The Ultimate Guide to Substance for Beginners - Painter/Designer/Alchemist EXPLAINED

master skywalker there are too many of them what are we going to do [Music] for the past several years the 3d texturing industry has been more or less completely dominated by algorithmic and their suite of texturing tools substance painter substance designer and substance alchemist here at stylize station we firmly believe that learning all three of these programs is essential to anyone's growth as a beginner digital 3d artist but where do you even begin to start with all of these complex and very different programs in this video i'm going to explain the important differences between painter designer and alchemist the pros and cons of using each software which one to use in all of these different varying situations and the difficulty level of each one this video is going to have a ton of information so if you stick around to the end you'll get a full recap of everything i covered in this video and as an added bonus we'll even talk about some cool alternatives for each of the three software and my own personal curated list of the best places to go to learn each program so let's get into it [Music] now algorithmics substance painter is an incredibly powerful 3d painting tool whose primary purpose is to texture 3d models quickly and efficiently now i know a lot of aspiring artists struggle with learning substance painters so i decided to create the world's most comprehensive substance painter course it's called the 3d coloring book now it has hours and hours and hours of tutorials that will teach you how to quickly and efficiently texture a wide array of assets i also cover a ton of cool techniques and styles as well including textures inspired by some of your favorite studio ghibli movies now not only that but there is a massive library of professional level models that you can practice your texturing skills on without the added stress of having to model sculpt free topologize each model is completely ready to texture and to top it all off you ever get stuck or confused i'm always hanging out in the comments section of the book helping out people that need it thousands of beginner artists have signed up and begun their journey to becoming a professional artist and with more tutorials added every few weeks i truly believe that the 3d coloring book is the single best course out there for learning substance painter techniques i'll leave a link in the description if you want to consider getting the course similar to photoshop substance painter utilizes a stack workflow and has various tools such as masking blending and generators that artists can utilize to dramatically speed up their texturing workflow substance painter also has a wide array of customizable brushes that you can use to modify the various different layers of your material substance painter is a real-time texturing software which means that you can paint directly onto your model and watch the changes be applied in real time now because of how powerful this software is substance painter has become an industry standard in the game development world and has been used in games such as uncharted 4 horizon zero dawn assassin's creed odyssey and many many many more seriously most games i check out on art station nowadays have been or have used substance painter in some way or another so you guys are probably wondering the pros and cons of using substance painter so let's talk about that it is extremely versatile which works perfectly for stylized and realism you're able to paint directly onto the model or use procedural textures via maps and generators substance painter utilizes a non-destructive workflow meaning you can go back and change your work whenever you want substance painter also utilizes something called smart materials which are basically recyclable materials that you've created in the past that you're able to save and then use on different models which saves you a ton of time in an industry where tight turnaround times are always looming speed is extremely important and substance painter is one of the fastest softwares around not only that but substance painter also has amazing built-in bakers meaning you don't have to go into another software and then import the maps back into substance painter you can do everything you want right in the substance painter program it's super fast not only that there are a ton of useful features we're going to cover and more and more are being added every single day okay now that we've got the good parts out of the way let's talk about the bad parts real quick so hand painting is an essential part of being a 3d texture artist and the hand painting brush and the brush engine is actually quite clunky when it comes to substance painter the substance painters suite has some amazing features in there like generators maps whatever but a lot of this stuff is buried in the ui and it can be really hard to find not only that but a very common complaint from artists is that the user interface is a little confusing as well let's talk about when is the best time to use substance painter or when is it appropriate to use so substance painter is best used when you have a fully unwrapped untextured 3d model that needs multiple different textures if you have multiple assets that need to be baked textured and exported in a very short time frame i'd highly recommend using substance painter or over something like substance designer for instance which is much slower and much more methodical than painter is is substance painter good for beginners overall i find substance painter was very easy to get into when i was first learning just understand layer hierarchy and what certain filters and generators will do and you'll basically be there in no time if you have decent background knowledge you should be able to pick up painter in i don't know a day or two depending on your experience it's a relatively simple software if you're looking to get into the game industry as a 3d artist this software is industry standard so you're going to need to learn it at some point so just learn it check the mic and make sure it sound right boy now designer is an application intended for creating 2d textures materials and effects in a node-based interface with a heavy focus on procedural generation parametrization and non-destructive workflows a lot of fancy words but i'll explain them in a second substance designer is an incredibly powerful software since it uses nodes that can be treated and altered at any point of the process substance designer is only limited by your knowledge of the software this means the options are virtually limitless i've seen some incredible creations made using only substance designer now just like substance painter substance designer is also more or less industry standard and has been