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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.
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Hi,
Thank you for reaching out! You've posted in the correct place.
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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.
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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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Hello Shwetha
I had it on my mind to get back to you see what the Substance core developer team thought of my request for thumb nail rendering.
From my perspective it just does not make any sense whatsoever to not have a simple callable API to render up a sphere or box with the loaded Substance material. To have a third party app do it, as would Subtance Player do it properly, is near impossible compared to the Substance engine being able to do it with ease + a 100% correct recreation of the underlaying Substance material.
A fundamental and core flaw I see in Adobe's third party Substance engine integrations is that they solely rely on the user choosing a text based filename on dosk without any means to view a thumbnail. The only valid thumbnail is most often tied to the Adobe Substance assets WEB site. While that is fine for choosing and downloading such files, it does not aid the end-user when they have hundreds of files on disk, and it may be months later when they have no idea of what the Substance file actually looks like. It places the onus purlely on the end-user to capture the PNG snapshot image from the downloading WEB site and place it along with the .sbsar file on their computer for future consideration.
A valid solution is that the Substance materials SDK exposes a proper render function to create a thumbnail at a specific resolution to a PNG file on disk. From my perspective, this seems to be a no-brainer piece of core kit functionality. To remove that functionality from the SDK, without reason, would not make too much sense. It's literally the only missing piece of the whole materials SDK other than its non-existent programmers documentation.
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Hello Shwetha
Can you confirm if there will be any official comment from the Substance developer who is handling the Substance SDK and its refinement? I was really hoping to hear of their response after your March 13th posting, and after my March 30th comments. Having the SDK produce thumbnails on my behalf is really important to me as otherwise I can't present a proper user interface whereby people can pick and choose Substance .sbsar files visually instead of via their filenames.
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Hi,
I have brought your question to our team's attention. While I might not be able to fully answer it, here are some insights:
I hope these insights are helpful.