Substance support NOT working as expected

Hi all,

I am at a loss after two hours of trouble shooting, so please forgive my annoyed tone.

Unity Substance support is sub-par or poorly documented... or both of those!
Problem: In an effort to reduce memory, Unity will often decide to unload assets on play (even though Resources.Unload has not been called).
This means that cached substance textures will be cleared (IF the substance material in question is not in the scene), which in turn means that these will immediately be regenerated which can take a while.

Surely, this can not be intended behaviour? Further, this behaviour and how to control clearing of substance materials (if possible) is not described in the documentation.

Last but not least: As pro users (but without a support subscription), exactly where should we turn for answers to questions such as this one? I highly doubt a Unity rep will provide an answer here, nor will they likely respond to the bug report I filed. Should we have to pay for monthly support to be able to get to the bottom of issues such as this one? Sigh!

Well, many thanks in advance to anyone able to shed a light on these issues!

 

I'm not at my desktop right now - so some of this info well be vague but these might be worth experimenting with to see if it helps:

When your inspecting the substance in unity at the bottom there are several check marks that you could choose to check (or not) that decide if the substance will be compiled and then cached on the disk for future use. Some of the Substance tutorials on Youtube go over this and it might be what your looking for. Its explained this is particularly useful for mobile to save on GPU time every time the scene loads to recompile the material.

There are also some methods in the API that help control the caching of the substance , see if this helps at all:

http://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/ProceduralTexture.html see the 'dontdestroyonload' method ? sounds like what you want?

 

Thanks for the reply!
Yes, those settings might well be what we need to play with. Ideally, I want the substances cached so that they do not have to be generated on load at all (unless we change them at runtime of course), ie. I want a "start texture" generated without having to trigger the generation.

The annoying thing is that the options in that settings pane are not documented well at all. Most options in the "Load Behaviour" tab are not even mentioned in the docs.
It truly is a lifesaver that some helpful people like yourself hang out here and answer questions, but really Unity have to step up their game in terms of documentation and proper support for paying users, IMHO.

Again, many thanks for your reply! I will experiment with the settings and report my findings here.

 

Have to keep bumping this. Changing the Load Behaviour setting to "Build on Load and Cache" has sped up the appearance of the textures since it is loading the cached textures.

HOWEVER, Unity badly needs to detail EXACTLY what the various settings do. I have searched, and as far as I can tell this is not documented anywhere! Nor do Google turn up any relevant information. What EXACTLY do the following settings do in both the Editor and Player (standalone) environment:

- Do Nothing
- Do Nothing and Cache
- Build on Level Load
- Build on Level Load and Cache
- Bake and Keep Substance
- Bake and Discard Substance

I should not have to experiment or guess to make use of features like this one. Unity...Hello? Are you listening or caring...?

 

If it is not documented, you have to submit a bug report to Unity. Saying "Hello?" in the forum is not exactly the way to get attention from Unity's QA

 

I have submitted a bug report (before this thread), however knowing Unity QA it will take weeks to hear back from them - if at all.
Sorry for the tone, but I am frustrated with the lack of support from Unity. They used to have a presence in the forums, but nowadays it seems like we are on our own. It is likely due to pandering to the masses with free stuff and betting that us professional users will pay up for the support subscription. I think that's a little morally bankrupt.

 

If you post about a bug or missing documentation, you should always post the case number, because in the case that someone from Unity sees it, they may directly have a look at it.

 

You are right. Here it is: #00157335
However, I seriously doubt Unity QA or dev team members read ordinary posts in the forums these days. Outside of select threads where they ask for feedback or announce things, I highly doubt they bother. Which is a shame.

 

Apologies, the case number is Case 619008.

However, I do find Unity support extremely poor. It has really gone off a cliff. This is the reply I got when contacting support in an attempt to get some correct information:

"For your technical questions I recommend that you go to our community pages. When e-mailing support you are asking a technical question to one person. Our community has 2.5 million users so asking a question on there makes more sense as you will get a bigger perspective. Plus if other people run into the same error as you. They will be able to search the forums and find the solution."

