I know blue, I know - but it's the "if" that's causing my insecurity.

Where's his Lordship when you need him?

Peter, user suffering form serious lack of information  - please provide ASAP.

Gerry

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System: Win 10 Pro (21H2), Asus X99-E WS, CPU i7-5930K -3,5 GHz, 32 GB DDR4 2666-16 RAM, NVidia GTX 1080 Ti GPU - 11 GB VRAM(Driver Studio-536.99), Samsung 850 Pro 512 GB SSD, 6 TB HD storage.

Get it, you won't regret it.


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Reallusion iClone & CC Pipeline --- Plugins: Iray HeadShot SkinGen.  CrazyTalk Animator Pipeline, CrazyTalk, Maya LT, Daz, Substance Painter Indie, Substance Designer Indie, B2M Pro+ Substance Live, Sculptris, Wrap, Unity, UE4, Perception Neuron Ready
SurfaceBook 2 Windows 11 Pro 64-bit Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8650U CPU @ 1.90GHz -2.11 GHz 512GB Solid State Hard Drive 8GB RAM Nvidia GeForce 1050GTX
Dell  Alienware m18X R2 18.5" Custom Convertible Tablet Windows 8.1 Pro 64-bit Intel Core I7-3840QM 2.80GHz Quad Core 8 Thread 3.2GHz Turbo 512GB Solid State Hard Drive+1TB X2 RAID Disk Drive 32GB RAM Nvidia Geforce GTX 680m 2GB X2 SLI Custom Multi-touch. Dagi capacitive touch stylus
Microsoft Surface Pro 2 10.1" Tablet Windows 10 64-bit Intel Core I5-4200U 1.60GHz 2.3GHz Turbo 128GB Solid State Hard Drive 4GB RAM HD 4000 Graphics Multi-touch Wacom Digitizer screen Surface Pen+Axiotron Studio Pen
Asus Vivo Tab 8" Tablet Windows 10 32-bit Intel Atom Z-3740 1.33GHz Quad Core 32GB Solid State Hard Drive 2GB RAM HD 4000 Graphics Multi-touch Wacom Digitizer Wacom stylus.

Friday = Payday = Substance Indie Pack

(Substance Designer + Bitmap2Material + Substance Painter)

I'm least certain about Substance Designer, mostly because I don't know if I want to devote a lot of brain cells and time to it.  I save $50 by buying the other two without the pack, but it costs $100 to add it later (bringing the total to $50 more than the Indie Pack).

I'll probably get the Indie Pack and try to get my son to learn Substance Designer in exchange for food and shelter.

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iClone 7... Character Creator... Substance Designer/Painter... Blender... Audacity...
Desktop (homebuilt) - Windows 10, Ryzen 9 3900x CPU, GTX 1080 GPU (8GB), 32GB RAM, Asus X570 Pro motherboard, 2TB SSD, terabytes of disk space, dual  monitors.
Laptop - Windows 10, MSI GS63VR STEALTH-252, 16GB RAM, GTX 1060 (6GB), 256GB SSD and 1TB HDD

You're so lucky to have willing and able children... I have to figure all these things out be myself...

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Honestly substance designer is not hard or overly complicated it just looks it.
If you can use photoshop you can use designer. The only real hardship is if your using your own models your UVs have to be good.





I Make My Mates Do The CanCan For The Amusement Of Killer Robots

Substance Painter is very Photoshop-like.  I have barely touched Photoshop, but I do mess around with GIMP from time to time.

The key I've already learned about Painter is "layers," just like in Photoshop/GIMP.  That, and to think literally.

If you want a steel, painted surface with scratches, you don't start with the paint and add metal where the scratches are.  You literally start with metal.  Everywhere.  The whole thing is steel.  Then you add paint.  Next you scratch off the paint, revealing the metal below.

The thing with Substance Designer that looks intimidating are the "graphs" where you create a chain of effects to design your material.  It's a lot more complex than selecting "green" or "oak."  It reminds me a lot of watching Blender tutorials.  I'm sure a good place to start will be editing and modifying existing materials.

About the UV maps, what you quickly run into is "bad" auto-unwrapped maps.  You can barely paint the model because some places only have a handful of pixels mapped to the most interesting parts of the model.  I had my son open a model in Blender and "re-unwrap" it so it was suitable for painting.

Ha, just like painting in the real world.... good surface preparation is key. 

