ArmorPaint and ArmorLab: open-source alternative to Adobe Substance | Hacker News Reader

ArmorPaint and ArmorLab: open-source alternative to Adobe Substance

armorpaint.org

173 pointslastdong27 comments

For those unfamiliar, Substance Painter was developed by an independent studio and acquired by Adobe.

It's also one of the greatest, most useful pieces of software of all time. It's up there with Veeam backup in the "Oh my god this is how all software should be" category. There is no other tool that compares.

There's also a buy-once-own-current-version-forever version available for purchase on Steam.

Thank you, I had no idea this was available as a one-time purchase on Steam. I'm very tempted, having written off Blender for this kind of thing. On the other hand, you just know they're going to require you to create an Adobe account "for exclusive offers and free updates", and then one fine morning in two years' time you'll get an email from Adobe titled "To Our Important One-Time-Purchase Product Customers" letting you know that "it was a hard decision, but we're going to have to disable your product license and move you to the subscription plan."

Anyone knowledgeable have any views on whether the big upcoming textures update for Blender will move it closer to Substance?

Have you tried the Layer Painter addon?

https://github.com/joshuaKnauber/layer_painter

Yup, just like they did for Photoshop and Premiere, After Effects, etc. Honestly, I want this to succeed. I want a blender-based Substance Painter alternative. I'm not too keen on it being just like Substance Painter but I should be able to achieve the same results. If you buy SP on steam, I'm pretty sure valve will make sure you keep that version forever with their vast cdn. Whether Adobe adds CC features to lock you out is almost a guarantee.

> It's up there with Veeam backup

Seriously, open source backup, especially in "more than 5 machines" isn't in a great state.

Bareos/bacula is old, clunky and still havent' moved past "just pretend everything else is a tape drive", while every other backup software misses this or that feature or have no central management and scheduling (which is near-must if you don't want to go crazy with a bunch of machines).

v0.9 might have changed a thing or two, but my prior experiences:

- irritating camera controls, difficult to account for unit scales outside of unity/unreal expectations (good luck painting something measured in HU), overall anaemic 3d viewport

- file loads block the whole app so have fun importing 8192x8192 textures

- good luck getting the results you want out of half the tools

- layer system is truly baffling

- overall doesn't feel like an alpha but a pre-alpha. or a hackathon proof-of-concept.

- charging for the binaries isn't charging for a piece of software worth $19; it's charging to not be forced to install visual studio on your windows machine. if you are on nixos, a ready-made nix expression [1] exists to let you take it out for a spin

- armorpaint being as miserable as it was let me to discover layer painter for blender [2] which is an infinitely superior experience and you can patch things into the shader workflows you've already accounted for in blender

[1] https://github.com/Shou/nixos-configuration/blob/f64a89d4631...

[2] https://github.com/joshuaKnauber/layer_painter

> layer system is truly baffling

In my opinion, that can be no easy use of a 3D painting app. 3D painting is inherently complex. Firstly, there are the many component layers of a material; roughness, bump etc. Then there are the baked Maps which are employed by the app in order to Define where the textures are going to be wighted. for example, the normal to Define dust falling from above, the ambient occlusion to Define dust falling into crevices etc. These are, effectively, masks. Add to that are the blend modes using which these layers are all combined. For example the ambient occlusion is combined with the color through a multiply blend mode. In summary, painting a texture on a 3D object is truly a pan dimensional problem.

Should you wish, Read our teaching material on Substance Painter here: https://rmit.instructure.com/courses/87565/modules#module_74...

i find the layer system in, i.e. blender layer painter to be perfectly sensible; this should be the case for anyone who's had cause to work in separate RGBA channels in normal graphics apps

i more meant the interface to armorpaint's layers is borderline unworkable. it feels like the no-man's land of having a floating selection above an active mask in gimp, but for the entire layer ui

Btw, did you know that this app is built on top of Blender's node system?

