Substance Painter is a specialized texturing tool which utilizes a procedural Physically Based Rendering (PBR) workflow.
The procedural nature of Substance Painter is probably its biggest advantage over using other texturing tools. It allows for masks to be generated based on algorithms instead of hand painting textures. Its due to this you can quickly iterate and achieve results much quicker and easier.
In this article I hope to explain just how useful and fun this software is to use as it has improved my 3d texturing dramatically.
What is Substance Painter
It’s important to understand that Substance Painter is a specialized tool and as such it primarily only does one thing Texturing. What could potentially take hours in other programs you can do in minutes with Substance Painter due to its procedural and PBR workflow.
Substance Painter has been accepted as an industry standard both in film and games. In 2019 Adobe even went as far as purchasing the company who founded the software Allegorithmic.
Substance Painter is only one piece of software in a suite of software available. Substance Designer is of particular note. It is a program that helps create custom textures such as the Smart Materials used in Substance Painter.
Advantages of Substance Painter
There are four main advantages to Substance Painter these include its Procedural Workflow, PBR Workflow, Particle Brushes and the Iray Renderer.
What is the Procedural Workflow
The procedural workflow basically outlines a set of rules on how a texture should be painted instead of physically hand painting them yourself.
For example, if you had some kind of metal object that you wanted to age. You could generate a mask to only paint the most elevated parts such a wear and scratches. Then you could do the inverse and create rust and dirt in the crevices
To achieve this in Substance Painter it’s easy. You can use what is referred to as a Smart Material. Smart Materials have all the rules already programmed in, all you have to do is adjust some parameters and colors its that easy!! To apply it to your model it is as simple as dragging and dropping the material on your model.
Substance Painter comes with a large library of Smart Materials to download in the form of Substance Source. If this is not enough you can use Substance Designer to create your own. Alternatively you can use Substance Share which is a repository of materials created by the community free of charge.
It is because of the ease of this process you can quickly iterate and get the final result you are looking for quicker. I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve saved thanks to the procedural workflow.
PBR Workflow
Substance Painter utilizes a PBR workflow for its texturing. PBR is a texturing workflow that attempts to emulate real life materials. PBR is a commonly used workflow used by almost all the big 3d modelling programs and game engines including Blender, Maya, Unity & Unreal Engine. This means you will never have trouble finding a compatible program.
If you want more information on PBR I recommend you check out this article I wrote outlining the basics of PBR
IRay Renderer
Substance Painter come stock standard with a render engine called Iray Renderer this is a GPU accelerated render engine created by Nvidia. From my experience I’ve found this easy to use and quite good.
The best thing about this render engine being implemented in Substance Painter is that it means you do not need to export your model into another piece of Software. Everything you need is in one handy package.
Particle Brushes
Besides the procedural side of the texturing process Substance Painter offers some unique ways to texture. Of particular note are the Particle Brushes.
The Particle Brushes are not your usual brushes they utilise particles to simulate effects which in turn can affect your models texturing. There are brushes that simulate fire so you can apply scorch marks to your model or brushes that simulate rain that weather your model. They really are fun to use and can add some great character to your model.
Below are the Brushes that are available with Substance Painter.
How Hard is it to Learn
Of all the 3d software I have used in the past I can say from personal experience Substance Painter is the easiest to get the hang of.
Some prior knowledge of the basics of texturing, UV’s and Normal Maps is advantageous. The way it works is very similar to Photoshop in the way you have several layers and you can build on top of each of them. It requires some setup of your model prior to using Substance Painter and this preparation can be time well spent. I recommend you read this article I wrote 9 Tips for Preparing 3d Model for Substance Painter.
There are vast amounts of tutorials to follow to get the initial hang of the program and I’d highly recommend just working through the Tutorials on the Substance Painter Youtube Channel it does a great job at introducing you to the program.
What Specs are Required
Substance Painter runs reasonably well on a low speced computer. I’ve successfully been able to run it on my 5 year old laptop with no problems. My main road block to using a laptop was when I attempted to use the IRay Renderer. While it worked it most definitely runs faster with a reasonably speced desktop. You really do not need an expensive setup to be able to take full advantage of Substance Painter.
Please refer here for Substance Painters recommended specs.
Cost of Substance Painter
Substance Painter currently works on a monthly subscription plan where you receive access not only to Substance Painter but the suite of software including Substance Designer and the newly created Substance Alchemist. These are all great pieces of software in their own right and are constantly being improved.
As a small business or hobbyist their pricing is in my opinion really fare when compared to other 3d software packages. In my opinion it’s worth every dollar it has improved my texturing productivity and quality incredibly. I highly encourage you to take advantage of their 30 day trial I guarantee you will get hooked.
Conclusion
I hope you now understand the benefits of Substance Painter and I hope you will at least give it a try. I can’t stress enough how much this has improved my 3d modelling and just how much fun it is to use. There is so much you can do and learn to take your models to the next level. Good luck and have fun!!