A Deep Dive Into the Substance Ecosystem
Adobe Substance has become something of a household name in the 3d artists’ neighborhood. In line with what we’ve been discussing about the PBR concept and its workflows and materials, it’s time to take a look at the unique approach of Substance to material creation and its contribution to the world of Computer Graphics.
But first, let’s roll back to France, in 2003, most probably a dormitory at Blaise Pascal University.
The first cell
Some things you create, others you buy, Adobe sure knows that. Sébastien Deguy founded Allegorithmic, the company behind Substance, in 2003. His initial focus was on developing procedural texture generation software for the film and video game industries, and it quickly gained a lot of traction.
It all started as a project for a PhD in Computer Science, intended to create new textures optimized to enable realistic real-time rendering for games. Deguy quickly realized that his software was more powerful than those used at the time in the game dev and film industry, and he started to promote it actively.
By 2007, Substance was already well recognized among the big players, and its user base was expanding. That’s when Substance Designer was introduced to the market. Painter followed in 2014, and in 2016, about 95% of Substance’s turnover ($9.5 million) came from international companies, 20% of which were in Japan. Sony, Square Enix, Capcom, Nintendo, and many others used Substance in their productions, as evident in Final Fantasy XV, Resident Evil 7, Uncharted 4, and many more of the popular titles at the time.
Again, Allegorithmic didn’t stand still; developments followed, and Substance became available as a plugin for Adobe, Autodesk, Epic, and Unreal products. Eventually, in 2019, Adobe acquired it. Shortly after, Connecter also unveiled a Substance integration that allows you to edit Substance materials parameters from within the Previews panel. Another cool thing is that you can export them as PBR materials and use them in applications that don’t support Substance.
While that was a sound investment on Adobe’s side, it brought mixed feelings in Substance users. The primary concerns were the grim end of some of the companies Adobe had acquired in the past and the expected changes in the pricing model. Considering Adobe’s track record, it’s an understandable reaction — their acquisitions either became industry standard or disappeared from the market. So, many feared that the latter would happen to Substance even though, for a while then, it was the leader in game asset texturing and material design.
Additionally, the acquisition announcement made clear that a new pricing model will be introduced. The assumption was that it would drastically increase the costs of materials.
Overall, even though changes were made, it all turned out alright; the creative power behind Allegorithmic remained in Adobe and contributed to developing the Substance ecosystem that is actively dominating the market even today.
The key components
Substance’s suite of products is popular among new and experienced artists alike. It has diverse tools that create an entire ecosystem. While its suite suffices for many professionals in different fields, in other industries, like Archviz, a much more diversified software stack is required.
And yet, it’s true that some of its products offer a unique workflow that doesn’t have an alternative. In that way, it does keep you a bit restricted in Substance Land, but its parametric approach provides much more flexibility and ease of work than the standard PBR workflows.
Let’s see a bit more about some of the integral elements of the mentioned ecosystem.
- Substance 3D Designer: In many VFX software suites such as Unreal Engine, 3ds Max, and Unity, Designer plays a pivotal role in the initial phase. Its primary objective is crafting lifelike textures following the PBR principles to replicate the authentic appearance of materials as observed in reality under specific conditions.
- Substance 3D Painter: Painter functions predominantly as a refining tool in the creative process. It integrates models generated in software such as Blender, along with materials crafted in Designer, and incorporates them into the model, adjusting them accordingly. It also follows a PBR workflow, automatically managing material properties.
- Substance 3D Sampler: This is a versatile tool for creating materials from real-world references. It enables users to capture physical materials through scanning, whether via photographs or physical samples, and then converts them into digital materials that can be utilized within Designer and Painter.
- Substance 3D Stager: Stager enables artists to assemble scenes, arrange assets, set up lighting, and apply materials, as well as refine and adjust their composition with the help of real-time rendering.
- Substance 3D Modeler: This tool creates 3D models from scratch and manipulates existing ones. It offers a range of features catering to organic and hard-surface modeling workflows.
- Substance 3D Assets: Previously called Substance Source, this is one of the big 3D content libraries. The idea was to offer users 3d content regardless of their workflow and 3d creation pipeline. Additionally, the assets’ parametric properties allow them to be freely customized for more versatility.
Let’s focus a bit on how the Adobe technical team creates high-quality materials. They follow a photogrammetry-based scan workflow, using surface datasets containing about 200 photos for each captured surface patch. Processing such vast amounts of data is mainly automated using custom tools, scripts, and Substance tools.
After generating a high-resolution 3D mesh, they manually define the area that would be used for the scanned material with the help of custom tools. The 8K base color, height, and normal maps are easily extracted and baked, but other essential tasks, like making the scan tileable, still require work and resources. They use custom tools to optimize that part, too. Substance 3D Designer comes into play afterward to add parametric controls to the scan.
You’ve probably noticed the many custom tools the Adobe team uses in its material production pipeline. That only confirms that no matter how great the Substance ecosystem is, it’s still not self-sufficient when it comes to complex tasks.
Focusing more on the positives, Substance has also introduced standardized file formats, such as .sbsar, for exporting and sharing materials. They encapsulate the entire material graph, enabling material transfer between software applications and rendering engines that support Substance files.
Overall, Substance materials are different from all other PBR options, and their changing properties allow for creative freedom unmatched before the introduction of MaterialX.
Stay tuned, as in the following weeks, we’ll keep digging at the different aspects of PBR and take a look at the future MaterialX promises.
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Disclaimer: Some of the images in the article are generated by DALL-E.