This is the first large piece of (GUI) desktop software I've seen written in Haxe. Not that I've seen all software ever of course, just thought it was interesting.

Source: https://github.com/armory3d/armortools

Haxe is a really cool language, but there is too much variation between the api's across compilation targets for it to deliver on everything it promises.

The immediate mode UI library (ZUI) that the developer created, and which ArmorPaint is built on, is also really good. I don’t think Kha or ZUI get enough recognition, and I find both of them extremely elegant and pleasant to use. It might also be surprising to know that besides a few files for specifying constants and enums, ZUI is a single file library with only around 2100 lines of code.

https://github.com/armory3d/zui https://github.com/Kode/Kha

In my opinion, the only usable software in that area is Marmoset Toolbag. It is stable, has enough features like Substance Painter to be useful, and they sell perpetual licenses.

Adobe disqualifies itself with their subscription pricing. ArmorPaint feels pre pre alpha. And Coat3D has fever features but worse DRM.

I took a look at toolbox just now and seen they've only just got symmetry and stencils last month, which would make me worried about what other aspects they are currently missing.

There is a perpetual license for substance painter on steam, which although updates are only for that years version, is still permanent. Not ideal I know (I'm stuck with a minor bug) but it's half the price of toolbox for an industry standard tool.

The Steam license is only allowed if your total annual income is much lower than a typical programmer's salary.

What DRM do you have in mind? I can't find anything about that on their website. On the contrary - they say you just put a license key in and can work offline - no sever pinging or similar I was expecting.

"As long as you aren't running the program on both computers simultaneously, 3D-Coat has no issues with you installing it on up to three different machines. If you happen to have it running on both machines at the same time, 3D-Coat will warn you about it, and eventually restrict your usage."

That only works if it's phoning home.

That logo looks similar enough to Adobe's to be misleading at first glance.

I was rather confused when I clicked on it like "why is Adobe open sourcing products that compete with its own commercial products?"

Surely that logo is a clearcut example of trademark infringement.

The whole site looks like an Adobe ripoff, from the font to the design to the menu to the button borders. If you were to show me that site, I would absolutely think it belongs to the Adobe family.

For super real textures front projection can't be beat. With this feature a texture can be projected face on to the model. To my knowledge only substance painter blender and Modo support this.

Quixel mixer is another free alternative texture painting app. It works beautifully with quixels library of textures, but which are not free unless you own unreal.

Mari does as well.

You are right. I forgot about Mari. It is now the only app which supports animation of textures over time and 16k textures. A real gem, but super expensive.

> 16k textures

You'll need some serious horsepower for this, but Mari does support 32k textures. I believe the only other app that does is Mudbox, but that's pretty much Autodesk abandonware.

It's been a bit since, but I've used both Mari and Painter in the past. When it comes to painting I prefer Mari's projection painting system over Painter's traditional paint on model system. However Substance does have a lot of nice functionality to let you work very quickly, particularly when using Painter in conjunction with Designer. It's too difficult to make a proper comparison typing on a phone with one thumb. Mari just provides a different workflow and very deep level of control over things (designed for VFX first rather than games).

As for cost, yeah, Foundry stuff is not the cheapest. For individuals you're looking at just shy of $700USD/yr for Mari if you can handle up-front costs, saving two months, otherwise it takes you a bit over $800 when done monthly (annual plan paid monthly). This compared to the Substance Suite, primarily Painter, Designer, and Sampler, that's available for $50/m or $550/yr.

Just as another data point, Substance tools can get even cheaper if you don’t care to have the whole collection. You can get the Substance 3D Texture pack which includes Painter, Designer, and Sampler for $19.99/mo or you can buy a perpetual license for this year’s version of Painter for $149.

I had heard of ArmorPaint, but didn't realize they also had ArmorLab. I'll have to try it out. There's another really good alternative to Substance Designer called Material Maker (https://www.materialmaker.org/)

They are alternatives, but they leave much to be desired. I dislike Adobe, but Substance is just too good.

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