Substance answers !

I think so... on our Windows here we don't have any problems, it seems to really depends on OS.

 

Just answered your mail

 

Sorry if this has been asked before somewhere, didn't see it so...

Will any of the substances in the AirStream demo be made available in precompiled form? Are they already and I missed them? Specifically the Road_02 substance because it has a lot of features (or a simpler substance that exposes things in a similar fashion). There are quite a few examples that shipped with Designer but I can't find any that show how to set up inputs so that they're exposed as procedural properties in Unity. I have an easier time learning through examples than reading docs and it seems Substance Designer is no exception (I've been through the docs but I can't find much info on this, I'm guessing it'll be updated when Substance 2 releases?).

 

All the substances included in the "Free Substances" package on the Asset store will be released as .sbs source files with the trial of Designer 2.0, I think you should find some interesting learning material in there

 

That's great! I opened up a few of the substances from the airstream demo and was disappointed (though not surprised) that I couldn't see the graph.

Looking forward to the release of 2.0 even more now

 

Yes, you need the .sbs files to be able to see the graph. We are however thinking about releasing the .sbs of Airstream.

 

Hi
Unity can work with substance redux?
If yes, it will not work under iphone no?

Thks!

 

No, Substance Redux is not compatible with Unity.

 

Substance Redux is a compression tool. It's actually aimed at traditional bitmaps, not Substances. (It has "Substance" in the name because it uses some of the Substance technology to perform its magic.)

Integrating Substance Redux into Unity is possible in theory, but it would be a completely separate project.

 

Will B2M work with texture atlases? I'm thinking of having my artist create unwrapped diffuse textured models, and using B2M to polish the models appearance. I'm also thinking of having all of my models unwrapped onto the same atlas for optimization. Is this possible? Also, I have unity indie. Will B2M work with unity indie? Do I have to purchase external software, or do I just need the B2M download from the asset store?

Thanks,

MTracer.

 

B2M is just another substance, so yupp will work with the free Unity.
Just the B2M is enough (there is no external software to work with it)

 

Texture atlases probably wouldn't work so well. You'd get poor results at the borders of the textures due to feature recognition and you couldn't tweak each individual texture, just the whole atlas. One thing you could do is run B2M on each texture, then generate the atlases out of the resultant textures at runtime.

 

The program we would be using to texture has the ability to extend the coloring of the texture beyond the edges of the unwrapped mesh, to a distance specifiable by the user. If I crank the distance, would that fix the seam problem? And besides, everything on an atlas would be the same graphic style, so manipulating the whole thing at once would be fine.

 

Ahh, so you want to use non-tiling texture maps? It's not really designed for that, so it's going to depend on your particular models and unwraps then. I'd be happy to test it out for you, if you want to send me a sample texture map or atlas I can generate some diffuse/normal/spec maps and send them back to you to apply to your model and see if the results are acceptable.

I did a quick test here and the results were better than I thought they would be, but not quite usable. But that was using a diffuse texture with almost no padding. If you set up your textures right, it might work.

 

Is everything on track for this demo ? >_>

 

Yup, release planned for tomorrow

 

Yes, since B2M samples pixels around the target pixel with blurs and warps, adding some color bleeding around the edges should do the trick. I recommend trying the B2M trial with your assets first to see if it works well.

 

I am primarily a scripter and not an artist, and just purchased the Nebular Sky product in the Unity Asset store under the Skybox section of the Textures and when I went to implement it into my Skybox I first tried to apply it to a "RenderFX->Skybox or RenderFX-Skybox Cubed" martial like I manually do for my other skyboxes, but since the product only outputs a singular image which doesn't appear compatible with either of the expected types (i.e. doesn't come up on browse from material and doesn't support drag-and-drop directly), I just tried dragging the "Space_02" Substance directly into my Skybox material and it seemed to work until I fired up the scene and panned left or right, or up or down where I see black segments with what looks like long streaks of stretched stars (but in a bad way). I looked at the Allegorithmic site for support but don't see anybody else having the same problem as me.

Has anybody else purchased this and/or can someone tell me what I'm doing wrong?

-Tim

 

Sky substances on the asset store are NOT skyboxes, but simple 2D sky textures, so what you see is the standard behavior if you use a standard texture as a skybox. We should definitely put a warning on those textures because a lot of people seem to assume they are skyboxes.

 

The character cusomization demo is up on the marketplace, check it out !

 

Yes, please do, as that is a bit of a shocker!

Thanks for the response.

-Tim

 

I've been playing around with the airstream demo. It seems like the procedurally generated textures keep reseting themselves to aniso 1, bilinear.

If I change them to trilinear, high aniso, when I stop running play mode they go back to 1 bilinear :\ even if I changed them outside of run mode to begin with.

Is there some way round this ?

 

I'm late to the party with Substance Integration in Unity but I searched and read all the threads. I have a question:

How would one use Substances with complex meshes with a UV layout? Can Substances be applied like one would use photoshop to paint on a uv map?

