Looking at Substance Painter, question on SSS

#1

Hey everyone,

I’m looking at stepping up my texture painting game by possibly acquiring Substance Painter 2.

Until now I have been using polypainting techniques in Zbrush to make textures but lately there seems to be a lot of hype over SP so I am here to ask how good it really is.

I guess the main question I have is how good SP is at rendering (or previewing real-time) multi-layered sub-surface scattering skin.

In the past with Zbrush my workflow would be to paint the various skin layers of a character and then plug the baked maps into the SSS shader in 3DSMax and render with Mental Ray. This often takes some time for me to get right.

I have read that SP boasts PBR but will the application actually give me a good idea (in real time) of how my layered map SSS effect will look before having to take it all into Max and do it the more laborious way?

I hope this isn’t too vague of a question. Please ask me to clarify any details as I am very new to Substance Painter.

Thanks in advance!

#2

substance painter is very geared towards PBR. it can give you a really good idea of what your asset will look like in engine. in saying that, the SSS doesn’t seem to be mind blowing. the shader gives you a couple subdermal layers and lots of control over them but the rendering still seems like a good game engine render of SSS. it’s not at the level of high end rendering engines like mental ray, vray or renderman.

#3

Thanks for the reply, Mark.

That pretty much answers my question.

I will look further into Substance Painter for my texturing needs.

Cheers!

Tristan.