Automation API Substance - discontinued??

hard to do succinctly here :-), will try.

there are lots of "gotchas" to get going but once you have those sorted it's easy.

Main issues are the formatting of the string you pass the command line is not that obvious.

Unless things have changes you have to be careful to force image inputs to be of the size you want and most importantly the bit depth especially for height and position maps I set it to absolute 16bit in my graph.

Once the graphs get more complicated you quickly get lost trying to find the imports so I break all mine out.

I try and keep as much logic and calculations in the python script as I can and pass the results and avoid doing complicated function graphs where I can so it's easier to manage and more visible whats going on.

Here's basic python example, I like to build the command line like this so it's easy to read, this is assuming you have the archive and associated files in the same directory as your python script.  I've just put a few examples with comments you should be able to derive the rest from these.

for color the easiest way to do it is create a float 4 input and hook that up to a standard color node then you can just pass the float values to that and use the color node line normal in the graph

import os
import subprocess

script_path = os.path.abspath(__file__)

script_dir = os.path.dirname(script_path)

render_path = os.path.normpath(R"C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Substance 3D Designer\sbsrender.exe")

output_path = script_dir

color_1 = [1.0,0.0,0.0,1.0]

args =[]

args.append(render_path)

args.append("render")

args.append("--input")
args.append(os.path.join(script_dir, "batch_example.sbsar"))

# {outputNodeName} is an internal sbsrender substitution not a python
# format command so make sure to escape it properly if using format
# it replaces with the output node name from the graph so if you have 
# multiple outputs they don't over write each others
args.append("--output-name")
args.append(os.path.join(script_dir, R"test_name-{outputNodeName}"))

# pass any files first note it's set entry not set value
args.append("--set-entry")
args.append("image_1@{}".format(os.path.join(script_dir, "image_example.png")))

# $outputsize is substance designer internal variable
# sizes are in power of 2 so 11 is 2048x2048
args.append("--set-value")
args.append("$outputsize@{0},{0}".format(11))

# $randomseed is substance designer internal variable
args.append('--set-value')
args.append("$randomseed@{}".format(0))

# gets passed as a string so get's interpreted as float or int
# by the setting of the input node (if you have bool input just pass 0 or 1)
args.append("--set-value")
args.append("number_value@{}".format(1))

# for vectors/arrays flatten out into comma separated
# string which then gets interpreted correctly
args.append("--set-value")
args.append("color_1@{}".format(','.join([str(f) for f in color_1])))

try:
    subprocess.run(args,check=True, stderr=subprocess.PIPE)
except subprocess.CalledProcessError as e:
    print(e.stderr.decode())

example of what I mean by breaking out the inputs, as your graphs get more complicated it becomes really hard to track.