P0-P-172: Part 70: Substance Designer

I have been trying out Substance Designer, the partner program to Substance painter, and I have discovered that it has some very powerful features.

I suspect it will quite quite a while to learn, but after following a simple tutorial, I have created the below material. The great advantage to Substance Designer is that it is all PBR based, it is not an image editing program. This should make it much more programmer-friendly.

In addition to this, Unity supports the native loading of Substance painter files, and this means that it is actually possible to create a material and expose one or more of its variables. In the below example, I have exposed a variable that controls how rusty the material is.

Unity can then dynamically change those variables, so I can, as can be seen from the below examples, go from a completly rusty texture to a completely clean one, with gradual changes in between.

This is an extremely powerful feature, and something a static texture (such as what would be generated in photoshop) would not be capable of.