Would you recommend Substance Painter, Quixel, or similar for an Arch-Viz pipeline?

[TomasEsperanza]

I'm interested in painting more UV'd maps (to complement and occasionally even replace the usual procedural and tiled maps). The goal is to find an expedient and versatile workflow for producing photo-realistic Arch-Viz (à la Benoit et al.)

 

Painting onto the mesh seems intuitive and (potentially more) accurate (rather than Photoshoping various maps from a template and manipulating them extensively with CC, Blend, and Composite, nodes etc. in the shader).

 

I've begun looking at various software, as I endeavour to avoid some of the frustration experienced with 3ds max (although it's great for modelling), e.g.

 

Substance Painter: https://www.allegorithmic.com/

Quixel Suite: http://quixel.se/

 

I much prefer the tutorials that allegorithmic provide, and this definitely influences my impression of the companies and their ability to look after their customers.

 

Please kindly contribute your experiences and opinions to this thread so that I and others can make more educated decisions when moving toward these relatively modern and user friendly texturing tools.

 

Regards,

 

Tom

Edited December 16, 2015 by TomasEsperanza

[TomasEsperanza]

So is anyone here using Substance or Quixel at all?

[RyderSK]

Most people on this forum or generally in archviz industry don't produce assets in their work that would require texturing touch-over from these tools, since that's considered quite a luxury. We still render 99perc. of time perfectly clean houses and props work gets delegated.

 

And when it comes to more complicated texturing, procedural approach with tiled maps and projected masks, will always be more time effective than binding individual texture sheet for single asset (and of course, unwrapping, plus associated back-and-forth between applications to do baking and painting)

 

Quixel comes out far more efficient out of the two (compared to Substance) since it's way more "one-click" oriented (in simplified terms, it's of course just as complex and robust when needed but doesn't need to be if you don't), esp. with growing library of ready-made calibrated "smart" materials and further on-going Megascans integration.

 

Seems like a no-brainer to me though that you need to personally find the need for these tools yourself if you want to use them. Producing lot of unique high-definition props in your work that could benefit from streamlined detailed texturing, ideally with ready-made precalibrated shaders ? Than the Quixel suite is imho winner.

 

(Personal bias: I use Quixel Suite for some time, although most dominantly to create normal maps through nDO, DDO Painter came just few weeks ago, there isn't widespread use in production yet anywhere, let alone in archviz which doesn't have much need in first place for it)

 

(In any way, check this cool guide by Dubcat in integration of Quixel to Corona Renderer's workflow

 

https://corona-renderer.com/forum/index.php/topic,10436.0.html)

Edited December 21, 2015 by RyderSK

[TomasEsperanza]

Cheers for your consideration Juraj

 

Yeah Quixel looks tasty. I'm always keeping my eyes open for any tools that will facilitate Arch-Viz production. Sometimes (and this is a case in point) it's difficult to compare workflows, and I don't have enough time to try all the tools that make my eyes pop! . So it's great to be able to check with others for whether it's worth investigating further.

 

Primarily my hope for a program like this would be a faster way of adding detail that calls for more than tileable textures, procedurals and complex shader trees. For naturally subtle real-world stuff, as opposed to "gamey grunge" if you like.

 

We can probably do without these tools for now, but if people start using them to efficiently raise the quality of their images then I'd rather be a relatively early adopter. If the learning curve is astronomic or the process is long winded then it's less likely to return investment of time. But of course when the official videos always endeavor to make it look sooo easy - the question is: "is it really?"

 

(BTW I ditched the composite and distance tex nodes and used mix maps, masks and a vray blend material for my attempt at a BBB3Viz road. It came out ok)

[RyderSK]

The learning curve of Quixel (DDO/Painter) is definitely fraction of Substance tools, and the whole workflow can be condensed to point it's really automatic asset chugging, if that's what one wants.

 

Issue with Archviz is, you can't just apply everywhere. 90perc. of my images is flat paint, big wooden floor, or building facade. High quality tiling textures with optional minor masking is the only option that goes there.

What Quixel outside of mask painting does, is just automatic masking of photo-scanned tiled materials (most of them tile 1x1 meter only with tiling being done procedurally so it looks tiled a lot if you're not masking it). For small-to-medium sized props that need surface weathering, it is of course much more efficient and nicer process than building 50 nodes shader tree with procedural masks. But Archviz largely isn't composed of such elements, so it will always be just additional tool not staple in production.

 

Simple texture library like Megascans will get much more widespread use.

[TomasEsperanza]

Ah yes Megascans does look promising, it's early days though; still needs loads more materials.

