and I had to roll back to v3.3 (which also didn't run until I added it to my DEP list.)

I'm also concerned about the reports of a whole bunch of new (class files and stuff) getting added to your projects after conversion causing further woes.


The clock is ticking on this price reduction, still no word (that I've heard) about a FIX to these issues with v3.4.


I'm hoping this offer will be extended (or UT gets that PATCH OUT like NOW? ) for those of us who can't even make a decision as to whether to buy in or not.

-Will

 

There is no new stuff added to your files, the only delta on that end is that the mono dev solution is now structured as the compile happens so you know what goes wrong if some class can't find another one over language barriors. No whoes from that end.

Doubt you gonna get to see a fix for it prior 3.5, as Unity 3.x didn't have any hotfix release at all (unlike unity 2.x). also some of the things are not bugs but by design (the unityscript compiler now is no longer as broken as before, the mono solution finally shows what you really have instead of making you guess, ...)

 

Well thanks for the clarification as far as to what's happening within the project structure since I can't see it for myself first hand.

I'm still however waiting for a fix since v3.4 is non-existent as far as my system is concerned.

-Will

 

Just a quick message to tell you that seeing the success of our discount for Unity users, it's prolonged for an indefinite time.

 

Great.
Slightly off topic but the substance browser is great: http://www.allegorithmic.com/substances/browse#

However it does not tell you the memory footprint of each substance. If you are making a web game and want to save space then it's all about the size. I know many are only a few kb but looks like some utilize textures and so may be larger.

 

To follow up, I assume that there is still no support for the substance runtime on iOS. Please shout out when there is.

Gigiwoo.

 

Still no iOS support, don't worry, when it's there you'll know

BTW, Game Developer magazine has launched it's 2011 Front Line Awards, rewarding the best tools in the industry. Substance Desinger 2 is one of the finalists, if you like the tool, you can show your appreciation by voting for us !

(and also vote for Unity as the best Game Engine !)

 

How long will the designer be discounted for Unity users?

 

We haven't set any deadline yet.