photoshop or substance 3d designer
Discussion started by nyrnia
Hello,
I am looking for someone who can explain to me the differences and benefits from the programs Photoshop vs Substance 3D designer. I would like to create textures for models made in 3Ds max and Maya. According to the website from Digital arts and entertainment, the school uses photoshop and Maya. Does Photoshop has better options or more possibilities? Or do you think substance designer is a better alternative? I am not looking to price but really to the what the programs can do. I know photoshop a bit, substance designer I dont know at all.
thank you very much!
Julie
Answers
1
Reiterate the above comment.....I'd go for Substance Painter (this is based on my own personal workflow!) Get a good understanding of painter and then perhaps it will give you an easier path-way to learn how to understand and use Designer! Also you can paint high poly assets without the need for a low poly meshes in Painter (as high-low poly workflow can be very time consuming sometimes!) Personally, I often use photoshop to build maps that I can use for Painter. So knowing how to use both is a must for me at least!
Hey Jim, curious as to why you don't use the subdivision workflow for high poly? This way you only need to texture the low poly and all the work will transfer to high poly.
1
OK, I am a long-time Maya model-builder who has used Photoshop(for a long, long time) and Substance Designer for about as long as it has been in existence, and who has written tutorials for both. So, I'd like to take a crack at answering this question. I'm going to talk about Substance Designer only, not Substance Painter, which is a totally different application - assuming that Substance Designer versus Photoshop is the core of the original question.
A quick answer to the question is that the essential difference between Substance Designer and Photoshop is that Substance Designer produces materials that are "photo-realistic" and will appear to be "photo-realistic" in all "photorealistic rendering engines ("PBR"). In fact, they will have the same appearence in any PBR rendering engine - regardless of the identity of the engine (Corona, Arnold, Maxwell Render, Maverick Render, Octane, etc.). This cannot be said of materials made with Photoshop. Typically, materials made with Photoshop will appear differently in different rendering engines.
Photoshop is essentially an image-based painting program that can produce a wide variety of realistic, stylized or painterly materials - which may or may not be seamless. To use Photoshop, you need to have a basic knowledge of image construction, drawing, painting and manipulation/editing. Substance Designer, on the other hand, is a purely "procedural" - node/graph program in which you create materials by pulling pre-built "nodes" from a library, assembling them and modifying them until you have built up an image of something like tree bark of great depth and detail. Substance Designer materials are generally inherently "seamless."
To use Substance Designer well, you first need to have a reasonable grasp of the basics of computer shader and rendering technology. We are really talking about "light" and the way light interactions with physical materials are handled in computer rendering engines. This fundamental knowledge is not something required by Photoshop. But, in my personal opinion, this basic knowledge about how rendering engines handle light is something all professional model-builders should acquire if they don't already have it. The kind of knowledge I am talking about is best represented by these two papers that can be found here https://substance3d.adobe.com/tutorials/courses/pbrguide And, there are two reasons you want to basic knowledge. One, is to be able to understand how Substance Designer works. The second is because you don't know which rendering engines you will be required to use once you've left school. If you have a basic knowledge of how light and materials are handled in rendering engines, and, therefore, how shaders are made, you will be able to quickly adapt to any modern rendering engine.
Substance Designer is a modern computer technology, with a much more expansive future than Photshop. It is quite good at producing "stylized materials", but its basic purpose is to produce photo-realistic materials for 3D models meant to be physically accurate representations of real or imagined objects. I suppose that in some ways, the focus of Substance Designer is more limited than the focus of Photoshop. However, if your purpose as a 3D model-builder is to produce a model with metals, glass, plastic, wood, ceramic (concrete, porcelain, ceramic, putty, tile), liquid (water, honey, etc.) or translucent (skin, water, thin leaves, flower petals, paper) properties, you can best achieve these with Substance Designer. This is because Substance Designer is making use of the same physics of light mechanisms used by a computer's rendering engines to display the materials as to make them. So, the two are inseparable.
As another overview observation, Photoshop is "old-school" - requiring knowledge and skills in image manipulation, as I said earlier. The functions it performs in 3D model-building can be performed almost equally well by several alternative applications (GIMP, CorelDraw, etc.). Skills in one of these applications are transferable to any of the other similar applications. If you are a student, you should have some of these image manipulation skills, but you might want to learn on one of the cheaper alternatives to Photoshop. [I have Photoshop and use it, but you know what? -- I've come to prefer Coreldraw and CorelPaint for my day-to-day working tools. For most purposes, these tools are quick and more straightforward than Photoshop.)
