Topics

1

Substance - Purchases & Licenses - Have been subscribed for 4 years. What are my options?

 on: January 23, 2019, 08:32:36 pm 

I have been a supporter of Substance since the early days and got on board when the indie licence came out. My license page shows that I have made 46 license payments over the past 4 years.

Initially I bought the subscription because of the promise that payments would stop once the full purchase price was reached, but that never happened. I then stayed subscribed for 4 years because of the regular updates and because I wanted to support development. But if I had just bought the software outright and even all of the one time license upgrades, I would only have paid a fraction of the amount I have over the years.

With the announcement that Adobe will be buying Substance, I'm looking at my options regarding getting permanent licenses that can't later be revoked (I have had bad experience with Adobe in this area). And having seen that I've paid so much into that subscription, I'm now feeling very stupid -- I could have bought multiple permanent licenses and all the upgrades for the same amount. Hell, I've now paid more for this indie license than it costs for a permanent pro license.

Could someone from Allegrorithmic to please explain what my options are for getting permanent licenses? Is my only option to cancel my subscription and get one permanant license for the current software versions, and just consider the rest of the amount I've paid as a very expensive lesson? Or is there a way to convert that into multiple licenses?

EDIT: Also, the Upgrade Licenses page on the subscription page is blank.

2

Substance Painter - Technical Support - Substance Painter 2.03 to 2.11 - Blinn (non PBR) shader missing?

 on: July 13, 2016, 06:05:08 pm 

I've just updated Substance Painter from 2.03 to 2.11 and the "Blinn (non PBR)" shader I was using is now missing. This shader closely resembles the final result in my custom game engine, and I was very happy to see it in SP2 as I previously had to write my own Blinn shader for SP1. When loading a previous project in 2.11, the Blinn (non PBR) shader showed as "outdated" and it seemed to be rendering using another shader (I think it picked the new car paint shader).

I had a backup copy of the 2.03 installer so I've gone back to that version and everything is fine again, but I'm wondering why the shader was removed and whether there are plans to bring it back.

3

Substance Painter - Discussions - Latest version of Substance Painter broke custom simple shader

 on: July 07, 2015, 02:58:27 pm 

One of the developers posted a shader called SimpleColor.glsl on the Steam forum last year, and I've been using a slightly modified version of it in my projects to include normal mapping from the paint's height as this gives a truer representation of how the final version will look in my game. Unfortunately, the latest version of substance painter has broken both shaders. It is tested and working in 1.34 but broken in 1.41, I would guess because 1.4.0 made some changes to the shader code.

I was wondering if any of the devs had a new SimpleColor shader that works with the new version and that we could adapt to include normals from height again. Attached are both shaders that are now broken. SimpleColor.glsl is the one supplied by a dev, and SimpleColorNormal.glsl is my modified version.

Cheers,
-- Brendan

4

Substance Painter - Discussions - Is there a way to bake using the normal map, not just geometry?

 on: April 14, 2015, 03:14:38 pm 

I'm trying to bake an AO map based on the normal map so that I can use it as part of the paint, but Substance Painter only take geometry into account in its baker. I know the typical use of baking is to bake information from a high-poly model down into a low-poly model's texture, but I'm kind of doing it backwards by adding detail on a low-poly model using substances with height like tiles and bricks. The final exported normal map has this information in it just fine, but the baker uses only geometry.
Is there a way to do this or am I barking up the wrong tree?

5

Substance Painter - Discussions - Workflow for baking PBR results into base texture?

 on: April 10, 2015, 04:57:56 pm 

I'm working on a computer game and trying to simplify my 3D modeller's workflow to take all the pain out of his process and let him concentrate on creating models. Right now he's producing models, merging them into a single mesh and manually unwrapping and packing the UVs. He previously then textured in photoshop, but we've decided to try to replace this with Substance Painter.

In the game, these models are always lit from the same angle by the same light and they're always viewed from the same angle. What we want to do is bake everything right into the base texture. The game is built in a custom engine, so I can easily disable the in-game lighting and just display the pre-baked texture. This works with our current workflow since photoshop just works on the diffuse texture, but doesn't jive with Substance Painter. The process we're trying to implement is:

• Create model, merge to a single mesh in 3DS Max
• Automatically unwrap and pack UVs
• Export as OBJ/FBX
• Texture exported model in Substance painter
• Bake AO, lighting and shadows into texture
• Import finished model into game

Ideally, we'd like to bake the results from Substance Painter's PBR based shader directly onto the diffuse texture. I know Substance Painter/Designer can bake AO, but the problem we're running into is that as far as I am aware, it has no lighting setup so can't bake lighting or shadows. We can import the textured model back into 3DS Max and use render-to-texture to bake in lighting and shadows, but I'm told 3DS Max doesn't have support for PBR shaders and won't render the same as Substance Painter, so the results will look very different.

I guess my questions are:
1) Is there a way to bake lighting and shadows in the Substance toolset that I just haven't found?
2) Is there a way to get 3DS Max to render a model the same as Substance toolset apart from lighting?
3) Can we make the Substance Painter display and output textures in a standard Diffuse/Normal/Specular setup so that it can be imported easily into software like 3DS Max and will look the same?

Thanks in advance for any help anyone can give. I'm not a 3D modeller by trade and my 3D modeller is still learning, but I'm hoping we can resolve this issue and start baking some of the visually impressive results of the Substance Painter onto the base texture.

6

Substance - Discussions - Your website is throwing Secure Connection Failed errors and Javascript timeouts

 on: April 09, 2015, 05:00:45 pm 

I've been trying to buy one of your products and the website seems to have been experiencing difficulties for the past 24 hours. Attempting to register a new account is met with a long wait followed by "Secure Connection Failed" and trying to click the buy button while logged into an existing account gets a Json timeout. For reference, I'm using the latest version of Firefox and am in the UK, and the website was working fine yesterday when it let me log in and get through to the checkout page. I've cleared my cookies and don't store a cache or temporary internet files.

7

Substance - Discussions - Unable to purchase - UK company with no VAT number

 on: April 08, 2015, 06:57:36 pm 

I'm attempting to buy the Substance indie live subscription for my company and your form is insisting that I enter a VAT number. In the UK, companies are not required to register for VAT until they hit a certain revenue threshold, so many micro-enterprises like mine won't have one. I've read that I could remove the company name to solve this, but I'd like the account to be in the name of the company for accounting purposes.
Is there any N/A type value I can add to the VAT field or any other way I can purchase without a VAT number?