Really? Oh. My. God. :-(

When I sent the email using the form, I got to the page without passing the "please do not send tech questions to support"-page (I saw that one now when replicating how I sent the support case). I just selected "technical question" in the form and naively expected some info back.
And even if that is not the intended way to get in touch with tech support on the dev side, then what is?
Are these really our only options:

1. Use Answers / Forum. Hope that you are lucky and a) a Unity rep sees the post and decides to answer or b) another knowledgable person actually spots it and knows the answer. Oh, and that sort of hinges on the answer being...yes...documented!!

2. Log a bug. Hope that you hear back with relevant info before the project is slated for release. You may. Your you may not.

3. Pay for support. Yes, pay for support even though you have paid certainly over euro 10k for licenses. And yes, pay for support that you very seldom need. Only when things are...well...not...documented!

Sorry for the rant. But getting info in a relevant time frame should not be this hard. I have no idea how it is over the fence at Epic but it cannot be this bad.... :-/

 

The problem is that the remaining 10% are not only not answerable by the community sites, they seem not to get any timely responses from your QA team either. For example, it's now been 45 days since I reported 611333, an issue that can be replicated by opening my test project and just looking at it, literally. I have kept that report updated with everything I have found about it since, I have kept a thread about it up to date and there has been no communication from you whatsoever. At all. I am very well aware that you have so many users that you are getting an insane number of QA requests but it really feels like whenever we find any real issues, we are on our own.

Yes, you have paid support and it would be completely fair enough to get a response such as "this is not a bug, please use the premium support or consult the community", but not even that happens. And 611333 is not the only issue we have had this lack of communication after a bug report either.

@Foxxis

Apologies for the semi-hijack.

 

@AlkisFortuneFish , no need to apologise at all. We are in the exact same situation.

Unity needs to understand that there is a void in their support system that means that some of their most loyal and competent users are falling through the cracks. I would guess there are a decent number of customers that:

- Are experienced programmers
- Have been using Unity for years
- Are not big enough or are experienced enough not to consider paid support a good deal
- Need relatively timely answers to questions such as mine ("Is this intended? Please document!")

We have nowhere to turn! The official options (forums / answers) feel like a lottery. As does submitting a bug report. We can't email support. What are we supposed to do? Suck it up and pay just to once in a while have someone answer a relatively easy question?

 

Hello

These "load behaviours" you can set in the Editor are documented in the Scripting reference, right here: http://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/ProceduralLoadingBehavior.html

Basically, you can set
- whether the substance textures is generated when the scene loads (in a blocking way, i.e. the scene load will not complete until the textures are generated), or whether they will only be generated when you call RebuildTextures() on the ProceduralMaterial object. This is the "Generate vs. DoNothing" choice.
- whether you want to store a cache of the generated textures on "disk" (this can be "flash" on mobile platforms) after the first generation, so that the next time your app/game cold-starts, the cached textures are read instead of being generated from scratch. Using this option, "Generate" becomes "Cache", and "DoNothing" becomes "DoNothingAndCache"
- alternatively, you can bake textures at build time, so that a real bitmap is embedded in the game/app. When baking substance textures, you can choose to discard the Substance data, or to keep it if you plan to generate alternate variations of the textures at runtime. This is "BakeAndDiscard vs. BakeAndKeep".

Keep in mind that these are the C# API names for the various behaviours (and that because of backward compatibility, we cannot change these names easily ). In the Editor, the names are:
- "Do nothing" / "Do nothing and cache"
- "Build on level load" / "Build on level load and cache"
- "Bake and keep Substance" / "Bake and discard Substance"

Also, regarding Substance+Unity questions, you can always post on our dedicated Unity sub-forum, where we try to followup in reasonable amounts of time The sub-forum is here: http://forum.allegorithmic.com/index.php/board,6.0.html

Best Regards,
Eric

 

Yeah, right. Substances still don't work as expected. Even the default setting, that of "build on load and cache" doesn't work as advertised – the cache is rebuilt every single time, wasting time and saving very little memory.

