Messages

121

Substance Painter - Feature Requests - Re: PSD Export

 on: August 29, 2014, 09:15:30 am 

Hum, but the bitmaps are flattened after exporting, and if I have more than one layer with masks and everything, there would be no reason to pass the bitmaps to SD.
Better to rebuild the entire layer stack directly in Photoshop.
Again, I would really love to see this feature

122

Substance Painter - Feature Requests - PSD Export

 on: August 28, 2014, 01:58:37 pm 

I noticed that the current roadmap includes "PSD Import", but strangely not export.
I would really love to see this feature,is that planned?

123

Substance Painter - Discussions - Re: How to create a substance in Designer to be used in Painter

 on: August 27, 2014, 11:53:50 am 

That's strange, it is exactly what I tried to do (Assigning the Usage properties).
I will check again, thanks.
Btw, is there a naming convention for "material" substances like there is for grayscale effects (i.e. using "input" and "output" names)?

P.S. Sorry, but the graphs at your link don't show how to setup input/output nodes to be used in painter.
The only one I can see is an output node called "Any".

124

Substance Painter - Discussions - Re: How to create a substance in Designer to be used in Painter

 on: August 27, 2014, 10:45:04 am 

Hi, sorry to bump this up.
I understood how to make "grayscale" effects, as Nicolas explained above, but I am having problems understanding how to create substances that have different outputs for diffuse/roughness/metal/normal channels.
In other words I would like to create "matfx" substances, like the ones in the Effects panel.

Thanks!

125

Substance Designer - Technical Support - Re: Divide Blend?

 on: August 24, 2014, 09:52:54 pm 

Many of the blend modes in Designer are substances on their own.
If you know what the Divide blend does, there's a chance you can recreate it by yourself.

I will give it a look as soon as I will have some free time >_>

Cheers!

126

Substance Designer - Feature Requests - Re: Python scripting

 on: August 24, 2014, 12:30:44 am 

+1 here.  We would like to do very similar integrations at our studio.  Ideally a standalone headless python module with access to graph functions would be very useful

+2

+3

127

Substance Designer - Feature Requests - Several SVG Feature Requests

 on: August 21, 2014, 07:51:14 pm 

Hi there,

after testing the SVG tools more intensively, I reached the conclusion that in their current state they are very limited.
It would be great if they were a bit more mature, as I really would like to avoid jumping to another app just to make simple masks.

I will list here a minimal set of features that I feel are really needed:


Line thickness.
Currently it is always 1px wide. See link
The "Clear Color" command (that makes the fill or the line color invisible) is somewhat buggy on multiple selections: sometimes it doesn't clear all the selected shapes.
Eventually, the stroke thickness should be exposed. See link

Freeze Booleans operations.
Currently there is no way to collapse several shapes into one.

Better transform/snap tools.
Flip along horizontal or vertical position. See link
Constrain the size of the polygon tools during creation.
Snap to axis with SHIFT when using the pen.
Introduce rulers for snapping. See link

Use Antialias
There's currently no support for antialias in SVG. See link

Fix the UNDO
This is probably one of the most important requests for me.
I find very frustrating the way the undo works right now, and I avoid using SVG tools at all just because of this issue.
The undo doesn't restore the previous state, but goes straight back from the first activation of the tool, deleting all of the involved steps to create one or more shapes. I consider it to be a bug.
More informations here

If Vector tools will be implemented not only in Desginer, but in Substance Painter too, please make the two toolsets the same
It would be awesome to have the same tools, that behave exactly the same way, in both applications. Please don't introduce two different workflows.
Same thing applies to the 2D brush (bitmap) tools.

128

Substance Designer - Technical Support - Re: Vector Graphics (svg) and UNDO

 on: August 21, 2014, 06:36:50 pm 

Sorry to bump this up, but the vector tools really need some love.
The undo thing alone is really frustrating :S

For example, it not only completely deletes the new shape, but every stuff done with the current tool.
If for example I switch from the pen to the extrude tool, and I start painting... the undo will delete every single stroke from the beginning!

I think this is more a bug than a feature enhancement, as it can't be how it was supposed to work.

Thank you for your support!

129

Substance Designer - Technical Support - Importing custom substances and relative paths

 on: August 21, 2014, 12:47:17 pm 

Hi there,

I don't fully understand how paths to substances work.
To make an example, lately I downloaded the RO substances package from here, but when I try to import one of these into one of my graph, they continuously ask to specify the path to some of the default substances that are in the resources folder of Substance Designer.

Now, shouldn't Designer automatically load substances from one of the paths that are specified in the preferences?
Because the way I would like to see it, it's a bit how python works... If I have multiple paths specified, and the imported substance it's not in the same folder as the "root substance", I will start looking into every path, with the latest path overwriting an eventual duplicate in the previous ones.

130

Substance Designer - Feature Requests - Re: Stroke a mask or vector shape.

 on: August 14, 2014, 03:38:40 pm 

Nice one artfx!
Even though I believe the stroke effect must be a clean outline.

