Substance Unveils Plans for Blender Integration
Substance is the newest software in a long series of industry players announcing a future Blender integration, following the likes of Pixar’s Renderman and Redshift.
This news was announced during the Substance and 3D News live stream which took place on January 28th, where there was a very early (and brief) sneak peak at the integration’s development.
Oh man, once you experience working with Substance materials it’s hard to go back,
Seriously – what choice do they have to grow in today’s CG market space, their user base is a minnow compared to the eye boggling growth rate of the blender community and pace of change. I would say this is not so much ‘good’ news, maybe at best a shrug, but perhaps most notably a necessary siphoning of a huge market stream to avert substance plateauing before the downward growth trend. ;-)
Hey I’m Vincent (the Substance community Manager). To give the full story, we wanted to make this for a long time as Blender is the #1 software used by our community (aside from Substance software). But the difficulty wasn’t technical but legal, as you have to find a way to make it work together some tech with some protected code with the Blender GPL license. And it’s more challenging than a renderer where you can ‘basically” send the data out of b3d to process the rendering. With Substance, you are expecting to be able to tweak Substance materials within Blender, so we struggled on this topic for a while, until we found a safe to make it.
Hope it helps :-)
Hi Vincent, congrats on finding a way to make it work. I have heard that the hurdle is too high even for many of the render engines out there. I think most blender users don’t realize the license-related challenges in making some like this work.
Indeed. Joining Adobe was actually a big help, as they have bigger dedicated legal teams that were able to propose the right way to make this happen.
Thank you for the clarification and inside view Vincent!
You are welcome ;-)
For me, it is a great great new. Texturing through nodes is a real pain, I hate it, that´s why I have a perpetual Painter license. I use addons in Blender to get access to materials libraries but….not, the amount of materials and possibilities is faaar from the possibilities of the substances and the amount of them in sbsar format for free in everywhere.