Overall, Unity has been plagued by endless regression errors ever since 5.0 was released (much too early, according to many). There's clearly something fundamentally wrong with the development process at Unity – the amount of regression errors, and the fact that many features that worked in 4.x still don't work is a clear indicator that Unity is losing control over its central activity. The 5.2.x releases have so far been a complete disaster in that respect (and 5.2.2 is certainly not much better than 5.2.1.)

I've been a Pro user since 2010, and I'm hearing lots of things like "Unity better get their act together, or they will lose the credibility they have." So, please give us some indication that you're aware of your development problems and are trying to do something about them. Otherwise people will soon start looking for other alternatives.

 

I haven't been able to export bitmaps from substances for ages now - I'm on a mac, and if I select to export the bitmap, I get a dialog to select the folder, and then unity beachballs (freezes), and never recovers. I agree that substance support is not working, and has not been working.
5.0 is both a massive step forward, and a big step backward as well. Lighting is still super-slow. Lightmaps still don't look as good as beast, and terrain lightmaps -- if you can ever get them to build -- still don't include the trees.

 

Hi folks! Could you please post your Bug Case numbers for me? Thank you so much!

 

I have an open bug (case 732705) related to the Substance "Load Behavior" setting not working correctly. It has not been responded to by Unity Support since October 8.

 

@evanratt thank you soooo much! I'm going to have you try one more thing, once you hit apply after "bake and keep substance" can you save Unity and quit. Then change to "bake and discard", save Unity and quit and see if that works?? I'm still going to ping the devs but want to make sure its not a weird cache issue

Thank you so much!!

 

I just tried that, but get the same result. Thanks for the quick response.

 

@evanratt Well thats a bummer The person working with you is sleeping atm ^_^ (central europe) so it probably wont be till tomorrow that he gets back to you Hopefully we hear good news tomorrow

 

Are there any current known issues with Substances and 5.2? I use them on assets I have on the store, and now I can't seem to be able change the Substance at all at runtime via code, on any Load Behavior setting.

Seems like it's either bugged or the scripting hasn't been updated in the manual?

I'll submit a bug report if I'm the only one having troubles with this.

 

So, tomorrow = more than a week in Unity time....? I appreciate the effort, but a community manager appearing and posting a bunch of smilies does not really help if you are a frustrated Pro customer since 2006.
I agree with others, Unity is losing it and once we ship the current project I will take a long and serious look at UE and the other alternatives.

 

@Foxxis I put a ton of effort into hounding the right people to get in contact with you and get your bug a second look. I don't really appreciate the "posting a bunch of smiles" as a representation of the effort I put into your bug report.

The bug is *still* reproducible in all of our builds including 5.3. The graphics team is talking about fixes for it already.

I understand it's frustrating and I have been there personally. (I was building a 2D game when the first Unity 2D tools came out... i have PTSD)

 

I frankly do not care what you appreciate or do not appreciate. I have pretty much had it with the inability of Unity to fix long standing issues. What point is there to submit bug reports if they only get fixed if one of these apply
1) It is a priority area, ie. a new feature that already has a team working on it
2) The fix is easy.

I have been around long enough to see things get worse, not better. For every new feature announced there are a ton of features that are *still* not fully implemented or performant or worse, buggy.
New, so called production releases have inane bugs in them that should not have passed any sort of quality control. 5.2 STILL has physics bugs in it that forbids negativ axis motor movement on joints and incorrect angle signage on joints. That should not have been incorrect in 5.0, and is still not fixed now.

I am sorry, and this is not personal, but you (Unity) need to understand that it is getting increasingly frustrating having to rely on middleware that is not solid nor well documented.

 

This part is not personal. 5.2 was generally frustrating, for everyone. I can respect and appreciate that.

This was your other option: https://store.unity3d.com/products/support

 

It is not just 5.2. This has been going on for a couple of years. Unity releases a new feature, supports it for a while, allows it to die slowly without any improvements, announces a new feature, rinse, repeat. I could give you a long list.

And no, it really is not personal. You represent Unity, a company I am losing respect for, and more so when bug reports go unanswered, devs seldom answer in threads, and we get upbeat smiley-laden responses while nothing happens. I hope you can see how that is very out of tune with the reality of a frustrated professional customer who has just spent weeks working around things that really should just work but does not.