Here my substance:
Contour.sbs

There are 3 different graphs:
Contour Clean and Contour Fast are based on the emboss filter. They have some more parameters and can produce a clean stroke... with the problem that the radius can't go after a certain amount (the maximum amount is one, but is not a value in pixels).
"Contour" instead has a radius parameter only, which is specified in pixels and so can produce very thick strokes. It basically blurs the image and contrasts it a lot to obtain the effect. It can produce jagged edges with thick strokes, but hey, it's up to you

I would like to study better the "Shadows" substance that comes with Designer, maybe there is a way to produce even cleaner results!

P.S. Btw, I would use "Contour"... the other two where just my first tries

131

Substance Designer - Feature Requests - Re: PSD Exporter - Feature Requests.

 on: August 14, 2014, 12:14:14 pm 

Adjustment layers would be useful if they work exactly the same as the Photoshop equivalents. I'm not sure they do. Maybe it doesn't matter if they're exported with zeroed values. Hue Sat and Levels are the most useful ones IMO.

From what I see, Levels and Hue/Saturation/Value from Designer look to be quite consistent with Photoshop.
And I agree, these are probably the only two adjustment layers that are really needed.

132

Substance Designer - Technical Support - Re: Access to layer masks with PSD exporter

 on: August 14, 2014, 11:37:46 am 

Thank you Wes!
I've added my list of Feature Requests for the psd exporter here

Cheers!

133

Substance Designer - Feature Requests - Re: Stroke a mask or vector shape.

 on: August 14, 2014, 11:11:06 am 

Hehe, I was wondering exactly the same
So far, I found a small workaround creating a simple substance:
- First I blur the grayscale image (the alpha in photoshop)... the radius of the blur will define the radius of the stroke.
- Then I feed the blurred image to 8 emboss filters (with black bg color), one every 45degrees.
- Finally I combine this 8 filters with a blend node set to "Add", eventually blurring the result if it is too noisy.

It is FAR from a perfect solution, as edges will be a bit jagged. So if you need a clean stroke, this will not work.
But hey, it may do the job if you need a blurred stroke

134

Substance Designer - Feature Requests - PSD Exporter - Feature Requests.

 on: August 12, 2014, 04:38:37 pm 

Hi there,
I would like to convince the studio where I’m working to adopt Substance Designer.
Thing is, being our pipeline still so reliant on Photoshop, we really need a strong psd exporter to welcome SD in our pipeline.
Currently I feel there have been some important omissions that make the exporter less useful than it could be.
For this reason, knowing that I can’t expect to replicate all psd features, I will try to make an analysis and ask for a minimum amount of feature requests.

Masks
This is currently one of my biggest concerns.
Currently only nodes with alpha are exported as layers with a mask.
The problem is that a layer exported this way will have transparent pixels (i.e. opaque pixels from the source node will be deleted) that will match the mask.
This makes the use of a mask useless, thus making the export function more destructive than it should be.

• Now, a layer in Photoshop may actually contain transparent pixels, and have a mask as well. For this reason the best way to export a mask should be the ability to assign an arbitrary grayscale node to a mask of a layer, while the layer should receive a RGBA node. Mask Assignment should be made with a simple drag’n drop.
• Groups should have masks too.

See also Topic: Access to layer masks with PSD exporter

Layer UI.
It is very difficult to organize layers, as it’s not easy to drag a layer in and out of a group.
Layers flicker when trying to drag a layer close to a group in the UI.

Adjustment Layers.
This would be so useful! Adding non-destructive features to the generated psd file.
Designer already have atomic nodes like Levels, HSL and Gradient Map.
In my opinion, these nodes should be added in two different ways:

• The way it is now, showing the result of the node operation.
• Adding and adjustment layer which takes the same node parameters as values (without rendering the image).Of course the adjustment layer should be able to receive a mask too.

Nested substances in a graph as a group
This is probably a plus, but I like the idea of it.
Layers that have already been setup to be exported inside of a subgraph (a referenced substance inside of the current graph) are currently not taken into account.
IMO they should be exported as a group in the current graph, if the subgraph have been added to the exporter in the layer list.
I hope that makes sense.

Thanks for listening!

135

Substance Designer - Technical Support - Re: Access to layer masks with PSD exporter

 on: August 12, 2014, 03:38:00 pm 

Hi Wes,

Thanks for the response.

Yeah that's what I've got, but as you can see in that example, the alpha is written both into the layer mask AND the layer opacity. So if the user opens that psd and tries to fill the layer mask with white, it can't reveal a whole opaque layer because the layer opacity is cutting off the transparent pixels.

Do you see  what I'm getting at? It's the same problem loading a png with transparency into Photoshop and attempting to restore the transparent pixels. You can't, they don't exist.

Thanks

I was just going to write a huge post about the PSD exporter, and this one was definitely one of my bigger feature requests.
I couldn't agree more.
It's ok to eventually use a Channel Mixer to read the alpha as a mask, but pixels in the image become transparent too! The layer should be opaque, with the alpha stored in the mask.

I think it would be MUCH better to read the mask from arbitrary grayscale nodes, as yes, the layer could contain transparent pixels, but they don't need to match the mask.

I hope that doesn't sound confusing, but basically it should be like this:

  [LAYER]         [MASK]
       |                  |
 RGBA node     gray node


The layer should be a RGBA node as it may contain transparent pixels, while the mask should just be grayscale node.
Sorry for the ASCII art