 

I know what you mean about the majority of Arch-Viz not requiring more than the standard workflow, and I agree.

 

For now I think I'll leave Substance and Quixel alone.

[RyderSK]

Ah yes Megascans does look promising, it's early days though; still needs loads more materials.

 

What do you mean ? The service isn't available yet to public, but studios do have access already to more than 10 000 scans. That's quite bit more than I thought they would have..

 

For now I think I'll leave Substance and Quixel alone.

 

Hmm, didn't want to discourage you, after all I use it, although sparsely. Quixel has 30day trial and even after that it's dirt cheap so it's well worth to try.

[TomasEsperanza]

my bad, I was thinking of this: http://real-displacement-textures.com/

[brendanrogers]

I recommend both Quixel and Substance painter for direct model painting. Both are great programs and aim to do the same thing. I think most Archviz people work towards a deadline and don't really have time to add this kind of extra detail. However, if your building your own models anyway, you would get benefit from using either of these.

 

I'm using Substance designer at the moment to create PBR textures, great program, lots to learn and the output is simply quite amazing.

 

Interesting vid showing of the use of both substance programs for viz like applications.

Edited December 21, 2015 by brendanrogers

[RyderSK]

my bad, I was thinking of this: http://real-displacement-textures.com/

 

I kind of thought you would have meant those. I definitely need to salute this guy for effort bringing this to public first, as we're all kind of tired waiting forever for Megascans.

It has drawbacks though: limited amount, bundled into not quite practical bundles for hefty pricetag, not that kind of cross-polarised precise capture as Quixel can do, on other hand, he does manual touch-up and manual tiling on these, which is far superior than the procedural tiling Megascans will have, so the quality is maybe little bit better straight out.

[cgvinny]

Interesting post to read

As I work for Allegorithmic I could argue a bit about the Quixel vs Substance Painter learning curve (Substance Designer is a bit more advanced I admit)

 

If you guys have any question, feel free to ask (we receive more and more requests from the Archviz world)

Cheers

[TomasEsperanza]

Interesting post to read

As I work for Allegorithmic I could argue a bit about the Quixel vs Substance Painter learning curve (Substance Designer is a bit more advanced I admit)

 

If you guys have any question, feel free to ask (we receive more and more requests from the Archviz world)

Cheers

 

Hi Vincent,

 

It would be good to hear about any product developments that could be relevant to Arch-Viz, so please do post any news about enticing updates for us here!

 

Cheers

[philippelamoureux]

I'm a bit like you Thomas. I can make complex mats in ue4, use vertex painting, decals, etc but when I go back to corona or vray I'm lost when it's time to make mats with masks, blends, layers, etc. I have not spent enough time to learn that and I always end up going back to ue4 because I can do more stuff faster. Eventually I'll have to sit down and learn that stuff tho because it's limiting right now.

 

I use Allegorithmic's bitmap2material sometimes to generate all sort of maps from a texture I may find on the internet. Sometimes Quixel too.

 

I like to use substance share for the free materials! Right now I don't have much time to learn substance in depth but still find them useful from time to time.

 

Procedural substances are pretty cool too. I use them in unreal engine tho!

Edited April 21, 2016 by philippelamoureux

[cgvinny]

Hi Vincent,

 

It would be good to hear about any product developments that could be relevant to Arch-Viz, so please do post any news about enticing updates for us here!

 

Cheers

No problem: we have seen a lost of interest from the Arch-Viz world these last month, as real time rendering is slowly bu surely growing. Many things are going to come

[cgvinny]

I'm a bit like you Thomas. I can make complex mats in ue4, use vertex painting, decals, etc but when I go back to corona or vray I'm lost when it's time to make mats with masks, blends, layers, etc. I have not spent enough time to learn that and I always end up going back to ue4 because I can do more stuff faster. Eventually I'll have to sit down and learn that stuff tho because it's limiting right now.

 

I use Allegorithmic's bitmap2material sometimes to generate all sort of maps from a texture I may find on the internet. Sometimes Quixel too.

 

I like to use substance share for the free materials! Right now I don't have much time to learn substance in depth but still find them useful from time to time.

 

Procedural substances are pretty cool too. I use them in unreal engine tho!

 

If you need any help, feel free to ask (même en Français)

[James Vella]

I use pixplant. Its great because its for people who dont have time

 

My uses:

- 1 click seamless textures 1 texture

- 1 click seamless textures with multiple textures

- create normal/spec/bump/displacement from this texture (like crazybump) & comes with normal/3d viewer