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iClone 7... Character Creator... Substance Designer/Painter... Blender... Audacity...
Desktop (homebuilt) - Windows 10, Ryzen 9 3900x CPU, GTX 1080 GPU (8GB), 32GB RAM, Asus X570 Pro motherboard, 2TB SSD, terabytes of disk space, dual  monitors.
Laptop - Windows 10, MSI GS63VR STEALTH-252, 16GB RAM, GTX 1060 (6GB), 256GB SSD and 1TB HDD

Designer can be used for creating Substance nodes for use in Painter, like the ones in the videos I posted in other threads(see below). The Allegorithmic community forum has plenty free nodes for download, and btw, you are lucky to have someone in a 20 mile radius that remotely knows what you do and can duplicate or surpass your efforts.



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Reallusion iClone & CC Pipeline --- Plugins: Iray HeadShot SkinGen.  CrazyTalk Animator Pipeline, CrazyTalk, Maya LT, Daz, Substance Painter Indie, Substance Designer Indie, B2M Pro+ Substance Live, Sculptris, Wrap, Unity, UE4, Perception Neuron Ready
SurfaceBook 2 Windows 11 Pro 64-bit Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8650U CPU @ 1.90GHz -2.11 GHz 512GB Solid State Hard Drive 8GB RAM Nvidia GeForce 1050GTX
Dell  Alienware m18X R2 18.5" Custom Convertible Tablet Windows 8.1 Pro 64-bit Intel Core I7-3840QM 2.80GHz Quad Core 8 Thread 3.2GHz Turbo 512GB Solid State Hard Drive+1TB X2 RAID Disk Drive 32GB RAM Nvidia Geforce GTX 680m 2GB X2 SLI Custom Multi-touch. Dagi capacitive touch stylus
Microsoft Surface Pro 2 10.1" Tablet Windows 10 64-bit Intel Core I5-4200U 1.60GHz 2.3GHz Turbo 128GB Solid State Hard Drive 4GB RAM HD 4000 Graphics Multi-touch Wacom Digitizer screen Surface Pen+Axiotron Studio Pen
Asus Vivo Tab 8" Tablet Windows 10 32-bit Intel Atom Z-3740 1.33GHz Quad Core 32GB Solid State Hard Drive 2GB RAM HD 4000 Graphics Multi-touch Wacom Digitizer Wacom stylus.

Now it has begun.
I am downloading the trials to see if this is too complicated for me. (Keeping my mind busy at this age is the important thing.)
The download will probably take most of today and some of tomorrow with these slow speeds.
It does sort of look like the price will remain for awhile as they are not bringing anything new out soon as far as I can tell. At least I hope not.
Ken
After another few hours with the Designer and the tutorials I have decided it is way over my head and above what I need. If I do manage to figure it out later, I may buy it but right now I have no real need for it.

I made my purchase of the Indy Pack (Substance Designer, Substance Painter, and Bitmap2Material).

Now that I can finally export my painted textures, I have to find out the best way to "simulate" the Physically Based Render that Substance Painter uses.  Since iC5 doesn't work the same way, my initial results in iClone were very ugly, but that didn't really surprise me.  It's just part of the learning curve.

I think I saw the solution in one of the tutorials I watched.  But which one.  It was just a little aside tossed in, and I have about 3 hours of tutorials I've watched so for.  I'm sure I'll figure it out eventually.  I may have to pester some of the nice people on the SP forum.

I can't wait to see how it all plays with iC6.

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iClone 7... Character Creator... Substance Designer/Painter... Blender... Audacity...
Desktop (homebuilt) - Windows 10, Ryzen 9 3900x CPU, GTX 1080 GPU (8GB), 32GB RAM, Asus X570 Pro motherboard, 2TB SSD, terabytes of disk space, dual  monitors.
Laptop - Windows 10, MSI GS63VR STEALTH-252, 16GB RAM, GTX 1060 (6GB), 256GB SSD and 1TB HDD

Well, that sounds like the kind of aside I might throw in. Here's a couple ideas. I suspect I'll have many more in a couple months!

Set all your materials to "reflective", but it keep it down around 5.

Use IBL instead of ambient light. not only will the colors of the light have an effect, but you can change it in real-time with the sliders, and it's likely to crash iClone. I use a neutral 128 square neutral gray image. It can be made any color using the saturation and hue sliders.

Use a very light, white colored fog to add gradient to your lighting. It can even start at zero. Set the end to taste.

Set your shadows to 100%. The default is 75%, and lets light bleed through walls and clothing and cheeks. Blur your shadows. A setting of 1 is good for bright-n-sunny, while a high setting is good for more overcast.

Use the ambient occlusion, but not with the fog.

set your directional light to medium light gray, and your ambient/IBL to medium dark gray.

I suspect all of these tricks will still work in iC6 as well, and there will be some new ones to!