 

There is a vector mask painting tool coming in (Designer) version 2.

 

One of the available nodes is a transform node. Say you have a graph that outputs a denim looking substance; you could use that as input into the transform node and move the denim into the right position for the UV map to give a character jeans for pants. I'm sure there are other ways to accomplish the same effect.

 

How do you expose a BMP input so you can set it within unity ?

I can expose color inputs and other stuff, but not BMPs.

Edit: 'aight nevermind I worked it out.

 

Thanks for this guide, clears things up for me

 

Designer 2 is released since 2 days, as well as Designer 2 Lite. It's available for both Windows and Mac OSX, with a cross platform license.

For those already having a license, just download the trial version and enter your key to register.

For all the others, just have a try!

 

Hi all,

Here's a quick video showing how Substance Designer 2 can help you to quickly boost your bitmaps by adding some customization on your bitmaps.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUqPqr_7pGg

 

Excellent video. The new layers and SVG painting system rock.

Has the EULA been changed to allow for selling substances yet?

 

Not yet, but we are highly working on it. The technical problems are almost solved, and we are moving on with Unity for the accountancy/administrative remaining questions.

 

When does the 40% off sale end?

 

End of october.

 

Thank you. That's good to know. I'll definitely be buying the pro version, but it's nice that I don't have to spend the cash right now. I'll be in a much more comfortable position in the middle of September.

 

Is there any public information regarding the integration of substances into custom CG shaders, and would it make sense to assume they'd be exposed via sampler2D? I'd like to support them in Voxelform for use with triplanar shaders, and the new (unreleased) multi-material support. Thanks!

 

You don't reference the Substance directly, you reference the generated textures. Once you do that there's not much difference between using them and any other texture.

 

@niosop - Thanks and just got it working!

Honestly, this is perfect for multi-material voxel terrain. Being able to easily tweak materials as you're flying through your terrain, placing sand dunes and carving out crystal caverns is just too much fun. I've been using Filter Forge, and while decent, this workflow beats it hands down. This is going to save a lot of time. Great work guys.

 

Sweet, can't wait to see your next web player demo. Don't really have a use for the tech in any of my current projects, but it's fun to play with.

 

Is it possible to implement using a unity 3.3 extension or library?

 

No you must upgrade to 3.4+ if you want it

 

The problem is that if I update my earlier projects in broke down and did not advance but will go back in my projects

 

I have one question about substances: could they be applied to imported mesh files? Yes, I know you can drag a mesh to the scene, drag substance on the mesh blah... blah... blah... This is not sufficient! What if I have tens of instances of object on scene? Use prefabs? - F*** no! Why I should embed object into another object, especially when it could be skeletal mesh with tons of animation and require programing? Or, another example, what you going to do with multipart character meshes, which is constructed at runtime and those parts never are manually added to the scene? - drop all those parts to the scene, create prefabs and such S***? Additionally, if you use such unnatural way, you will have very hard times, if reimport of mesh needed, which is usual thing in game development process. So, generally speaking , is substance useable at all?

 

The proceduralMaterial class inherits from Material so you can basically use substances in the same way you use standard material by script and apply them on your meshes at runtime.
I believe the only difference is that you have to add the "as ProceduralMaterial" bit and that you have all the substance controls on top of the standard material functions.
In order to support the substances directly on imported meshes however, Unity has to provide an updated FBX importer , as FBX files exported from Max or Maya can embed substances applied on objects.
For now the most convenient workaround is indeed using prefabs if you have a large amount of instances of the same object in your scenes.

 

am I missing something or is it possible to create such a proceduralmaterial at runtime with a certain "substance" file. What I mean is: Can I load new substances directly into the game or do I need the Unity roundtrip to get them in? Ideally I would think of something like:

ProceduralMaterial.LoadFromFile("MySubstance.sbsar")

Any chance?

 

I'm a bit tarde to this thread - I'm here now cause I'm at the point in time where I need to decide if I'm going to move forward with Substance Designer or stick with my current tool Genetica.

I would love to hear that Modo was adopting Substance, I'd buy in without reservations for sure.


Additionally, I didn't see the correct answer to the comments above concerning DarkTree Textures but I want to add that Darktrees ARE rendered realtime in the >Host< application though the Symbiont(s).

I had Darktree textures for a handful of my applications back when it was popular; Lightwave, Animation Master and Caligari trueSpace. Though hacked, I was even able to get them within Softimage (v6 / v7) though not supported.

I agree with Bawss, the textures were pretty much free, you paid for the authoring tool. Provided your host app had a symbiont written for it, you could enjoy your Trees in all your apps. Here they got you paying for onezees and twozees...


The Darktree format is pretty much a text file describing the texture - the Symbiont renders that texture description onto your surfaces within your 3D (or supported) app.

I believe the Symbionts are likewise written in C++ or at least C.

