New and somewhat lost

Question

Hello. I am 100% new to the Substance collection and the 3D world. The separate apps are clearly that, separate but can work together, that much I understand. But where does one start? I usually have some sort of 3D model (.obj, .igs) that needs texture, lighting, an environment, perhaps another object added, and rendering. So, what's first? Substance Designer? Stager? Painter? Any guidance will be appreciated. A.C.

Marco Vitale · Answer

Hi I try to get you a short overview of the use cases for each app in the Adobe Substance Suite.

Every app in this collection serves a specific purpose, to provide the functionality you need for your task.

Substance 3D ModelerIs a 3D modeling software, to create 3D models using a technique called signed distance fields. It's using mathematical functions to create the 3D model, instead of vertices and faces. This allows a whole new level of creativity and detail, since you are modeling with "unlimited" resolution. It involves a little bit of practice, but then it's very easy to create complex models, via your desktop setup or even interactive via VR.
Substance 3D SamplerIs basically a photogrammetry app, which allows you to create 3D models or materials from one or more photographs, to quickly generate realistic 3D Assets without modeling or texturing. It provides a rich toolset for this kind of 3D asset creation, which are quite easy to use, even as a beginner.
Substance 3D Designer
Is a very powerful material authoring software, which allows you to create procedural textures and materials in a node based workflow. It uses Nodes for all kind of specific tasks, combining these nodes and altering parameters let you complex create realistic materials. The procedural workflow uses mathematical functions, to generate noises, patterns, blurs, transforms and much more. This allows you to generate endless variations of the material, once you created the basis, by just changing parameters, which makes it very fast to change the appearance of the material in seconds. Learning to create Substance 3D Designer Materials takes a little time and effort, but once you did your first material, it's just an addictive piece of software.
Substance 3D Painter
is used to "paint" materials onto your model, it's layer-based workflow is a bit like in photoshop. The use of Designer materials in Painter is fantastic, because you can use different inputs from your model and feed them into the Designer material, creating quick iterations, by just using a non-destrucive workflow, this means, you can always go back to an earlier stage, by just deactivating a layer in the stack, or you change one layer and the rest of the stack will change depending on the input of the specific filter of material. Learning to master Painter takes a little bit of time, but in my opinion it's one of the best softwares to texture 3D Models.
Substance 3D StagerIs basically the digital studio, it's used to render your 3D scene and provides a large selection of tools, for lighting and compositing your assets, it also integrates into the Substance Eco-System, so you can use the assets from all the Substance 3D Softwares, seamlessly in Stager, which makes it the perfect software to render your scene.

To get you started check out the Substance 3D YouTube channel, it provides video tutorials for each application in the ecosystem, it also provides quick overviews over the Softwares so you can see what it's capable of and what specific software fits you needs.

https://m.youtube.com/@Substance3D/playlists

Stay healthy and creative Marco

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