So, to become a model-builder for the future - especially if you are seeking to become a professional, you need basic image-making skills, and you absolutely must learn and be able to use Substance Designer to construct a variety of basic materials.
At any rate, Photoshop and Substance Designer are not comparable applications. The only thing they have in common is that they both can produce materials that can be part of the shaders for a 3D model.
.......... I'd be happy to answer any more detailed questions about the differences between these two applications. Just ask.
I forgot to make mention of one other tremendously important difference. Substance Designer typically makes materials whose properties (color, shininess, amount of translucency, et. al.) can be adjusted "on-the-fly" within the rendering engine. That is, you've got a model positioned and lit within the rendering engine. But, you really want the blueish metal to have a more greenish cast in your lighting setup. If you were using Photoshop to make the material, you've got to exit the rendering engine, got back to Photshop and change the material, make sure it is applied correctly to the model, and then go back into the rendering engine. If the material was made in Substance Designer and the author made the material adjustable, you just tweak the material right there and then execute the render again.
If you have read the PBR guide 1/2 by substance you will know that materials are not 'physically accurate' despite the name. The fact IOR is locked for gemstones, diamonds and 1.5 for most real-time applications certainly does reduce the phrase 'physically accurate'. The point of Substance was to create a 'standard' which all render engines can use (not necessarily 'physically accurate' in a visual sense). That standard was a success, and thank god because it does make things a lot easier. However I do believe that 'physically accurate' is certainly a criteria that they will continue to evolve (we are talking about minute details, but the devil is in the details right).
Secondly, you can certainly create the same results and accuracy within Photoshop - but yes its a lot more difficult. I mean why would you mean you have Substance Painter/Designer which you can interactively see how the materials react (as you have pointed out). Not to mention the other plethora of tools you have in Substance.
I'm not sure what version of Photoshop you are using but if I save while interactive rendering it updates in all my software.
These are my only nitpicks, otherwise I think your point of view is correct.
I agree with most of what you are saying here about "physical accuracy" being just a little bit "relative" - but I was trying to get to the heart of the matter without nit picking. In my personal experience, since my clients cover the entire range of rendering engines, "yes," the materials I build sometimes have to be tweaked a bit. Especially, the gamma. Well, seriously, the gamma because there seem to be two major rendering engine differences in this whole world. Ugh! But, this tweaking is kind of an advanced topic.
So, without going into a debate about IOR settings (something I think I maybe overed in my tutorial on Glass in Substance Designer), yes! absolutely !"physically accurate" is an "evolving criteria/standard." Certainly correct.
As to that last about Photoshop updating - it certainly does that for Maya. But, I like to use a couple of stand-alone rendering engines. Maverick being my current favorite. So, the minute you use a rendering engine outside of your model-building software, boom, there comes the extra step. Maybe most professionas use a rendering engine built into their model-building program. So, this last point might go to you, after all!
@3dcargo Getting same results in photoshop is not difficult at all if you have right workflow, in some cases (for me at least) photoshop offer greater control and precision than substance, for me, besides real time presentation there is nothing to it, the same can be done via marmoset-photoshop for those who don't own substance, skill and workflow is everything, for example i have developed technique for hand painting normal maps (not just small details, whole model to be clear, and it doesn't matter what it is) so i don't need high poly for baking anymore, wich cut time dramatically. If you wonder about subdivision, I rarely do that because subdivision is very shapely imprecise for my needs/taste even when it's done 100% right.
@3DCargo, I'd still maintain that the two applications are not comparable, in the sense that you are implying. I think you are implying that it is possible to create an image - a material in Substance Designer - perhaps something fairly complex like Coastal Redwood tree bark with lichen and moss, and replicate that image exactly in Photoshop. No question that this can be done - and sometimes with greater precision of line, as you suggest. But, part of the appeal of Substance Designer is the ability to "program" the properties of the material so that it can be changed on the instant. For example, all the maps of Coastal Redwood tree bark (the color map, the normal and height maps, the AO maps, the specularity/metallicity, sub-surface scattering, translucency, etc.) can be made different by building randomization functions into each element of the tree bark - so that differerent sets of maps are created whenever the user presses the "randomize" button. And then there are the "user adjustable features" (i.e., exposed parameters), that let any of these properties be changed in all kinds of ways - on-the-fly - within the rendering engine.
