Substance Bitmap2Material

Still trying to find out how to fix the issue with exported textures. Seems it's a problem with the Substance material exporter, not just in side Unity but also from the Substance Player as well. When you look at the normal map inside the Substance material and the one it exports, there's an obvious difference between the two.

 

Now that unity 4.0 supports shades on terrain. Do you plan to update Substance Terrain Tool?

 

We answered you by mail, did you finally manage to have it work correctly?

 

It seems that the substance material is using different values for its parameters than what was used to export the bitmap.
If you set the Relief_Balance setting to 10, you get exactly the same result as in your exported normal map bitmap.

Did you try this?

Cheers,
Nicolas

 

I will update it as soon as I have some time to allocate on this (but it's pretty hectic right now^^)

 

Spent the last few days going back and forth with Alexis and here's a quick recap: The issue is that all exported textures aren't using the correct Substance material settings when they are saved and is a regression from 3.5.4 (doesn't work in 3.5.6 or 3.5.x) but was fixed for 4.0. Fortunately, you can work around the issue in 3.5.6 by tweaking one of the Substance material settings in the inspector before exporting. I've tested this and it works.

Thanks Alexis, Nicolas and Eric for your help!

 

Thanks for the update Big K cause this was concerning me that you wasn't getting the kind of support I feel is necessary for spending the amount of money being asked for this tool.

I'd still like to at least have Substances work within (preferably) Modo or Lightwave, that would allow me to easily justify spending ~$600 for a texturing tool that only Unity support at the moment (I don't have Maya or 3DS.)

Mobile dev is not my main focus so texture sizes are not a pressure point for me at this point in time.

That being said, I am highly interested in Designer v3 and B2M v2...


-Will

 

Hi Will,

I've not used Designer and I don't do mobile apps so can't comment on those, but I got B2M primarily to create my own high-quality, repeatable textures for large objects and terrains. This, B2M does in spades and easily replaces about a half dozen Photoshop plugins I would normally use to accomplish the same thing. I'm very happy with the quality of textures, specular and normal maps that B2M creates. Plus I think the fact that it works in the Unity editor makes it even better, I personally would rather do this sort of texturing in Unity where I can see the final outcome without re-importing anything. I've not tried version 2 yet but from what I've seen it'll be worth the $50 to upgrade. As for Allegorithmic's after sales support, although it took a couple attempts to get their attention (and to be fair, lost emails do happen) once I got their attention they were very responsive.

All in all, I'd give them two thumbs up and plan on buying the upgrade (which I would not do if I wasn't happy with the product).

 

The bug I reported above was fixed in Unity 3.5.7. It's already working in 4.x so no fix was necessary for that version series. Thanks very much to Allegorithmic and Unity Tech for your quick attention to this problem.

 

Hi Will,

I have good news for you: we just released yesterday a non-commercial license of Substance Designer for $99, fully featured!

This provides of course also access to future releases, and we have a 3.2 coming around Christmas with a new Library view which should ease a lot the workflow:




And as it's Christmas time we provide 250 substance files (with sources!) to everybody who buys either Substance Designer 3 or B2M (or an upgrade) before December 31st.

We hope you will like it
Nicolas

 

Hi,

The license is for the moment only available in the trial version, but we will make it visible on the website.
And it's only for non-commercial use.

Cheers,
Nicolas

 

Wow, I may just have to go for this. Is there a list of what substances are included?

 

I am assuming we get the free materials if we order through your website? If we order through your website, we will still get unity related files?

 

All the substance files we provide are compatible with Substance compatible software, meaning those 250 substances work in Unity, 3ds max, Maya... and other tools to be announced

 

**BUMP**

 

Sorry for the delay, here is a list of the 250 substances : https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ap5AWVqfBp5PdFE4VlJzcUdvSUQ0LWh1QmJ6WmI4NFE

This represents around half of the substances which are on the Asset Store.

 

@NicolasLIATTI: Did you get my PM asking how to upgrade? I'd like to take advantage of this offer.

 

I just answered you. Sorry I didn't notice earlier I had a MP.

 

Hi Nicolas.

I bought the upgrade. I understand that the 250 substances cannot open in the substance player.

But I cannot open them also in unity (3.5.7) ...

 

I'm having the same problem as elias_t. The zip contains files ending with .sbs and .sbsprs, neither of which do anything in Unity. Attempting to load them in the substance player results in it trying to find a file called "designer.app"


edit: I would also like to add that the new Bitmap2Material2 is incredible. The first was good, but this one is way better, it's hard to explain, but in just a few tweaks you can have incredible textures. I can't recommend it enough.

edit2: Unfortunately for me, it appears that exporting bitmaps from substances is still broken on the Mac. Still generates errors:


Failed to generate bitmap from Substance
UnityEditor.SubstanceImporter:ExportBitmaps(ProceduralMaterial)
UnityEditor.ProceduralMaterialInspector:ExportBitmaps(MenuCommand)

[/Applications/buildAgent/work/812c4f5049264fad/Editor/Src/AssetPipeline/SubstanceImporter.cpp line 1872]
(Filename: /Applications/buildAgent/work/812c4f5049264fad/Editor/Src/AssetPipeline/SubstanceImporter.cpp Line: 1872)

 

@Jaimi- What version of Unity are you using? Did you submit a bug report to UT? If not be sure to and include a project that reproduces the error.

