Hello community,
i am pretty new here, as obvious and I wanted to ask, if its possible to do the CGCookie Tutorials without Adobe Substance products.
I am learning blender and Unity for a year now, in my freetime and am trieing to put my learnt skills in a project together now. I am coding a small FPS game on a space station in Unity HDRP and am aiming for a good graphical experience. I have seen some CGCookie tutorials about scifi corridors, FPS weapons, doors that sparked my intrest. Now I have seen that most tutorials use Substance Painter to texture the model. Texturing and choosing the right material hasnt been my strength yet in blender. I have managed to get some decent looking materials, especially found the addon Fluent: Materializer but its all not looking that great. Could be a bad lightning setup tho as well. I got myself ArmorPaint now, which is similiar to Substance Painter and wanted to ask, if I can use that too for the tutorials (ofc it will not have all the materials).
I am fully working on Linux therefore Substance painter can only be bought through Steam for me and I havent rly understood the product politics. Somwhere it says you need a subscription, on Steam it says, update support ends in 2022, there are like 4 or 5 Substance products all for a lot of money... all very confusing and nothing I want to wrap my head around.
So thank you in advance for giving me some hints and looking forward to my hobby GameDev journey and maybe seeing you again.
Greetings
Hey Oliver,
First, welcome to CG Cookie,
As for the course you refer to, Substance was just what was used in the course, the objective is to teach the process of creating assets for games.
You can use whatever texturing software you choose, however there are so many and CGCookie is focused on teaching Blender.
There are free options you could look into, such as Quixel Mixer. You will need to learn to use the texturing software you choose separately from Blender.
Hope this helps!
Quixel mixer doesn't appear to have Linux support though.
I do everything in Blender and the more recent tutorials on CGCookie all (I think) use Blender for their material creation.
Third party Software may be easier to use, but it is not absolutely necessary. And like Adrian said, if you choose to use other Software, you'll have to learn that separately from Blender. But I think you can easily follow along with those tutorials that use SP, no matter what you decide to use.
Hello Adrian, Martin and Omar,
thank you for your expert knowledge, I think I am understanding it now. I had the wrong impression that I needed those extra programs to create good looking materials. I played around with ArmorPaint now a bit and I think I get the idea what it is actually used for. It is basically a good asset for quickly creating texture masks and adding decals or playing around and to see changes quickly; but blender would do that as well. Since I am primarily aiming for game dev, it maybe can help at times to get the textures baked more quickly.
Thanks for your help, that gave me more assurance and I will see if I need to use an extra texturer at all in the future. :)
Have a nice weekend and greetings,
Olli