I suspect this is what 3DCargo means by Substance Designer being "easier" - and why would you use Photoshop if you have Designer. It is easier to build a material in Designer that can be infinately variable in whichever properties you decide upon, than it is to do this in Photoshop.
That is, when a Substance Designer is building a material, if they are using even just a little bit of the power of the application, they are making the resulting "material" "programmable. The power of this is immense - a developer has only to build one good "Coastal Redwood" material. and then it can be forever applied to different tree models so that no two look alike in a grove. Juvenile trees can be distinguished from mature trees or saplings. Fire burnt and diseased trees can be distinguished from healthy trees. Any given tree can have both sun-whitened and shadow-grown bark areas displayed correctly. Tree knots and bark fissures can be changed in number and density. Branch areas and hollows of a tree that will collect grime - will be shown to do so automatically, without needing to be painted by the 3d model-builder (edge detection and changes in the direction of face normals control of the model control how the material is displayed). All this, with the simple push of a button. I have made models of sycamore trees whose leaves and bark can be changed to reflect the seasons - Spring - Summer - Fall - Winter, and any transitional proportion ( for example, twenty percent bright green spring and eighty percent darker summer leaves). This is just a tree model, along with its bark substance and leaf substance. The purchaser buys an infinately re-usable tree. He or she just clicks on which ever property of the bark or leaves he or she wants for a given scene or season.
@Phantom, I agree its not entirely difficult I use photoshop interchangeably with Substance, my point is some things are just easier with Substance (mainly technical - pipeline/automation/naming files etc), the visual aspect is about the same especially if you are using plugins then you are correct there's barely a difference. I personally find myself using Photoshop less these days for painting or material creation.
@Forester, I agree which was my first point - they are are not really comparable, Photoshop/Designer/Painter all have different uses and strengths and I recommend the OP try them all. I also use Natron which I found is extremely useful to add to this combination - Its kind of the closest thing to Nuke/Photoshop (node building software). I find I sometimes go back and update my models so if I have to update 50 models or so it takes a long time to update all the render's for updating the store eg. Open Photoshop, load the render, turn on the right layer, save the image, name the file, etc. Some images require the logo overlay for my brand, some websites have different resolution requirements or background colors etc. I find Natron is great for this because you can load all your renders in with 1 node, split that off for wire frames, previews, full size images, different website categories/requirements, then hit 1 button and it spits out 30 images all named, ordered and colored correctly within a couple of seconds - it has saved me a lot of time. Its also free so that's cool. My point being there's lots of useful tools and whatever saves you time is worth investing in since time is your most valuable resource and its running out.
@3dcargo Of course, "loaded" software (max, ps etc) is a must. Off topic, do comment notification works for you ?
@PhantomG Yes its working for me.
1
Can I make an observation or two, that is aside from the point of your original question ?
A lot of old model-builders like myself (20+ years) have significant difficulty learning Substance Designer. Painting and drawing imagery or screen-capturing other people's textures seem relatively straightforward. But creating an image - a material, by assembling "nodes" in a graph seems so foreign as to be incomprehensible. So, many old professional model-builders are and have failed to adapt to technological change.
BUT, ... if you work with Substance Designer for a little while - it may take about three days to become accustomed to it, you'll find that it is FUN! Building a Substance Designer material is very much like playing with cardboard puzzles. You've got a playboard in front of you that is the "graph" and your task is to find and use the most appropriate node out of the Library sitting to your left, that will help complete the puzzle. Very often, making a "Substance" is a matter of trying one node after another, playing around with their settings to learn if those settings will do the job.
If you look at many of the Substances published by Adobe in "Substance Source" or by others at Artstation Marketplace or on Gumroadd, they look like hoepless spaghetti fields. Impossible to trace and understand. Intimidating. But, it doesn't have to be like that! A lot of those massive old spaghetti field "substances" were created when only a few primitive nodes were available, or were created because the authors were trying to create materials that could have the older Diffuse-Specular map outputs, as well as the newer Metallic-Roughness types of map outputs. Now days, we have many basic nodes that let you create really good "substances" with just a few nodes . For the most part, you make a substance by dropping in a basic node, dropping in another that modfies the first in some way, dropping in a couple more to add some other features, and that's it. And, if you are a good person in this life, you neatly organize the nodes and comment them so that any one else can understand your graph with just a little bit of examination. Its all very much fun!
0
Both are useful in their own way. Photoshop is for painting, Designer is for procedural creation (like any node software) for materials/textures.