Regarding paid support, I am aware of the option. But it is frankly a bit offensive to have that suggested when the problem is not that we do not understand how the system works and need help. The problem is thet parts of the system do NOT work. Should I then pay extra for someone to presumably care about the fact that it is partly broken? And maybe listen and respond to emails? And maybe, just maybe, fix the broken part?
Really?

I stand by my opinion. Unity *still* needs to get its act together and prioritise bug fixing over new features, and make sure QA works. I know I will be taking my business (and yes, we are paying for multiple Pro seats and extras) elsewhere in the future if nothing radical happens.

 

You're one of many. People will be leaving in droves unless Unity gets their act together. The overuse of smileys will only hasten the process.

 

Hello

@Jaimi: It is indeed unfortunate, but we broke the bitmap export function in 5.2. It was fixed recently and the fix went live in 5.2.2p1 according to https://unity3d.com/unity/qa/patch-releases

@evanratt: I am unable to look at case 732705 right now as the bug database seems down, but I'll have a look as soon as I can and keep you posted.

Also, if you have easily-reproducible bugs related to Substances, or stuff that seems wrong, you can come to our forums to post about it, a lot of experienced Unity + Substance users can help you, and I must say the relatively low volume of posts make it easier for us (Allegorithmic) to look at new threads than here on the Unity forums, so feel free to join us there: https://forum.allegorithmic.com/index.php?board=6.0

Best Regards,
Eric

 

Just tried in 5.2.2p1 - works great! My thanks to the team, I was really needing this.

 

Thanks for the fix.

Sure, but please do describe how we should deal with issues in the future when we feel bugs and/or poorly implemented systems are ignored and emails and posts go unanswered (or worse, get terse answers).
Perhaps you might recognise that "lightening the mood" with smilies is not an effective tactic when you are communicating with professionals with real money at stake, especially if said professionals have been badly treated for a while.

I wrote that it is not personal, and I mean it. She should not have to hunt devs down at all. As far as I can tell, QA and bug fixing is not really efficient on your part and that is the real problem.

Thank you. I appreciate it, I really do.
I understand you may feel that I am harsh, but our patience is really running thin. I am no entitled teenager either. I have been with you for nearly ten years, as a paying Pro customer the vast majority of that time (and for several seats). My own invested money is on the line and the time I have lost to bugs or poorly implemented "features" the last couple of years is starting to add up. Please take complaints such as this one seriously and take a look at where your priorities lie.

 

Hi Eric,

I'm out of the office for a while so I unfortunately can't make our sample project available on the Allegorithmic forums. The bug that I reported looks to have previously been reported here:

https://forum.allegorithmic.com/index.php?topic=6950.0

To be honest, while we don't want the memory impact of keeping substances around when they are supposed to be discarded, the part we are most concerned with is removing the processing time of generating the materials from the substance at run-time (we are not particularly concerned about disk image size, at this point).

If you still can't access the bug database, let me know and I can try to have someone else at the office get the sample project together to send to you.

Thanks,
Evan

 

Hi Evan

The bug DB is back up, I am looking at your case, and indeed there seems to be a bug where the "discard" part is skipped at build time

However, there seems to be a workaround: if you manually reimport the SBSAR asset from the project view, the SubstanceArchive seems to be correctly stripped and and textures are baked correctly.

I'll try to fix this as soon as possible.

Best Regards,
Eric

 

Hi @evanratt

Case 732705 is fixed, and should hopefully go live soon (no ETA though, QA and backporting of fixes can take a while )

Best Regards,
Eric

 

@PeterB
@The_BenEvans

You mention having troubles changing substances at runtime and issues with getting the cache to work as expected, do you have repro cases for these bugs that I could look at ?

Best Regards,
Eric

 

Hey @EricBatut_ALG
Had another look, and it turns out I was using "SetFloat" and "SetColor", instead of "SetProceduralColor" etc. *Facepalms HARD*

Working as intended now it seems, just one of those easy to miss things. Feeling a mix of relief and derp.

 

Focus on the positive: it works now

Cheers,
Eric

 

Thanks, Eric. We'll look forward to seeing the fix in an upcoming patch notes.

