Messages

5896

Substance Designer - Technical Support - Re: Substance Steam version : launching it without using the Steam UI ?

 on: October 08, 2013, 07:19:04 pm 

So launching by the exe doesn't always work, however there is a workaround showed by a friend of mine :

-Ask Steam to create a shortcut of Substance on your desktop
-Move this shortcut somewhere else if you like (to avoid deleting it).
-Pin Substance in your task bar.
-Open the properties of this shortcut and change it to point out the shortcut you created above. Like this in the target :

"D:\Steam\SteamApps\common\Substance Designer\Substance.url"

"url" is the actual file extension of the shortcut. This way you will be able to launch Substance by the calling the AppID of Steam.
The advantage is that the shortcut will also launch steam if this one is not yet started.

5897

Substance B2M & Substance Player - Substance B2M - Re: Where is the sbs/sbsar of B2M with the Steam verison ?

 on: August 30, 2013, 05:38:42 pm 

Ho ok, unfortunately I only have the non-commercial version (for the moment).

5898

Substance Designer - Technical Support - Substance Steam version : launching it without using the Steam UI ?

 on: August 29, 2013, 09:19:58 pm 

Hi,

I'm meeting some problems when trying to launch Substance Designer 3.6, I own it on steam and it works perfectly fine if I launch it from it. However, I pinned Substance down to my taskbar to launch it more easily and unfortunately almost all the time it's not working. A command line window quickly appears and disappears, Substance appears a very short period of time (a few seconds) in my task manager and then Substance.exe disappear and nothing happens. Of course steam is running in the background when I'm trying to do this.

Is the launch via Steam special ? Is there specific command line settings to launch Substance ?


I don't have any problem with B2M that I also own via Steam.

5899

Substance B2M & Substance Player - Substance B2M - Where is the sbs/sbsar of B2M with the Steam verison ?

 on: August 29, 2013, 07:07:11 pm 

I recently purchased B2M on Steam and I was hoping to bring it inside the Substance Designer version that I also own on Steam. I can't figure out where the substance of B2M is.

Is the sbsar available to steam users ?

5900

Substance Designer - Discussions - Re: [Feedback] Misc things on Substance Designer 3.6.0

 on: August 22, 2013, 04:37:41 pm 

If you want to edit Input identifier add --expose-identifiers in the target field of SD shortcut.

We chose not to enable this option by default because it's dangerous. You can easily mess up graphs by changing input identifiers while the graph is already instantiated somewhere. So, use at your own risk

Thanks, that did it !
I promise : I will be careful.

5901

Substance Designer - Technical Support - Re: [Bugs ?] Misc problems I noticied (locked nodes, crash loop, and so on...)

 on: August 08, 2013, 02:35:10 am 

Cool then ! Can't wait for the next update ! :]

5902

Substance Designer - Technical Support - Re: Fur

 on: August 07, 2013, 11:38:42 am 

Substance makes textures, not shaders. What you are trying to get require a shader simulating fur (or you need to fake the fur via layered geometry).

5903

Substance Designer - Technical Support - Re: [Bugs ?] Misc problems I noticied (locked nodes, crash loop, and so on...)

 on: August 06, 2013, 05:38:02 pm 

Thanks, all 3 are fixed and will be rolled out in the next update.

Just curious : what was the problem ?

5904

Substance Designer - Technical Support - Re: [Bugs ?] Misc problems I noticied (locked nodes, crash loop, and so on...)

 on: August 05, 2013, 11:57:36 pm 

We fixed the first 2 bugs but we can't reproduce the last one, do you have a good repro case and if you do, could you send us the assets and command line you use so we can try over here ?

Check your PMs, I sent you the files.

5905

Substance Designer - Technical Support - [Bugs ?] Misc problems I noticied (locked nodes, crash loop, and so on...)

 on: July 31, 2013, 08:45:31 pm 

Hi, while I was using Substance Designer 3.6.0 I noticed some behaviors and probably bugs. Here is my report, but I'm not sure it's always a bug so any information is welcomed.

