Hello all!

As I recently bought Houdini Indie a few months back I am not too familiar with the texturing and shading sides of it yet. (Not too familiar with anything really)

Seeing Houdini now got substance support I was wondering if getting the indie version of substance designer is worth it in pure functionality.

Houdini seems to have a lot of the same procedural material/texture generation functions as designer got, or am I wrong?

I would very much like some insight from people who are more familiar with it all

Thanks!

Best regards
//Morgan

Yes - Houdini has a lot of the tools already, so if it works for you, no need for SD. On the other hand SD is very intuitive, has thumbnail preview on nodes and is a very active community, so there is a much better base to work from.

You can get the 30 day demo of SD and check it out, the beta SD Houdini plug-in will work.

Another advantage of SD is that it has plug-ins for stuff like Unreal 4. It also comes with a lot more generators.

I have a Substance Live subscription and rarely use Substance Designer but I do use Substance Painter, a lot.

Procedural can only go so far in my opinion but it depends on what textures you want to create and how you want to do it.

I use Zbrush for Modelling, Substance Painter for texturing and Houdini for everything else. So for me, Painter fills a gap for “manual” texturing that I couldn't do with Zbrush or Houdini.

I'm used to Photoshop so I can build textures (or substances) inside Painter using it's layers, masks, filters etc. I bought Live as I was expecting I would want to use Designer to build some substances but haven't felt the need so far.

Sorry, I know you didn't mention Painter but it works so well for me I feel it shouldn't be overlooked.

MartybNz
Yes - Houdini has a lot of the tools already, so if it works for you, no need for SD. On the other hand SD is very intuitive, has thumbnail preview on nodes and is a very active community, so there is a much better base to work from.

You can get the 30 day demo of SD and check it out, the beta SD Houdini plug-in will work.

I have dabbled with it before, but I have not tried how well it works in Houdini, I guess, the main thing I will be missing out on is a real-time PBR preview in the viewport. That is actually quite a huge deal now when I think of it.

DASD
Another advantage of SD is that it has plug-ins for stuff like Unreal 4. It also comes with a lot more generators.

Yes, that have struck my mind, being consistent everywhere with my materials would be quite handy.

robsdesign
I have a Substance Live subscription and rarely use Substance Designer but I do use Substance Painter, a lot.

Procedural can only go so far in my opinion but it depends on what textures you want to create and how you want to do it.

I use Zbrush for Modelling, Substance Painter for texturing and Houdini for everything else. So for me, Painter fills a gap for “manual” texturing that I couldn't do with Zbrush or Houdini.

I'm used to Photoshop so I can build textures (or substances) inside Painter using it's layers, masks, filters etc. I bought Live as I was expecting I would want to use Designer to build some substances but haven't felt the need so far.

Sorry, I know you didn't mention Painter but it works so well for me I feel it shouldn't be overlooked.

I have 3D Coat for any painting needs really, if I didn't I would probably have went with substance live already

Overall, I am a strong believer of procedural workflows and I feel that is the direction I want to take with pretty much everything.