Looking at Substance Designer Substance Painter and trying it out. They say they are compatible with any game engine... Wondering if I can use it on rFactor? https://www.allegorithmic.com/products/substance-designer https://www.allegorithmic.com/products/substance-painter It's got lots of sweet tools. It owuld be great to use it on tracks and such. When you try to connect the program to the engine it asks for a .dll in the game. Not sure which one to use, but the ones I tried failed.
yeah, i've been planning to get into it for a few months now. I was going to go with Quixel but i read some things on the internet and allowed myself to be swayed. I like procedural and dynamic systems generally, so i think i can handle the brain-work of connecting stuff. Not sure I'd use it for Longford though, since I already have lots of actual photo reference for textures (of the real objects/buildings), but if i were to make a game of some type I'd almost certainly be digging into Substance. My main concern is it might take me a while to be good enough at it to get good results. Gonna have to try it sometime though.
it makes pretty awesome results pretty fast... makes people look like they know what they're doing... and the price is right too. $19 a month for 8 months. pause payments whenever you like
Beware of Quixel... small team, not been updated in months. It is a frontend for photoshop actions so it can be a bit slow.
Got an answer from Allgorithmic. "We don't have a substance integration with this engine. However, you can export bitmaps from Designer for use in rFactor2."
I've never used substance painter so can't comment on it specifically but I've used substance designer fairly extensively for the T70 spyder. Yeah the "compatible with any engine" statement is kinda true, but some engines are much better supported than others. Commercial engines like unity and unreal support the loading of substances directly but for everything else you have to do it the old fashioned way and generate individual texture files. Using this method any engine is technically supported but SD (and presumably SP) are quite focused on physically based rendering and shaders and many of its stronger features reflect that. For an engine like RF2's it still works but I can't quite get the correlation between the material that you see in the SD viewer and what you get in RF2, at least in my experience so far. Someone with more knowledge of shaders and RF2 shaders in particular may have more luck getting the SD material->RF2 material correlation happening. The positives are though that it's still an excellent tool for generating textures and the advantage of that over hand crafting everything in Photoshop/Gimp is it can speed up many of the tedious and repetitive tasks involved with texturing. An example of this: all of the car skins for the T70 Spyder are generated by chaining about 4 substance graphs together and combining with a flat colour map for the livery/sponsors etc. (created in Gimp). The benefit of this is, if I update a mesh or need to tweak some uv's in the car body I just re-import the adjusted mesh into SD, re-bake the mesh info and all of the skins will be re-generated and can be visible in game within about 10 minutes (this is assuming the mesh/uv change is in a 'safe' area that doesn't affect any if the liverys but you get the idea).
Do you have Substance Designer in Max? I was wondering if a texture/material template could be made with all the shaders each shader getting a template..
Nope, I haven't tried the max integration, I figured that would just give me access to substances in max and not really get me any closer to the SD->RF2 discrepancy but perhaps your onto something. Honestly though I'm pretty happy with my workflow at the moment so not that motivated to improve that particular situation. Maybe I'll dig a bit more into it when the T70 is finished and out of the way...
There is a converter that merges substance right out of SD/SP into various systems. http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/substance-bonus-tools-for-3ds-max
Here's what we're going through to use Substances in SketchUp. This is for rendering mind you. - Sketchup Model; - Export to Blender using Blendup (free for up to 1000 faces wich is not much so better buy it); - UV Unwrapping within Blender with Smart UV Project (wich is automatic, fast and easily tweakable); - Export as Collada; - Import collada into sketchup and run Cleanup3 to merge faces keeping UV; - Import into Substance Designer and work your texturing; - Publish your substance as high as 16k textures (If you have enough GPU ram, I have a Titan X) - Convert Substance to Thea material using Thea converter; - Apply material in Collada model using Thrupaint to keep UV modes. - Render! ~JQL