• Input nodes become locked when opening a substance ? Check the image, I opened today my substance and I'm unable to load resources (as link) and load them in my nodes. If I create a new input node there is no problem.
  
  

• Importing a tga file in the 3D view lock the program in an infinite loop. Okay this bug is silly and totally my fault, but I think reporting it is important. When you load an external mesh and you type a wrong path (easy in my case because I use XnView to paset the path of a file contained in the windows clipboard), such as importing a tga instead of an obj file, Substance will still load the file and will enter in a loop with the message "The scene will be updated.". This force you to crash manually the software.
  
  

• The sbsrender output wrong files. I tried the batch render today and I was quite surprised. It looks like that with the command line the render output flipped files and with incorrect gamma/filters. Take a look at my screenshot to see a comparison between the sbs and the batch. All my outputs react like this.
  
  

5906

Substance Designer - Discussions - Re: [Feedback] Misc things on Substance Designer 3.6.0

 on: July 31, 2013, 08:04:01 pm 

Thanks for the answer, I was able to launch my commands !
I noticed some bugs/problems so I will report them in the right section.

By the way, it looks like you can't call the input node otherwise than by their explorer name. The label field is not recognized by the command line. That's a bit annoying because it means you have to know by heart your substance node names when using the command line.

This works :

Code: [Select]

--set-entry "Input"@%txt_vc%
This doesn't work :

Code: [Select]

--set-entry "Vertex colors"@%txt_vc%

5907

Substance Designer - Discussions - Re: [Feedback] Misc things on Substance Designer 3.6.0

 on: July 31, 2013, 07:21:57 am 

• I noted a little thing missing in Substance Designer : there is no "save as". Sounds stupid, but I wanted to create a copy of my substance and I had to do it manually in the explorer.

• I noted that you can't rename the input nodes, only the output nodes can be renamed. Is that normal ?
  

• I was trying to batch some textures and I met some problems. Again, no documentation on the commands. There is a a max-script file presented in the documentation, but I believe it's a bit obsolete as it references some exe that don't exist anymore in the Substance Designer folder (or are not available in the non-commercial version ?).
  
  There is an "--help" command mentioned by the sbsrender, but hey, it doesn't work. Calling the "--help" argument only display the default information, no list of the commands.
  
  
  
  
  So I'm stuck currently, the maxscript doesn't help very well (especially because I'm a Maya user and I don't know the max-script language). Here is my current batch file, the command "--input-image" is not recognized.
  

Code: [Select]

echo off
echo.
echo Build textures...

rem Substance renderer path
set sub="D:\Steam\SteamApps\common\Substance Designer\tools\render\sbsrender.exe"

set sbs="D:\Dropbox\EXIL\GameData\Char\Lena\txt\mat_v3_base.sbsar"

rem Output size
set size='2048x2048'

rem Textures
set txt_vcols = "D:\Dropbox\EXIL\GameData\Char\Lena\txt\txt_v3_legs_vcols.tga"
set txt_ao = "D:\Dropbox\EXIL\GameData\Char\Lena\txt\txt_v3_legs_occlusion.tga"
set txt_nm = "D:\Dropbox\EXIL\GameData\Char\Lena\txt\txt_v3_legs_normals.tga"

rem --set-value '2048x2048'
%sub% render %sbs% --output-format tga  --connect-image "Vertex colors" %txt_vcols% --connect-image "Ambient Occlusion" %txt_ao% --connect-image "Normal map" %txt_nm%

5908

Substance Designer - Discussions - Re: Maximum image output

 on: July 30, 2013, 09:54:13 pm 

I believe it depends of the renderer used, GPU still have some memory limitation, so performing computation on them can be problematic. I guess Substance doesn't only use the CPU to compute the maps.

5909

Substance Designer - Discussions - Re: [Feedback] Misc things on Substance Designer 3.6.0

 on: July 30, 2013, 09:49:08 pm 

• Normal green invert: Noted. In the meantime, there is a simpler way of inverting the green channel, using a levels node. Click on "values", then invert the green low and high Levels In values. Also you can make a custom node from that level and store it in the library for future quick access.

Thanks for the idea, it's indeed far more easier to use the level node.