There's an SDK for wiring into the a host renderer. It was finding folks or getting the company to take the time to write the Symbiont for the target application that was the road block (Cinema 4D R9 and above for example)

You can "bake" a DT down to a bitmap within the authoring app but ultimately they're rendered within your host app in realtime similar to Substances, including (animated textures) by the Symbionts.

Near the end of their focused development, they implemented "Tweaks" which allowed you to create "parameters" you could change within your host app - very powerful at the time...

-Will

 

Personally, I really liked Genetica and am still using it for some things. However, even though I've had Genetica installed for years, I'm only using it sporadically ... so, I don't really feel like I know a lot about Genetica. One thing I'd still use Genetica for is rendering texture animations into "tiles".

With Substance Designer, I immediately fell in love. Probably there's some things, maybe quite a few things that you can't do with Substances but that you can do with Genetica. But while with Genetica, I never got to the point of really being able to do what I wanted to do easily, I reached that point with Substance Designer within a day. I don't know enough about both tools to do a real comparison. But obviously, the realtime rendering aspect of Substance Designer makes it the preferred tool for me for most use cases. Especially with the Unity integration, this opens up a completely different workflow.

For example:

I have created a substance for my main level textures in Traces of Illumination, which basically uses a raster. Now, I have variables to tweak the background and foreground colors, the width of the raster, glow, blurriness, and a "dirt" factor with a couple of parameters to tweak. Instead of having to move back and forth between applications, I can now tweak all of these parameters directly within Unity - even while playing if I so wish. That's a lot of fun, an easy and intuitive workflow.

Regarding the prices: I'm not particularly interested in buying Substances. If I want something, I can create it. And if there's something that someone else has already done, I'm happy to pay the price because most of the time, it'll save me more time than what the money would be worth (otherwise, I wouldn't even consider buying it).

Of course, if Unity supported realtime rending of Darktree or Genetica textures like it does with Substances, that would be great. My understanding is that Substances are designed from scratch to be capable of realtime rendering, so maybe that's the difference. Or, the Darktree / Genetica folks just need a little nudge to approach UT to have their technologies integrated ;-)

 

Don't get me wrong, Genetica, Darktree, and Filterforge are great procedural authoring tools, but the main difference that makes Substance the only tool fitting in the Unity pipeline is that Substance has a runtime component allowing complex procedural material to actually render in real time, even at high resolution. Believe me, it's not that easy, it took us 5 years to get it right

 

Thanks so much, Jashan, this is exactly where I'm at with Genetica - I like the tool but I'm certainly not a master of it - there's a lot I feel I need to learn and currently can't accomplish with it for sure!

The Canvas and texture synthesis nodes are about the only 2 so far I got a decent grasp over - don't even ask me to do anything animated yet!

One of the biggest things I'd like to do with Genetica is generate spherical textures to map onto spheres for my planets - can't grasp generating spherical renders with Genetica so I'm back to using LunarCell and photoshop.

I can imagine creating these maps easily using Designer without any worries about pole pinching and other bitmap related errors that usually crop up. Hell, I may even be able to create a nice glow and realtime, changing cloud layers without too much hassle if I'm lucky!



So reading you say that you were able to become comfortable with Designer is a plus in the direction for me to buy in.


Just to be clear, I'm not advocating a push towards DarkTrees or Genetica although Atlas did mention he is considering a plugin architecture.


My concern would be adoption of Genetica at that point, even if the plugin SDK was available today.

Anything Autodesk adopts (unfortunately?) also tends to become a dominating force in the 3D industry, so having them adopt Substances (along with Unity) is a major positive. I can only imagine (hope) the use of Substances will increase over time, preferably enjoying a multiple selection of hosts similar to what DarkTrees enjoyed back in its heyday...


Jerc, understand, I agree Substances is the >best choice<, especially for integration into Unity, the only direct question I'd have for you is would you folks consider a Modo port or say even Softimage, Lightwave or Cinema 4D?

My goal here would be to have my Substances useful across my applications (as an indie / hobbyist, I will not buy Autodesk products again after having let go my Softimage 2011 maintenance - basically a hella expensive toy I had to let go in this current economy after being forced to upgrade after v5 Foundation was dropped...)


Reconsidering a bit, my deepest, most honest request for you Jerc, would be to FIRST get Substances working in Blender v2.5x - that alone would open up a HUGE user base for Substances, and for me would be just as much an immediate trigger to buy into Designer as having them available in Modo, if not more.

Please consider this.


Thank folks, I'm hoping to get the chance to play with Designer v2 this weekend to see if I can get a positive feeling for it similar to say Jashan's experience with it.

My first attempts will definitely be to see what kind of planet maps I can make for myself and how they look in Unity within a test level...


-Will

 

Of course our goal is to get Substance integrated in every 3d software and engine to make it a standard in the industry, but those kind of deals take a lot of time to actually happen.
Autodesk and Unity are the first big steps in that direction but be assured that we are working hard towards integrating substance natively in all the major 3d apps and engines.