Perpetual licenses for Adobe Substance 3D products on Steam!

ShelLuser

Hi gang,

I really hope this is allowed because although I am talking about 3rd party software products I do think it's fair to say that these can (and will!) drastically enhance the way you'll be using Daz Studio, I'm fully convinced of that.

This week I discovered that Adobe is selling 3 of their Substance 3D software environments on Steam, in specific: Substance 3D Painter, Designer and Sampler (all individually) and because it's on Steam... that means no dumb subscriptions but a perpetual ("one time only") purchase. And in my opinion the price they charge is more than fair as well! I can only comment on the first two products because that's what I treated myself to yesterday and honestly you guys: I am amazed by all the possibilities I now have, this is mindblowing.

But for those who are not familiar with these products...

Substance Painter 3D allows you to paint on 3D models "just like that". It provides a large collection of brushes, material and texture presets which can be used to work on your figure(s). It's fully compatible with Daz Studio though no "out of the box" bridges exist. Still... all you have to do is export an item out of 'Studio' using the Wavefront ("obj") format after which you can then import the mesh into Painter. And that's not all... Painter is also fully capable of adding & using any existing texture maps you may have so that you can change those or create fully new ones if you so desire. One thing to keep in mind here is that this isn't an automated process. So while you set up your new project (and point Painter to your mesh) you'll also have to manually add the texture maps to your project and later on assign them to the appropriate surface groups.

Even so... I am convinced that with this software your days of purchasing texture packs will be over. Because it's honestly that easy to create new textures for whatever figure you're working with. Not to mention... once you're more familiar with its workflow then nothing is stopping you from designing your own skins as well.

Substance Designer 3D then is all about creating, or maybe better put: generating materials. Materials which you will then be able to use in either Substance Painter or apply them to your 3D figures within Daz Studio. Unfortunately I can't fully comment on this part just yet because at the time of writing I simply lack the experience. What I can say though is that if you're familiar with the Shader Mixer within Daz Studio then you'll feel right at home within 'Designer' because it also uses an interface where you add nodes to your work sheet and then customize and connect them to generate shapes, textures, colors and/or a large scale of effects.

Of course the only requirement here is that you will need to have a Steam account and you can only install and use this software with the Steam client installed; this is needed because that's how Steam can verify that you're licensed to run the software. While I can imagine that this may seem like a severe limitation at first I can rest assure you that it doesn't have to be. Steam can even allow you to run certain software offline too if you need / want to. Now, some bias goes into effect here because I've been a very satisfied Steam "fanboy" for quite a few years now but even so... I can honestly say that I never had any issues where I suddenly couldn't run my favorite games or watch my favorite videos.

 

Although I definitely consider myself biased here I can honesty say that in the few hours that I've been using Substance Painter I already managed to enhance quite a few things in my library. Most noteworthy a 3D figure which I once downloaded for free but which came without textures. Even being completely new to the sofware didn't proof much of an issue to make this figure look much more realistic. I also managed to change some clothing which didn't render properly using Iray and apply much better materials to it which made it look a lot more realistic.

Of course I still have a lot to learn, but even so...  this is truly something else. And with no dumb subscription fee's either!

Alas, thanks for reading and I hope this was useful for some of you.

butterflyfish

Wow, that's great! I wish I wasn't broke from last month's DAZ+ sale.

Sevrin

Just note that you will no longer receive free updates after the end of the year, and there's no access to the 3D Assets platform.  Other than that, it's a good deal.

nonesuch00

Are they still going to be selling those on Steam in 2023? I can't find anything that indicates one way or another.

I would buy 3 of the Substance products in the Steam store if so. Isn't there a typical Thanksgiving sale of Substance products on Steam? Maybe I should wait til November.

+++

Checked into it and I see no end of the sale of those 3 Substance programs so I'll look at if they do a great Thansgiving discount or wait til next year.