General Curiosity about Adobe Substance 3D suite of software

vijayasimhabr

I have been doing a ton of research into Daz 3D use cases and every now and then I bump into something new in the world of 3D art. I ended up purchasing Adobe Photoshop to process Daz renders, and I noticed the Substance 3D products from Adobe. 

I am trying to compare these Adobe 3D products with their comparative options. Wanted to cross check my assumptions with the community. 

• Substance 3D Stager - is sort of like what we do in Daz 3D I guess. Staging things, lighting and cameras to get renders. 
• Substance 3D Painter - is like Zbrush I supposed, Paint on 3D assets. Adobe has a sculptor too (which I believe Zbrush does) but its in beta. 
• Substance 3D Sampler - This is Photogrammetry I suppose. like Autodesk® ReCap or RealityCapture. 
• Substance 3D Designer - node based generator. Something like Terragen but not limited to landscapes and such. 

I picked up Daz 3D on a whim (mostly to cope with ongoing depression and also because I have hundreds of hours to kill every month), but I am sort of liking it. I can see myself getting more into this '3D staging of real life scenes' stuff. So, I am trying to see the tools I need to marry myself to. The adobe license fees appear reasonable to me, and I like to have my pipeline come from a single company. Perhaps over time, this hobby could become a profession. I dunno. Stranger things have happened in my life.

For instance, I could, capture with ReCap, then feed that to Abrush and design with Terragen (or Houdini, I think) to generate node based environments and eventually bring them all together. But, I think, it would be simpler just get the whole suite from a single company. Capture in Sampler, paint it in Painter, stage it in Stager and bring everything together in Designer, all from Adobe. Appears easier.

I am probably typing a lot of stupid things above, but hopefully someone can tell me where I am going wrong and where I am getting close. 
 

Richard Haseltine

I think Stager is largely limited to static content

Painter is currently more a 3D Photoshop, it is very different from ZBrush though they can be used for similar things in different ways

Designer is a tool for creating materials from procedural and image elements, which can then be applied to content in rednering/game engines (theer are players which will take the packed output) or used as raw materials for Painter.

DustRider

From their promotional material,  it looks like Sampler just makes textures from photos.  I think it creates the needed bump/normal and possibly specular maps to turn the photo into a pbr texture for use in Substance. It may also make it a tileable texture. It definitely doesn't make 3d models from photos like recap though (would be great at that price, I was hhoping it was a photogrammetry software).

vijayasimhabr

@Richard Haseltine

Yes, I just realized that Stager is 'staging' only. no manipulation via movement like in Daz. Like 3D Photoshop? That gives me more to think about as to what it does. Thank you for your input.

@DustRider 

Texture generation only, eh? I did not realize that. I also got the feeling that Recap or Reality Capture is still the best way to go abo

vijayasimhabr

On a side note, profiles which have names with a space (like Richard Haseltine) are hard to tag. I always end up tagging someone else. 

Richard Haseltine

vijayasimhabr said:

On a side note, profiles which have names with a space (like Richard Haseltine) are hard to tag. I always end up tagging someone else. 

They ping him here, they ping him there, that damned elusive Haseltine.

vijayasimhabr

Agreed :)