-Evan

 

I've long since submitted bug reports about this. You want to me to resubmit them because your bugfixing process doesn't work?

I have exported the substance bitmaps and created normal textures from them and will avoid Substances until I hear, unequivocally, that they are supported as advertised by Unity. Until that time, they don't exist for me. (And yes, I'm p***ed off.)

 

Will just echo that sadly, we have done the same. We use Painter and Designer to create a few textures, mainly since artists like the workflow. But it saddens me that the tech in engine falls way short of the promises. It simply causes more trouble than it is worth. Or it did when we dropped it six months or so back.
We will also stay away until I hear that it works, and works well.

 

You can be pissed off, sorry p***ed off. You can be angry, you can be all sorts of things.

Maybe it would be useful to simply post your case numbers as requested?

 

Indeed, bug reports would be nice

It can happen that some bugs are misdiagnosed by Unity QA and never reach me, in which case there's not a lot I can do about it. This does not happen often, but it has happened in the past...

 

@EricBatut_ALG @Graham Dunnett @Aurore
Well, okay then. This was the straw that broke the camel's back for me:
Case 669342
http://fogbugz.unity3d.com/default.asp?669342_rbqiadu3q2ntd2p5

Unity builds crashed when generating substances. I got no reply to the bug report for an entire month, had to pester my sales contact about the case, only to finally get this reply:

"Thank you for reporting your issue.

I was not able to reproduce your issue neither with 4.6.2f1 nor with newer versions. Also built project which you have attached works for me. So I suspect this is hardware issue. Can you try to reproduce issue on another device?

Regards,
Rolandas
QA Team"

We managed to crash the built project on two different macs IIRC. One was a new Mac Pro which has worked solidly for every other application, game, and situation. So forgive me when I get really upset when a QA team dismisses the problem after testing it on one machine and judging hardware error. I mean , really? Is that how you Unity does things?

(Edit: And yes I did follow up and report our tests, asking QA to test on an identical Mac Pro with an identical config, etc. But they were not very interested.)

So, yes, maybe that report did not reach Allegorithmic. But I do not care, I am not interested in playing the blame game. I need features to work on all supported platforms, and solidly. If they do not, I am not interested and will not be supporting them with our money in the future. This goes for Unity as well as third party solution if QA / Bug fixing does not get better.

 

@Foxxis Thanks for the case number, I am downloading the repro cases right now, and will test on 5.2 / 5.3 builds to see if I can get it to crash/hang.

Also, just to be clear, Substance texture generation in Unity does not involve the GPU at all, so I don't think the D700 cards are part of the problem. However, the number of cores (or their configuration) can have a large impact on the Substance engine, so we might have a bug lurking there that you hit because of the MacPro config.

Best Regards,
Eric

 

@Foxxis I've looked at the repro project you sent, as well as at the pre-built application that was attached to the same bug. Unfortunately, the prebuilt app didn't crash on me so I couldn't properly repro your bug.

The subsystem from which the crash originated was completely rewritten in 5.2.0, and it is very likely that these crashes are completely gone.

I've built the standalone app with a 5.2.something build anyway, and I will try to send you a PM with a link to download it so that you can check on your end if you can still get it to crash as before. Hopefully it will launch properly on your MacPro, if it doesn't we'll have to reopen some stuff and dig deeper.

Best Regards,
Eric

 

Thanks, just sent you a PM back.

 

@Aurore

Eric sent me a new build of my original repro, and it does now run as expected on the machine were it previously crashed. So, it was a bug, and one that Unity QA ignored and blamed on our hardware.

While it now seems that Substances work, at least in the way we used them earlier this year, I am still not convinced that Unity is committed to Substances as a technology. I have similar concerns regarding SpeedTree.

I have said it before, Unity seems to love sticking new features on the list, but the implementation and support often leaves a lot to be desired.

I wish Unity would find some way to reassure me (and others) that QA will step up their game. Right now it feels like just a question of time until I have to report a serious, project breaking bug that QA will ignore and/or chalk down to our hardware or some other factor that enables them to close the ticket.