 

I'm using Unity 4.0.0F7. I did submit a bug report during the beta, which they closed saying that they fixed in RC2, however, it's still broken. It's easily reproducible - no substances export for me. I'll submit another bug report.

 

I don't think it is a unity bug.
If you read here: http://docs.unity3d.com/Documentation/Manual/ProceduralMaterials.html

it says that: Uncompiled SBS files are not supported.

Nicolas said that these files should load in unity. But as I see it unity does not load sbs files.
So what is the point of giving away these substances if we can't do anything with them? (Yes I know they open in designer. But that's why I bought b2m, because I don't need the designer yet.)

 

Yeah, I don't think that is a bug. The bug is that I can't export bitmaps from any substance, with any project, in Unity 4.

 

I'm interested in the upgrade too. I bought the first version on the asset store.
Can you tell me how to upgrade?

Thanks,
Jacopo

 

You should also have received the .sbsar files, because those are the only files which are readable in Substance integrations. Sbs files are just the source files.
I'll have a look why you didn't get them and upgrade your account accordingly.

 

This is indeed a bug in Unity 4. We submitted a fix a few weeks ago, it should be shipped with the next Unity release (4.0.1 I guess).

 

That's good news, thanks for the update. btw - my zip also included the sbs files instead of sbsar, hope I can get updated too.

 

Thanks, I transmitted it to the team!
And you should put it in this comment on the Asset Store

 

Yes, I figured out the mistake and I'm working on it.
I'll beep our admin system so he can update it.

 

Please let us know when the new zip package with the sbars have been made available.

Thank you,

Lee

 

It should now be done, you can download it on your Allegorithmic account.

Nicolas

 

I'm interested in the upgrade too. PM sent.
Max

 

What is the differences between the LITE and FULL version of 2.0?

 

Upgrade PM sent!

 

Would if I could.. but unfortunately I bought it from you, so I'm not allowed. But I still recommend it!

 

can i save settings on substance player? i prefer working on player but i cannot save parameters for future use.

also renaming material on unity inspector is very slow. is it normal?

 

You can save the settings in preset files in the substance Player using the menu at the top right of the parameters panel.

 

I also want to confirm before buying this product, As Same Above asked by Mr Burns

 

How do you upgrade to B2M 2 and what other features have been added?

 

You can upgrade to B2M 2.1 for 67.50$ on the asset store now during the AssetStore Madness. New features includes new outputs such as curvature along with grungemaps you can overlay on top of your textures and the algorithm taking care of the normal generation has been completely redone from scratch, the results are much better than any other similar software now.

Also the new version includes a faster B2M filter especially designed for mobile games, which runs about 10 times as fast as the standard B2M.

 

Running into build issues with B2M_2.1 inside of Unity 4.1:
Assets/B2M_2.1/Script/BatchApplySubstance.cs(2,7): error CS0246: The type or namespace name `UnityEditor' could not be found. Are you missing a using directive or an assembly reference?
and
Assets/B2M_2.1/Script/BatchApplySubstance.cs(26,33): warning CS0618: `UnityEditor.EditorGUI.ObjectField(UnityEngine.Rect, string, UnityEngine.Object, System.Type)' is obsolete: `Check the docs for the usage of the new parameter 'allowSceneObjects'.'

 

I will investigate the error, in the meantime, this script is just a side utility for applying a B2M on a lot of textures at the same time, but you can use B2M without it, so if you don't plan to use it you can simply delete it until it's fixed.

 

I'm getting the same error. Only just bought this so hadn't played with it, just imported the package in to my scene and got the error when i tried to build for iOS so removed the package for now.

 

The error comes from the fact that the script is an editor script. If you want to keep it, you need to put it in an "Editor" folder so it is ignored when building the project.

 

I would rather use B2M as a stand alone application then import my substances into Unity. Do you get that luxury when purchased on the asset store or is it strictly usable inside of Unity? Basically is there some sort of CD Key maybe that can be applied at allegorithmic.com for the standalone? I'm very interested in this for making tile textures significantly easier and improving their look quickly (would export as bitmaps instead of use substance though), but really don't want to use inside of Unity. The reason I ask is because at allegorithmic.com it's not on sale; I can do $67, but $150 is above my budget am afraid.

 

The B2M you buy in Unity can be also used in 3dsMax, Maya, UDK and as a standalone using the free Substance Player over here.

 

Purchased, works great! Thank you!

 

I purchased B2M and the results are really great.

I have a lot of textures that I have to process and doing this manually is very time consuming and tedious. So naturally I am looking into automating this process as much as possible.
My second use case is runtime processing because I want to support modding in my game.

This brings me to my questions:

1)
How can I save the outputs as Bitmap. In the editor there is a menu item on the context menu of the component window "Export Bitmaps" but there seems no way to access this through scripting.

The method GetGeneratedTextures() returns an array of ProceduralTextures. I haven't found a way to save those as PNG. Is there a way?

2)
How can I save a cloned B2M Material?

I cloned the material (created an instance by assigning it to renderer.material). Changed the input diffuse texture. Rebuild the textures. This all works without a problem.

Now when I try to add the new asset to the asset database "AssetDatabase.CreateAsset(mat,string.Format("Assets/{0}.mat", mat.name));" I can see my new material with an error "invalid procedural material". The new material is all white.

I know that I cannot use AssetDatabase in the final build because it is a editor only feature.
But for the start I could live with creating the materials pre build.

3)
Is there a way to automate the Substance Player? Via Command Line for example?

I am hoping someone can help me with those questions.

Martin