I think Substance Painter should be also on your list of software to learn since that comes with great tools for baking (occlusion/normal/heights) etc. Painter has the ability to bring in your Designer materials since they are both made originally by the same company. The benefits of Designer/Painter is that you are working in 3D while making/painting your textures. That's just the basics really but Substance tools are great for automation, PBR workflow, optimization, the list is extensive.
Check a few youtube videos if you haven't used it before and decide for yourself since you already know Photoshop so you have an understanding of how it compares.
I purchased a copy of both when they were still perpetual, probably some of the best 2 tools I own and I use them every day. I also still use Photoshop every day so like I said each tool is useful for its specific purposes.
0
Julie, to get a good discussion of the differences and the benefits of the two programs, I would recommend that you seek out the Discord channel for Substance Designer.
https://discord.com/invite/010JCPblJTh3d6CXe
Virtually every Substance Designer user is familiar with Photoshop and has Photoshop skills as well as Substance Designer skills and experience. You are sure to get a good discussion of the basic nature of each program, the differences between them, and the benefits of learning both at this location.
-1
during my tuime building cars . im only on my 3rd vechile buil d. During the process of building the vechiles. Within the process of creating a clean ambient occlusion map within substance painter has taken the longest part of the build .
taken longer on 3 occasions than buildingthe mesh of the vechile ..based on having to uwrap several times different methods to ensure there no black areas within substance painter ,....... ..the only reason imbaking my ambient oclsuion map to drive the mertal edge wear if needed for rust later on ,,,,,how have other found this method ...
I think this question is "off-topic. If your question is how to I best build a clean ambient occlusion map within Substance Painter, you should start a new topic for that question.
You can auto unwrap the entire car with non-overlapping and equal texel density within a few minutes. For more complex things like plants you can also use stacked UV's (for leaves) and auto unwrap for baking on UV channel 2. If you are on a budget 'Tex Tools' is a free plugin for 3dsmax which compliments the built-in unwrap tools, otherwise I highly recommend 'RizomUV', the indie version is cheap by far the best unwrap tools I have used, its nearly entirely automatic and very powerful for quick/complex unwrapping. These methods can save you hours of time I suggest you look into it.
-5
susbstance desinger work,flow not the same as painter tho . has learning curve based on mixing diffent blends togethusualy black and white oveerlays ..greyscale9 IT LEARNING CURVE NOT THE same PHOTSHOP BLENDING METHODS ... ther learning curve when getting into creating brick work and rust - substance painter mixing materials is easy than designer
Please dont spam this thread 512pixel, we have seen your separate post. Keep your updates there thanks mate.
-6
photoshop use for creating curvature map ,, - which you can then use in substance painter for metal edge wear ( use the curvature map( you can bake this map / in photshop u can add control to the map,,,, you can see me working in usbstance painter here and how combining photshop substance painter - substanc designer is differnece to substance painter used susbstance designer for creating normal maps , ambient occlusion maps ( here demo some of the methods below on my channel
substanc epainter creating metal this great waty to understand metal refection and rust .. how can be built .. probaly when rendering out in marmoset or fave render pbr material not exact match what u see in power ful iray render
metal this was great tho for learning metal .... i spent around 3 days creating metal .. ur can then create them ssbr files drag deop on your project
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrFqLZ2lr4U
-6
metal susbtance painter
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrFqLZ2lr4U
curvature map
helps to creat moss and brick work great control same method using metal edge wear
substanc epaintrer and photshop
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yjGvSim7LY&t=40s
susbtance designer m - and combing programming with blender ( substance player great cos ur can export maps free ur creat then
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNEbZnBcwM0&t=4s
-6
substanc painter currently great for creating maps and textures ,,,,above ...photoshop cropping uploading ( colour correction ect (- and curvature maps (checking uvw maps ,,, both package are needed .. subnstance desiger when ur need to creat normal map brick work concrerete textures ,,,, ( use less ) .. can be handty ... ..use designer less than substance painte and photoshop ,
( substanc epainter alternative photshop called gimp ( open scource)
-6
substanc painter currently great for creating maps and textures ,,,,above ...photoshop cropping uploading ( colour correction ect (- and curvature maps (checking uvw maps ,,, both package are needed .. subnstance desiger when ur need to creat normal map brick work concrerete textures ,,,, ( use less ) .. can be handty ... ..use designer less than substance painte and photoshop ,
( substanc epainter alternative photshop called gimp ( open scource)
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