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anyone got to work substance material in h16?


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Hi, the plugin doesnt seem to work for me at all... I can load the sbsar file (which takes a ridiculously long time btw), I can see material parameters but changing those does nothing - render is always just sort of gray color and viewport shows nothing, as opposed to what I've seen in presentation videos.

Due to zero posts complaining about plugin not working at all, I assume mistake must be on my side. And probably it's gonna be something trivial. I tried on two different workstations with two different Houdini 16 builds (no difference).

Thanks for any help. D.

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Does your geometry have uvs? This plugin generates a set of textures from a substance material and applies standard Houdini material to the object in question with those textures applied on it. Another issue might be the path Substance trying to save textures to. Make sure write permissions are in place. 

hth,

skk.

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no difference if the object has uvs or not. still the same thing. i'm suspicious thou, after your answer, if I understand at all how the plugin is supposed to be working. my idea was that i design some material, export it a sbsar and then I can use it in Houdini - still as a fully procedural thing (only blackboxed) without need of any uvs or image files being baked out. just like when you do texturing inside houdinis' shop network... otherwise I don't see much reason why to use it at all if you have to have uvs and bake maps first. :|

thanks for your insight thou. D.

Edited by davpe
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I never use the plugin since I found it rather "underwhelming" to say it politely. Instead of - like you said - being a real procedural texture that is evaluated at rendertime, it only allows you to bake your textures inside of Houdini in a clumsy way - and you need to re-bake the textures after every parameter change. I therefore prefer to do my texturing in Designer or Painter directly, since there I have way more options.
Initially I also thought I do something wrong, I just couldn't believe that this is how it's supposed to be used.

If Allegorithmic want's to enter the non-game markets, they need to do MUCH better IMO.

I'm not the biggest fan of their software anyway but this plugin is really bad.

Cheers,

Tom

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hmm... that's interesting Thomas. i'm sure you've seen this video here: https://www.allegorithmic.com/content/substance-houdini 

it clearly shows material being altered/rendered without any need of baking anything and all of it is even shown in viewport. so, it's hard to believe that allegorithmic would show of this functionality if it wouldn't be there at all. actually, without that, the plugin has no point. why would you need it for if you can bake maps directly from substance painter? 

on top of it, as far as i know, maya plugin works more less as it is supposed to be working...

thanks for your inputs guys, anyways.

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My machine is rendering ATM so I can't check if there is anything new with the plugin, but last time I checked, the plugin would bake the texture to your temp directory every time you hit render, no matter if any parameter had changed or if you already had baked out high quality maps. So what looks like realtime in the video would become very slow fast when dealing with serious texture sizes like 4k on dozens of objects. 
It also did not clean up after itself, so your temp directory would get clogged with old textures fast - and of course you don't want your textures in your local temp folder if you render over the network - not very efficient to re-bake the whole lot on every network node...

The least thing I'd expect would be that it would allow to set the path for the temporary textures created, not recreate them when already existing and no parameters changed and that it would use the manually baked ones if present.

It could also create a substance-independent material with all texture maps assigned automatically as a way to use it in production.

But IMO the whole workflow currently is adverse to how non-gaming workflows work and I see little point in using the plugin other than for quick, low quality tests like in their video.

If I'm missing something or if there were major improvements in the plugin I'm unaware of, I'm all ears - I originally had high hopes for the tool so part of me being rather negative is my sadness over how clumsy it was implemented...   :(

They seem to realise recently that there is a world outside of games though, so I keep hope up that over time the plugin will become usable...

Cheers,

Tom

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well, all you've mentioned is certainly a room for improvement. my initial question thou, was why it does not work at all for me? :) it literally does nothing no matter what i do and it seems like nobody other than me have this issue... weird. 

Anyway, I've seen this plugin for maya in action and I was quite impressed. Although it was caching textures into temp folder too, it was quite fast and not really a deal breaker. Definitely something we'd like to have in our houdini pipeline.

Edited by davpe
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Can't really help you there, but some things to look into:

You can check the .cfg files in your Documents\houdini16.0\dso\substance folder, they configure how the plugin works.
substance.cfg defines what shader config to use, the others define the mapping to Houdini shaders. This way you can even define your own setup. Maybe they use the wrong shader code for the current Houdini?

Otherwise it could be read/write access rights maybe? Or the plugin is compiled for an older Houdini version?

Will give it a try as soon as my rendering is finished (12k image at 8k samples - Redshift can be slow too... ;-) ).

Cheers,

Tom

Edited by Thomas Helzle
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Okay, rendering finished...

I updated to the latest substance plugin and it kind of works here with Houdini 16.0.678.
But its extremely slow and doesn't correctly update the view when changing parameters.

I don't get the resolution slider though and honestly still think it's a complete fail in it's current state.
That may be the reason why not many people bother with it...

Good luck! ;-)

Cheers,

Tom

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I'm currently on 16.0.557. anyway, it's obviously not there yet for people to start seriously using it so I guess I'll leave it for now. hopefully Allegorithmic updates the functionality to match the Maya plugin soon (it would make a nice xmas present :)

thanks for your effort Thomas, I appreciate it

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