Sampler Documentation and Release Notes

[leighv123]

Hi,

I recently saw another post where a user asked if presets had been removed from a particular filter and was informed that yes the presets were removed and that  'Unfortunately the documentation is not up to date anymore'.   Here is the thread I am referring to... https://community.adobe.com/t5/substance-3d-sampler-bugs/surface-relief-presets/idc-p/14744616#M464

After doing a bit of digging it has raised the following questions...

1. Why is the documentation not kept up to date? It can be very frustrating and time consuming for users when they are not sure if it is them doing something wrong, there is a bug in the program, or if the documentation is out of date. 
2. What is the policy at Adobe with regard to keeping the documentation up to date?
3. Why are some changes not included in Release Notes (for example, the Surface Relief filter now no longer has presets, yet I cannot find it listed in the Release Notes). This is despite the fact that the title of the page I went to is called ‘All Changes’.
4. Why has the Known Issues section been removed from the Release Notes? The last version with this information was V4.1.0 on March 28, 2023. 
5. To compound the confusion, Sampler Documentation does have sections which mention known issues… but if the documentation is not up to date and the Known Issues have been removed from the Release Notes, how are users meant to be able to use the software efficiently?

Thank you. 

[Lory3D]

Hello!
Thank you for creating this thread, I think it will be usefull for everyone. First of all, there is a misunderstaning :
"Unfortunately the documentation is not up to date anymore". Meant that this documentation page isn't up to date 🙂

1. We keep the documentation up to date as much as we can. We are a small team and it can be hard to update the whole documentation at once. For all new Features we always publish at the same time of the public release. There's a lot of pages (over 200 pages) and some pages may be forgotten in the process (Which is the case with the surface relief ) and we are glad to fix it when it's reported.

2. AFAIK there's no convention. Of course we work to keep it up to date, as I mention in the first point.

3. It is mentionned in the release note, on the specific 4.3 release page and the all changes page. We list every changes :

• [Content] Updated all filters to support Texture Generators

The release note has to be readable. We won't list the precise changes of each 78 filters of 3D Sampler. It will make the release note unreadable. And we update the filters page (we forgot the surface relief and will fix it as soon as we can).

4. We have now a specific sections in the documentation where we list all the known issues and the specific workarounds if they exist. It is split by type in the table of content. Also, we mention known issues in the release note when they are known at the release date, which we try to avoid (and fix before releasing).

https://helpx.adobe.com/substance-3d-sampler/technical-support.html

5. End of the loop! It can happen that we forgot pages, but the documentation is up to date. So as long as we are aware of a specific issue it is mentionned in the known issues sections.

Then you mentionned in the Surface relief thread : " issue stems from users not being informed of changes made to the software." Which is untrue and I think it will be usefull to share where you can get the informations:

• The Texture Generators release with the new Starter Content is well presented and explained in the dedicated release page (like every new release).
• There's is, in app, the What's new pop up that appears when launching the application after an update, that explains what are the changes we made, with a direct access to the specific documentation page.
• We, also, post a lot on socials when a release have a major new feature/change.
• We post here on the forum
• and on our discord server.

We have identified pain points for our users to get the right informations after (or between) releases and we are working on improving this route and the access of the learning content for the new features.

Thank you again for raising this topic to our attention,
I hope everything is more clear.

Do not hesitate to ask or share your specific needs, we are always looking for improvements!
Regards,

Lory

[leighv123]

Hi Loryline,

Thanks for your quick response. I appreciate it is quite an effort to keep all documentation up to date, particularly when working to resolve existing issues and implement new features, whilst working in a small team and therefore having limited resources.

Encouraging users to report documentation which is outdated I think will benefit everyone. As you mentioned the surface relief page is not up to date. I also noticed that the documentation for the dirt filter is outdated (and I suspect others might be as well due to the filter presets being replaced with the improved Texture Generator method).

Thanks also for the clarification about the release notes. I admit that I looked for the Surface Relief filter changes in the Release Notes, by going to the All Changes page, hitting CTRL+F in my browser and searching for Relief. Of course this returned no results because it was listed under Texture Generators.)  

It definitely makes sense to have one single bullet point for the Texture Generators (instead of 78 points, one for each filter). Maybe a few extra words to explain that, presets which were previously found in the filters have now been replaced using Texture Generators.

Point 5 in your response above talks about the Surface Relief thread, specifically the comment I made which was that the “issue stems from users not being informed of changes made to the software."

For this I apologise to you and your team.  As you said, users were made aware of the changes (and if I had re-read the release notes more closely instead of trying to do a search for what I was looking for, I may have noticed that it was mentioned).

I do like the What’s New popup screen which appears the first users open the app after an update. This is informative, delivers the information at the right time and is something you are pretty well guaranteed to see.  Good that you have them on socials and Discord (personally, the only place I would see these posts ‘out in the wild’ would be on youtube… which is where I think a lot of other users would go).

Unfortunately on the Texture Generator docs page, the link to the youtube tutorial appears broken (screenshot attached). Below is the link.

https://helpx.adobe.com/substance-3d-sampler/features-and-workflows/texture-generators.html

I am unsure which video is meant to be linked here, but it wasn’t until some time after the introduction of Texture Generators that Adobe released a more comprehensive video which made it easy to understand what they could really be used for (texture generators, to my knowledge were released on January 25th with V4.3. The video I am referring to can be found at the following link and was released almost 4 months to the day after Texture Generators were introduced).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YD3tPlO5h3g

This is the kind of video I feel benefits your users… and it would also be nice if the Substance youtube channel was updated at the same time as the Adobe tutorials page and vice versa.

I am sure it has nothing to do with you or your team and is likely marketing or something… but when I see how quick Adobe is to post hour long videos from events like Substance Days, videos which Adobe customers don’t usually watch unless they know one of the speakers or worked on that project (as shown by the number of views).

When I see that these videos appear, often on the day of the event…then compare that to 4 months to get a decent video tutorial explaining new features that were released, in a product I have to pay a monthly subscription for… that to me just doesn’t seem right… and just to be clear…in no way do I think this is the fault of you and your team. 

I think it is much more likely to be a culture problem within Adobe at a higher up level… that it is somehow more important to spend the money and the resources on production for Keynotes at Substance Days, when it should be going back into product development and ways to educate Adobe customers about Adobe products.

Apologies for the mega-post… and if you made it all the way through… thanks for listening 🙂 Have a great day.

[Lory3D]

Thanks for your response!
We try with the marketing team to launch the video tutorials at the same time with the releases as much as we can. Thank you for your feedbacks they have a great value for us.

I'll check the issue with the video on the documentation page.
In the meantime you can find every tutorials on the learn pages :
https://creativecloud.adobe.com/cc/learn/substance-3d-sampler/web/create-plaid-fabric-material?local...
https://creativecloud.adobe.com/cc/learn/substance-3d-sampler/web/create-carbon-fiber-material?local...
https://creativecloud.adobe.com/cc/learn/substance-3d-sampler/web/fabric-texture-generator?locale=en

Do not hesitate to reach me in private message if you have any other feedbacks of this kind (or deprecated documentation page to report, or even questions).

Regards