Substance painter vs unity assets in the store?

Hi,
Sorry, I'm not sure where to direct this question but am eager to her your views as help.

I am fairly new to Unity and am looking for advice for tools to do shaders and apply these to prefabs.

Now the store got several tools that are popular for this such as surforge and vertex tools pro.

Does substance painter do what these do and more? Or is it better buying assets like the ones mentioned above? Combined they cost the same as Substance painter.

Thank you

 

The store tools for painting might be geared towards working with regular textures, but at least Vertex Tools Pro comes with a lot more than just painting tools. It's very Unity-specific, but I think flow maps are something you will find use for no matter what.

Substances are procedural materials, sometimes not even based off bitmaps as a source to generate the output. Substance Designer and Substance Painter are made to work very well together.

If you're making your own materials I strongly recommend looking at different tutorial videos (like this one) which show the power of Substance Designer[1]. I'm a Substance Live subscriber, which gives me access to their library of pre-made materials (30 materials a month). They can be pretty handy for PBR-based games and archviz, or as a foundation for further customising materials. There's also the user library with more materials and nodes for Designer.

As for shader tools you probably can't go wrong with the current most popular one (you know the one - they're promoting the hell out of it, so I won't). It should work equally well with regular textures and substances since shaders are just shaders.

tl;dr: Substance tools, a shader editor and Vertex Tools Pro[2] will likely be a good combination with little overlap in purpose, apart from the painting. One painter works with textures (which could include procedurally generated output from substances), while the other works with substances directly. You could get VTP and the shader editor, then consider Substance Designer later.

[1]Combine Substance Designer with some in-editor level modelling tool and you can get pretty decent results without an actual 3D modelling program.
[2]There might be other tools which are better to get for some of the functionality included. Flowmaps are be included with some water solutions, deformation exists in other tools and parallax mapping exists in so many forms on the store. VTP has a great mix of features though, saving you a bunch of downloads.

 

Thank you for the detailed answer. Much appreciated.

I got amplify shader editor for shaders and pro builder for levels. I will look at getting VTP (I just missed out on the Black Friday sale).

 

I think that's enough to play with for a while, at least. Add VTP to your wish list so you get reminders

 

Or you can just use my vertex painter for free.. (On my github)