used in hundreds of aaa games and is seeing more and more use every day i love it so what is the difference between substance painter and substance designer i get this question all the time so hopefully we can clear this up now while substance painter and designer sound pretty similar they actually accomplish very different things so with substance designer you're working with a node system to create non-destructive quote-unquote substances aka materials just like painter you can import meshes into designer to preview your material on it but it's generally not meant for texturing like substance major is let me explain designer has no brush feature whatsoever and it only uses nodes to author its materials so here's what makes substance designer so powerful the materials you've created in designer can have parameters that will be included in the substance file and allow you to alter the quote-unquote substance or material in other programs such as substance painter or even inside unreal engine 4. substance painter on the other hand isn't made to create substances or materials it is made to use those substances to paint on imported meshes in layers and export the end result as textures now hopefully that clears up a few questions so first things first kind of like substance painter depending on your workflow it is fully non-destructive designer offers a full non-destructive reworkable workflow so that textures can be created and scaled without the loss of any data whatsoever not only that there is seamless integration with substance painter if you use designer chances are you'll have to use painter a bit as well so it's great that it is so flexible and you can move between painter and designer very very easily not only that the options are completely endless being able to alter parameters creates an unlimited variety of options for your materials and i'll talk about how these parameters work in a minute okay let's talk about the cons now for one subset designer has a much steeper learning curve when compared to substance painter most artists will have at least a basic understanding of how a layer-based workflow works but the concept of creating art using nodes is an alien concept for a lot of people not only that but since it's node-based it's a little difficult to replicate hand-painted textures as in substance painter ironically is actually a lot better for this now one of the other points is that substance designer is much slower than painter and i don't mean performance speed i mean workflow so designer uses a very specific workflow that involves building the height map first and then creating every single component of your material or substance such as rocks cracks sticks dirt whatever and then blending everything together afterward now once that's done that you then have to shade your material and color it and build out roughness map each material that you create can be a very involved process and will take quite a bit of time especially as a beginner so let's talk about when should you use substance designer if that's the case so let's say for instance you have a fully modeled untextured environment with a lot of assets you have several different types of rocks each need say varying levels of detail and some even have to be a slightly different color importing and baking each asset into substance painter would be incredibly time consuming so instead you can create a single rock material in substance designer with several different parameters that control various details such as color roughness or number of cracks for example you can then export that material open up painter or unreal engine and then apply the same material to all of your different rocks and use the parameters that you've created to easily and quickly edit the material to your liking creating an endless amount of variation with just a few clicks so is substance painter good for beginners it's a very good question so i'd say it's more of an intermediate level software procedural texture creation can be daunting to understand at first as many of its concepts are mathematical by their nature and therefore difficult to grasp for most artists without a technical background especially beginner artists the workflow itself is complex and can be strange to wrap your head around as a beginner which is true i struggled a lot with it [Music] so let's talk about the third algorithmic software substance alchemist the lesser known substance alchemist is a scan processing resource using the power of ai or artificial intelligence alchemist enables you to easily create high resolution digital materials for range of 3d projects you can modify existing 3d materials or make new photorealistic materials from photographs and scans to put it simply it is a tool designed to allow artists to quickly mix and blend already existing textures sounds pretty cool right so how is it different from painter and designer so let's say you are working on a 3d environment that involves creating some sort of dirt path you've created the dirt material and substance designer but you're struggling with adding grass to the material and you're on a time crunch using substance alchemist you could technically step outside into your front yard and take a picture of your lawn and import that image into alchemist from there alchemist would use artificial intelligence to create a tileable texture of your grass and allow you to naturally blend it with the dirt texture you created using substance designer you can now easily reuse that grass texture in any project as well and you'd be slowly building up your library of images until you have a wide array of tileable textures ready to work with for your next projects okay so now let's go over the pros and cons of using substance alchemist number one it is incredibly easy to use number two you can create amazing textures in a matter of minutes speed is very very important in the game art industry number three there is a decent library of pre-scanned materials in the first place and now let's talk about the cons number one there's less flexibility since you're using already photo scanned assets so you don't have full control over the materials number two creating materials that are even slightly stylized can be challenging painter or designer would be much better suited for this process number three it's not very popular or at least not as popular as designer and painter so that means there aren't too many tutorials or courses that you can take but it's a pretty simple software so is substance alchemist good for beginners honestly i think alchemist is an awesome option for beginners if you're a beginner it'll introduce you to how layers work which will be super useful to know for substance painter and it'll also teach you about layer and height blending which is an essential component that