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T
Teddy35848972z8a0
Participant
March 4, 2024
Question

Substance materials SDK developer support?

  • March 4, 2024
  • 1 reply
  • 625 views

Hello there,

 

Most often an SDK will have a mention of developer support or a forum to ask questions but the Substance materials SDK seems to have no mention of that, nor have I found any Adobe forum where such questions can be asked. As such, please excuse me posting this question in the 3D Plugins forum.

 

1) Is there a dedicated forum for Substance materials SDK support? I believe that may be no.

 

2) I do have one specific question: what is the preferred or exposed method for serializaing a Substance file's current loaded state (within the Materials SDK) to and from its host application? In other words, what method does Adobe's internal developers use (for its custom plugins) to capture and save the state of the currently loaded .sbsar file (and its modified tweak parameter list) within the host's scene graph and file format (such as within its implementation for 3ds Max, Maya, Cinema-4D, VRED, etc)? The only simple way I can see that being done is by importing and exporting XML preset files then having such a file embedded within the host program as meta data. The other alternative is for the host program to save/load its own local copy of the tweak parameters but doing so via the presets mechanism of the SDK seems better in the long run.

 

 

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

S
Shwetha2294297372w1
Inspiring
March 8, 2024

Hi,

Thank you for reaching out! You've posted in the correct place.

  1. We have a Discord channel here: https://discord.gg/gSmPm6M2, or you can post in the community forum as you have done.
  2. We currently don't support modifying SBSAR files. At the moment, using presets as mentioned in option 2 is the best approach.



T
Teddy35848972z8a0Author
Participant
March 9, 2024

Thank you for your quick response. 

 

I did have one last question which has been lurking in my mind for a month and for which I'm 99% sure that the answer is going to be "no". Is there an un-published API in the Substance Materials SDK (such as in its rendering engine DLLs) which can created a thumbnail of a Substance .sbsar file? To me, thumbnail developer support is pretty poor in the SDK and shouldn't entirely depend on the client program to have to make one. For example, a custom developed interactive icon/thumbnail-based choose/browser could easily use the PNG/JPEG thumbnail files on disk (or embedded within a .sbsar file) to provide visual feedback to the user as to what a Substance file looks like. Sure, online repositories do provide for such thumbnails but most third party or Adobe implementations of a Substance plug-in just has the user choose a text-based filename but with little or no visual feedback. The problem is that "not a lot" of existing .sbsar files have embedded PNG thumbnails (and even those that do range in size from 64x64 to 256x256 or even larger, so there is little consistency).  Relying on a third party application to render up their own thumbnails is not good at all since their rendering engine isn't going to produce a lovely thumbnail as does the Adobe Substance File Viewer program. Thus, to me, this should be a fundamental aspect of the Substance Materials SDK.

 

S
Shwetha2294297372w1
Inspiring
March 14, 2024

I completely understand the use case for having the thumbnails. There is a method available, but it's not recommended because it might not be supported in the future. Let me confirm with our internal team and get back to you on this.

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