Messages

1

Substance - News & Announcements - Re: Allegorithmic is joining the Adobe family

 on: January 24, 2019, 03:13:41 am 

God damn! This is really heart breaking!!! Everyone is smart enough to see the writing on the wall.. perpetual licenses will be a thing of the past. In its place, the all too familiar Adobe CC rent-to-never-own BS shoved down customers' throats!

Got to hand it Adobe though.. it was a smart move on their part. Why? The substance applications are now becoming heavily adopted by studios everywhere (thus integrated into pipelines as an integral part).. so where does a studio turn to if they become unhappy with the CC business model or become unimpressed with Designer and Painters slowed down, unmotivated progress? There is no serious additional competition here, so there is no incentive to keep pushing the envelop (just look at Photoshop.. over the years, it has not flourished to be the best it can be, as, once again, no serious competition).

I know it must be hard to resist Adobe knocking on your door (as the company founder) and waiving a boat load of cash in your face and offering you a great position within the Adobe empire.. but I have to ask, was Algorithmic not successful enough (and thus making enough money) to not really need being acquired? How much greed is needed before enough is enough?

I really admire companies like Pixologic remaining independent in the face of world increasingly being take over by large corporations. Allegorithmic was also one of the companies I admired, but not now I guess.. It's really hard not to use the term "Sellout".. but this is how I feel.. and while the substance applications won't disappear, we know where it's heading.. and will most likely cost a lot more.

Ultimately, we need a new and serious competitor.. someone who won't sellout.. a substance "Blender" or Substance "Pixologic" type that remains 100% independent... but alas.. something tells me not to hold my breath.. what a crappy day (and for years to come) this is

R.I.P Allegorthmic.. You will be sorely missed. To the company founder, For your sake, I hope you're happy.. That way, at least one of us is...

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Substance Designer - Technical Support - Re: Substance designer running slow Macbook Pro Retina

 on: June 24, 2015, 06:32:19 pm 

Hi Cyrille,

Sorry about the lack of info.. upon seeing your post, I realized the lack of additional info on my part..
As for the Substance Designer version.. 5.1.1 Build 16082
My OS X version: Yosimite 10.10.3
Video Card data: ATI Radeon HD 5750 graphics with 1 GB of dedicated GDDR5 memory (vram)

The part that is most sluggish is the graph window. Now the weird thing is that just a few days ago, the software was utterly unusable on the whole. Everything chugged. When I just fired it up to fetch the version number a few moments ago, I loaded what I have done so far following along in Allegorithmic's procedural rock tutorial found here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajkdLUozO4Q

This time around, the graph is still sluggish (but not as bad as a few days ago - it's workable, but not the most pleasant experience). The 3d and 2d views are better as well (2d is more sluggish than the 3d view however -  the 3d view is best performer of all the main windows).. so perhaps I had other applications running in the background eating up ram the last time. Overall though, its still somewhat slow (but workable this time around).

Perhaps this is one of these apps where I really need to shut down ALL others for it to be somewhat usable (perhaps even the need to reboot the system?). I still think performance is an issue though.

Going back to what I was saying about testing in my earlier post, I understand that you can't test and account for every possible hardware configuration out there (this is obviously absurd and not practical at all). That's not what I was suggesting.. what I am saying is that if you are testing computers a few years old (especially macs) that don't have maxed out ram or high end video cards, the performance issues would surely be visible. And with that, I was suggesting that something in the software could be used to help things out. You guys are smarter than me at figuring those kind of things out, as you guys wrote the software.

Please don't get me wrong... I think the Substance products are overall really good (otherwise I would not have purchased them). But when I fire up Designer and it's sluggish beyond usability, It's certainly calls for concern (especially when other software doesn't exhibit this kind of problem).

I was looking through other posts on the forum about mac sluggishness, and came across a post where someone with a mac pro was able to run Designer smoothly, but this was an older version of Designer (version 4.x). Once this user upgraded to version 5, it was sluggish.. so information like this highlights performance discrepancies (not sure though if it's an overall software problem or new nodes that are much heavier in processing). But something tells me that on the whole, there's room for better optimizations (if for example the entire system is always calculating and updating the entire substance package in all views, is this needed? When there is no actual node selections/attaching in progress, no sliders being adjusted, wouldn't the rendering of panning the graph or 2d view be rock solid?) Again, I don't know the inner workings of these sort of things.. you guys know better than I do.. just expressing from my vantage point and wonder what can be done to speed the software's performance...

Sorry again for the lack on info in my earlier post.

Cheers,
Norm

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Substance Designer - Technical Support - Re: Substance designer running slow Macbook Pro Retina

 on: June 24, 2015, 05:16:05 pm 

I am also having the same problem of very slow, practically unworkable performance on my mid 2010 iMac.
System stats:

Model Name:   iMac
  Model Identifier:   iMac11,3
  Processor Name:   Intel Core i7
  Processor Speed:   2.93 GHz
  Number of Processors:   1
  Total Number of Cores:   4
  L2 Cache (per Core):   256 KB
  L3 Cache:   8 MB
  Memory:   8 GB
  Processor Interconnect Speed:   4.8 GT/s
  Boot ROM Version:   IM112.0057.B01
  SMC Version (system):   1.59f2

To be honest, while my iMac is getting a little long in the tooth, I still think there is now way Substance Designer should be practically unusable... while I agree that Macs are not the best systems for graphic performance, they're not completely terrible either. Many other applications (including Substance Painter) run at an acceptable frame rate on my system.
Perhaps it's the nature of how Designer is designed, but I'm sure there are multiple solutions to really help speed things from a software design standpoint. I've turned off post effects like the lens flare and switched engines and still no luck.

In this day and age, when building for multiple platforms, one would assume tests being done on non-dev machines without maxed out ram or state of the art video cards, observe the results and when obvious performance issues show up, have some sort of software solutions imbedded that can really help speed things up (this assumes the software is even fully optimized to begin with - something tells me if someone like John Carmack wrote the Designer software, it would be much faster than it currently is...but I digress).

I'm sure people who are much smarter than I am could come up with better solutions aside from any software optimization performance issues.

At the end of the day, while my system isn't exactly new anymore, it's not so old as to be unusable. As a legal paying user, I do have the right to be upset with almost unusable software (especially while this software's counterpart [Substance Painter] actually runs fast enough on the same hardware - I understand that these two pieces of software are two different animals build for entirely different purposes, but still.. dealing with extraordinarily slow running software is disheartening to say the least).