Substance 3D Sampler 2023 Reviews

Eat Shit adobe

Still a useful and nice piece of software

abandoned

Fast material creation especially when paired with stable diffusion

Absolutely incredible software! I think its very underrated for what it can do. What is not incredible is Adobe pulling it from steam

They moved it to subscription only. However they're offering an additional years worth of updates, which I do genuinely appreciate. I'm sure the Sampler team is going to have a ton of cool stuff to play with this coming year and I hope I get the chance to have some of that. That said, their most recent update broke the ability to launch the program at all. Myself included.

Would have been fair to give a litle discount with 1 month deplay, but I really like the software, especially with the new photogrammetry

Adobe Decided to Cancel the Sale Of this product Starting Jan 1St likely adding it to their subscription system. This is evident that what ever Perpetual software they offer, they will cancel it after a year or two forcing you into the subscription system if you really need it. I would have changed my rating if they resolved some of the issues below and kept perpetual. I don't think I can ever be their customer again. Too many subscriptions out there that only larger studios could afford. Their payment schemes are not artist friendly unless you want to limit yourself to a particular skill set. Creating Tiling Materials from a single image: Pros Image to Height map approximation is awesome Cons Tiling -where is the AI to recalculate seamless boarders? It seems too much like old school B2M, everything is manual and not worth the cost. If you have part of your image of a particular color that you want to control roughness, you should be able to select a color range at least! rather than having to create your own mask. Texture Masking options should at least give you a button to send to photoshop of the UV with the seams it created so you can blur the seams for height & normals. -spending way too much time on tile correcting. I have not tried the Photogrammetry capabilities yet, maybe it would bring some value.

Sampler is growing even better and the new photogrammetry feature is awesome, can't wait for it to get better and for new features to be added

One of my favorite unsung tools of the early Substance Suite was Bitmap2Material 3, which let you take an existing image and it would try to approximate normal maps and other maps from it. While perhaps not as precise as making the material from scratch with Designer, it was great in ap inch when I had something specific I needed, but while Painter and Designer sent on to have bold, game-changing updates, poor B2M3 Lingered in oblivion for a while. Well, now it's back in the form of Sampler and it's gotten the full suite treatment. Everything I loved about the old version is here, but there's a lot more options for tweaking things, [i]you can actually save your project[/i], you can export Substance materials, and on top of that B2M sequel there's also an entire photogrammetry suite, which I haven't experimented with yet, but this is exponentially cheaper than something like 3DF Zephyr so that's a huge bonus! It's all super intuitive and if you've used other Substance software you won't need much time to get up to speed.