Category: Game Development

Substance Painter, the popular PBR based texturing application, just received a major update.  The fall update comes with a completely new rendering engine resulting in better performance with lower hardware demands by incorporating Sparse Virtual Textures, which simulate large textures using less memory.  The new engine also supports up to 300 UV Tiles at once enabling support for massive scenes.  There are also several new tools aimed at mobile users including a new 2D viewport exporter with the ability to bake into a single high resolution texture and more.

Complete details on new features from the release notes:

Added:

• Summary: a huge boost in performance, viewport upgrades, proper 2D view export, new UI helpers, an enhanced symmetry tool and new content
• [SVT][Engine] Sparse Virtual Textures (SVT)
• [SVT][Preferences][UI] SVT hardware support acceleration option
• [SVT][Log] Additional information for Sparse Virtual Texturing feature (e.g. size disk)
• [SVT][UI] Message window at start if size on disk too low for the cache
• [SVT][Preferences][UI] Substance Painter global cache location
• [SVT] New environment variable to specify the path of the cache of Substance Painter
• [SVT] New environment variable to activate the SVT hardware support acceleration
• [SVT] Detect sparse support by hardware
• [SVT][Hardware Sparse] Raise minimum driver version for Nvidia GPU
• [SVT][Shader][[Viewport][UI] Warn user if artefacts present with Sparse Virtual Texturing at project opening
• [Anti-aliasing][Viewport] New temporal anti-aliasing filtering for 3D viewport (via Display Settings)
• [Export] Export the content of the 2D viewport as a single texture
• [Export][Dithering] Expose dithering at export
• [Layer stack] Colors on layers and folders
• [Layer stack] Quick activation and deactivation of multiple layers and effects
• [Layer stack] Easier navigation for blending modes with up down keys and mouse scroll
• [Proj][UI] Additional rotation manipulator on all three axis for triplanar
• [Proj][Shorcuts] – and + to change the UV projection manipulator size
• [Shader] Control coated layer parameters with channels in the PBR-coated shader
• [Substance] Expose new mesh-based texture inputs for filters and generators
• [Symmetry][Viewport][UI] Control symmetry offset with manipulators
• [Symmetry][Contextual toolbar][UI] New symmetry panel with options
• [Symmetry] New symmetry line intersection mode
• [Symmetry] New symmetry clone cursor
• [Symmetry][Shortcuts] Q to hide and -, + to change size and shift to snap
• [Log] Improve error messages when unable to export textures
• [Scripting] Allow to change or update the resources in Display Settings
• [Scripting] Allow to create or remove channels in Texture Sets
• [Content][Shaders] Add support for anisotropy with a dedicated shader (pbr-metal-rough-anisotropy-angle)
• [Content] Update of the preview sphere with anisotropy and modified angle
• [Content] Updated matFx shutline
• [Content] New Texturing.XYZ seamless face scan
• [Content] New anisotropic procedurals
• [Content] New filter: baked lighting stylized
• [Content] New environment map: studio automotive neutral
• [Content] New project template: PBR – metallic roughness Anisotropy angle (with anisotropy channels)
• [Content] New project template: PBR – metallic roughness Coated

Fixed:

• [Color Picker] Painting cursor appearing when trying to pick a color
• Crash by Selecting or Unselecting layers in a specific order can lead to crash
• Crash when pasting as an instance a layer with a mask
• [User Channel][Regression] Crash when renaming user channel
• [User Channel] Grayed brush preview
• [Alembic] Only one texture set from several materials after import
• [Engine] Exported texture differs from viewport for brush stamps
• [Engine] Invert with a level effect does not fully affect a texture
• [Material picker is applying a brush stroke while picking
• Switching resolution to 128x128px leads to a crash
• Mesh map links are not updated properly when rebaking or instancing layers
• [Substance] UserData ColorSpace does not work on Baked Mesh Normal requested as input
• MDL association mismatch when using multiple shaders instances
• [Symmetry][Fill Layer] Symmetry plane and its manipulator active in Fill Layer
• [Viewport] Pivot point for translation not always updated after clicking
• [UI] Fixed icons and removal of placeholders for HDPI monitors

Known Issues:

• Computation freeze on AMD VEGA GPUs
• Huion tablet issue with shortcuts on Windows OS
• Anti-aliasing and shadows when active together may give unexpected results

You can learn a great deal more about this release in this blog post.

Art GameDev News Applications

The folks over at Humble Bundle are running another bundle of interest to game developers, the Humble RPG Game Dev Bundle.  It’s a large collection of RPG Maker (don’t worry, they can be used outside of RPGMaker in your engine of choice) assets including sprites, tiles, sound fx, icons and more.  Humble Bundles are collections with different priced tiers, with a portion of the proceeds going to the content maker, a charity of choice (Child’s Play in this case) as well as to Humble Bundle themselves.  I normally full heartedly recommend Humble Bundles to people, but this time I must give a bit of a warning due to the attached license.

From the license:

4.1. A “Licence” means that the Seller grants to GDN (purely for the purpose of sub-licensing to the Purchaser) and GDN grants (by way of sub-licence thereof) to the Purchaser a non-exclusive perpetual licence to;

(a) use the Licensed Asset to create Derivative Works; and

(b) use the Licensed Asset and any Derivative Works as part of either one (1) Non-Monetized Media Product or one (1) Monetized Media Product which, in either case, is:

i) used for the Purchaser’s own personal use; and/or

ii) used for the Purchaser’s commercial use in which case it may be distributed, sold and supplied by the Purchaser for any fee that the Purchaser may determine.

That 4.1 b is going to be a huge deal breaker for many people.  If you are intending to use these assets for personal use, the license wont matter.  If you are looking to distribute your works however, do be sure to go over the license with a fine tooth comb, as that clause seems to limit you to a single product, commercial or otherwise!  There is a discussion of the bundle going on over on /r/gamedev if you are interested in learning more.

EDIT – An update on the licensing terms.  The publisher of the assets have reached out to me on Twitter to announce they’ve heard the complaints regarding the license and are updating it to be more developer friendly.  Additionally I signed up for the Humble Bundle partner program, meaning purchasing through the above link will help support the channel.

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Art GameDev News

Materialize was just released for free.  What exactly is Materialize?  In the creators own words:

Materialize is a stand alone tool for creating materials for use in games from images. You can create an entire material from a single image or import the textures you have and generate the textures you need.

Materialize is production tested, having been used to generate metallic, smoothness and occlusion textures for the Uncharted collection.  It is very similar in scope and functionality to Substance’s B2M or the free ModLab.

Essentially you start by feeding it a diffuse map, which you can then edit as you desire, then create a height map, normal map, edge map, smoothness map, AO map and metallic map automatically.

Each step of the way you have fine tune control over how each individual map is created.  For example, here are the controls governing the creation of the normal map.

You also have the ability to provide your own maps from file if you have them, simply use Materialize to generate the maps that you are missing.  There are also features in place for creating tiled maps.  Of course to go along with all of it, there is a real-time preview of the map you are creating, including multiple skyboxes and control over the post processing effects show in the preview.

When you are done you are able to export your generated maps to a variety of different texture formats.  Just an all around amazing application and one that should be added to every texture makers toolkit!  Watch the video below to learn more and see Materialize in action!  There are also some tutorials available here if you wish to learn more.

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