• I'm not sure what the issue is with the full-screen option. You can full-screen any view by clicking on it's docking icon, then clicking on the full-screen icon that replaces it. A shortcut would be useful though. It may actually be there but not documented, I'll make sure of that too.

Yeah that's the problem :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJoHb_1Z1Ik

As you can see, to put something in fulsomeness you have to undock it, which put the panel to it's lats floating position, however, you are unable to move it because the software try to dock again you panel. Also, doing a double click with a window popping somewhere that you don't expect it's a annoying I think. A direct fullscreen button should be better I believe.

• We try to have a good and comprehensive doc but obviously we are always missing something. There are descriptions for the 20 "atomic" nodes but none for the hundred + that sit in the library. All those nodes should still have a brief description in their tooltip in SD.

The tooltip in the library are not always self-explanatory, for example it took me a bit of time to find a way to do the same "motion blur" as available in Photoshop in Substance. I guess Photoshop doesn't have the right technical words to describe this function, but since there is not keyword related and also no documentation at all on these nodes, it was hard to find.

I have friend that agree on the fact that you have to test every node to find what they are doing, because of the lack of information in the documentation. That's a bit sad since a lot of these node are quite powerful but stays in the dark because of the lack of knowledge on them.

5910

Substance Designer - Discussions - [Feedback] Misc things on Substance Designer 3.6.0

 on: July 29, 2013, 06:43:25 pm 

Hi,

I'm a fairly new user of substance designer, however I noticed some little things that I'm sure could be easily improved or changed. So here is my list :

• In the parameter panel, which displays the various settings of a node (of whatever is selected in the graph) the float fields that allow you to type a custom value are a bit annoying. What I mean is that when you click on them, they don't select the full number and instead put the typing character directly. If you start typing a value it becomes impossible because these field are limited in number of digits. I think something better would be to select the full number when you click on the field and allow the user to quickly override it. Also, if the user type a number too big, after validating the software should clamp the value.
  
  See what the UDK do for example :
  

• I have read that some new tangent spaces are planned to be supported, however a little setting could be added to the link/file node for the possibility to flip the green channel of a file. Currently you have to manually do it with a RGBA split/merge and an invert node.

• I think the 3D view could benefit of icons instead of a lot of menus/sub-menus. It's really painful to edit a shader as you have to go inside 3/4 menu each time.
  

• In my case (see my UI below) double-lciking on a node in the graph steal the focus. What I mean is that if I that if I want to keep to 3D viewport in top, I can't because the 2D view will be back each I want to update the thumbnail of a node by double-clicking on it. It's really annoying. Especially if you close the 2D view or if you pin the 3D view. No matter what, the 2D view will pop on top.
  

• The fullscreen is not really usable in my case (as presented by my UI above). It would be cool to have an overall fullscreen button that override the full interface, instead of having to move the panel somewhere in the interface to be able to get a full fullscreen.

• In the explorer panel, the export folder of the substance when created should be the same as the one used when the substance is saved (if not saved use My documents folder as it is currently). It's annoying to have to set the export folder every time (especially when Substance doesn't keep in memory the folder where you saved the substance, so you have to go back in the folder you wish each time).

• I'm missing a shortcut that could be really useful, from the documentation the combination CTRL+E is not used, it could be used to export the output of the current graph. Or at least open the export bitmap window. Even CTRL+E to export all the outputs of all the substances if the Explorer is focused ? (With displaying a loading bar when exporting multiple files, this way the user will know which files are ready or not.)

• The possibility to save the overall UI/Layout of substance. I recently had some crash of my Windows and each time I had to redo my UI. Saving it as a config file could be helpful. Even if it's not really vital.

• I own the non-commercial version on Steam, and each sample inside the installation folder looks like broken. Is that because substance store the node links with full path instead of relative path ? I yes, I think this could be improved. Especially because I work between two computers and relative path would be really helpful.

• Last thing I would like to note : the online/pdf documentation is really poor, I would have expected at least to see some details of each node, which is note the case currently. Some parts of the software are not documented at all. I know there is some video tutorial, i plan to watch them, but i prefer reading something.