you need to understand when you start to tackle substance designer with a ton of great pre-made materials ready to go any beginner can start easily mixing and matching materials and come up with a semi decent result right from the start now we've covered the main three but i just wanted to quickly touch on something called substance source while painter designer and alchemist are the three main texture creation programs substance source does deserve a bit of a mention substance source is an ever growing content library where you can find physically based high resolution and tweakable assets for texturing from fully procedural materials to physically based scans and hand painted materials substance source is an honestly a really great place to find assets suited to any type of 3d project it's really really great and has an awesome extensive library so i'd highly recommend checking it out so that just about covers all three breakdowns for all three programs so let's talk about the best places to learn each software starting with substance painter for substance painter number one is the 3d artist coloring book wink wink haha in all seriousness the stylization channel also has a lot of free stuff where artists come on to talk about substance painter so i would highly recommend checking that out and if you want to learn the basics and a lot of cool concepts and technical stuff from professional artists i would highly recommend checking out the flipped normals channel those guys are great they've got some cool paid courses too i can leave a link in the description so let's talk about the best places to learn substance designer so for free on youtube one of my favorite places is a guy called 3dxtrude he has a lot of time lapses and some commentated stuff on substance designer he does mostly stylized stuff really good go check them out for the basics and another free option is the algorithmic youtube channel they have some really great beginner playlist stuff and that's how i got started too i made some like rocky dirt ground with sticks took like an hour and they basically taught me everything i need to know and to round it all out the best place to learn substance alchemist there's not many tutorials out there so i would again recommend the algorithmic youtube channel they have a lot of professionals and experts on there that kind of talk about it a little bit making your first mixtures and blends check it out so you've made it to the very end and i'm running out of time so let's do a quick recap of all three softwares real quick just so it really sticks into that brain of yours substance designer is for authoring pbr materials using a node-based system it is extremely powerful you are only limited by your imagination and adding parameters allows for limitless creation it has a steep learning curve and the workflow isn't as fast as substance painter if you decide to create materials from scratch designer is the way to go substance painter is for applying those materials you've made in substance designer to a 3d mesh using a layer-based system just like photoshop it is extremely fast great for realistic and stylized work has amazing and powerful baking tools but hand painting can be rather clunky sometimes if you need to add textures to your models quickly and efficiently substance painter is your best bet alchemist is for combining and blending pre-made materials in designer or photo scanned materials it is extremely beginner friendly very fashion efficient but it has somewhat limited options and limited tutorials and courses if you have very little texturing knowledge or you just want to combine and mix materials quickly with great results alchemist won't steer you wrong and for the final section of our guide let's quickly cover some alternatives so for substance painter if you are frustrated with the brush engine and substance painter and you want to get better at hand painting try 3d coat it's really good i have it i use it all the time if you want a free option to substance painter try quixil mixer it's supported by epic games and it's got a really great backing behind it it's still pretty new but hopefully i will see great things from it in the future i'm very excited about it the dark horse is armor paint i haven't heard a lot about it and i don't know a lot about it um but i've heard from others so a little anecdotal but i've heard from others it's great so give it a try and i believe it's free substance designer alternatives if you want a free one blender is actually a surprisingly good option blender's texturing system is node based and a great free alternative give it a shot houdini is also another node-based software you may have some interest in now houdini is paid rather expensive and kind of complicated to get into it it's a pretty steep learning curve i'm going to do another video on that later but if you really want to get into a powerful software houdini and for the dark horse material maker is a pay what you want node-based material generator i've been keeping my eye on lately i followed the subreddit and i've seen some really cool stuff coming out of there so give it a give it a try and for a substance alchemist recommendation alternative i would recommend again quixil mixer quixle mixer is a great choice and again has financial backing from epic games meaning hopefully development will be pretty quick i'm expecting big things from them in the future so that's pretty much it for this guide guys i really hope you enjoyed if you have any questions feel free to ask in the comments um buy my 3d coloring book and uh check out stylization.com we got a lot of cool tutorials on there most of it's free actually pretty much 99.9 percent of it's free so check it out love you guys

Channel: Stylized Station

Views: 179,813

Keywords: substance painter stylized, substance painter 2020, substance painter, substance painter tutorial beginner, substance designer stylized, stylized texture, texturing tutorial, substance painter tutorial, substance painter smart material, substance painter stylized tutorial, substance painter stylized painting, substance painter vs substance designer, painter vs designer vs alchemist, substance alchemist tutorial

Id: KMXpmsmZy38

Length: 17min 59sec (1079 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 15 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/TenragZeal]

What are your thoughts on Quixel Mixer vs. Substance Designer? Debating to pick up Substance Designer from Steam, but I’m unsure if it’s worth the $150 tag compared to Mixer being free. Thoughts?

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[u/Sandeep184392]

Yo amazing video. But how do i bake properly in painter? If i use two or 3 objects with different or even same materials, some of the details from one object are Projected on others.