Sure, the engineers who work on it, the managers who assign it a priority - thanks to the team :-)
Regarding the 16-bit I meant, all colors from (16-bit) Substances appear as/at 8-bit color depth in Max.
The #1 with this fact is that using substances with/for normal-maps in Max looks bad.
In example I inputted a 16-bit texture into a subsance -> wanted do some things inside the substance, but for the test the substance is just a simple input/output (all set to 16 bit) ->and then I wanted to use the substance's output as normal map in Max...but the ouput in Max is 8-bit.
A picture of this test, comparing the texture as normal map and what happens when this texture goes through a (simple pass through) substance is here
https://forum.allegorithmic.com/index.php/topic,8857.0.html______
Edit:
I just tried a substance I made a while ago, and it was a rocky re-start. I think it's the best place, and maybe the best moment to mention the further issues besides the 8-bit limit. For demonstration I used the Flower-substance that ships with Max. In Max2017:
- The substance-map must be set to 'Software rendering', otherwise no substance in viewport or rendering.
- Adjusting the sustance's size by setting setting "Tiling" to 0.2 (in the texture coordinates rollout) didn't work. Somewhat ok in viewport, but total pixelation in rendering.
- As alternative I changed the object's UVW to adjust the scale, which worked better than scaling in the texture-coordinates-rollout...but there seems to be no texture-filtering, the rendered imagelooks still 'pixelated'
First picture: in the substance's rollout "Coordinates" set tiling U/V to 0.1 -> a bit pixelated viewport, and total messy rendering
Second picture: Coordinates/tiling back to 1.0, and stretched the objects' UVWs to adjust the substance-size -> viewport ok, but rendering still pixelated, no filtering happens. (increasing the substance's resolution to 2048 helped of course, it made the pixels smaller...but they remain unfiltered, which means flickering and other issues when rendering animations)