The Ultimate Guide to Substance for Beginners - Painter/Designer/Alchemist EXPLAINED

For the past several years, the 3D texturing industry has been completely dominated by Allegorithmic and their suite of texturing tools. Substance Painter, Substance Designer, and Substance Alchemist. Here at Stylized Station I firmly believe that learning all 3 of three of these programs is essential to anyone’s growth as a beginner digital 3D artist. But where do we even start with these complex and very different programs? What is the difference between Substance Designer and Substance Painter?

In this video, I’m going to explain the important differences between Painter, Designer, and Alchemist, the pros and cons of using each software, which one to use in varying situations, and difficulty level.

This video is going to have a lot of information, so if you stick around to the end you’ll get a full recap of everything I covered in this video, and as an added bonus, we’ll even talk about some cool alternatives for each of the 3 software and my own personal curated list of the best places to learn each program.

Timestamps:
00:00 - What do you meme
00:12 - What we are going to cover today
01:09 - The Ultimate guide to Substance Painter
05:31 - The Ultimate Guide to Substance Designer
10:22 - The Ultimate Guide to Substance Alchemist
13:33 - Where can I find tutorials for each program?
14:50 - Recap
16:03 - Alternatives
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[ammonn]

Best intro ever, i feel after all this years still like this little jedi 😂😂😂

[Akko]

Junior 3D Artist:
Master Skywalker, there are too many of them, what are we going to do?.

Skywalker:
*Notices he's in the Blender artists room*

[MAJmufin]

I would add that using substance designer is very handy to know if you want to do environments mainly without unique uv's

[gutspraygore]

Very cool. Honestly, you make it sound like Substance Painter is the way to get started. It's rooted in someone's traditional sense of painting textures and complex enough to be a decent middle ground.
Alchemist if you need to bang stuff out and Designer when you're ready to dive deep.
Thanks for the video!

[StylizedStation]

Honestly, I think the Substance Suite is by far the most powerful set of texturing tools an artist can hope for right now. With the amount of flexibility and power that comes with the combination of Painter/Designer, one of the only glaring downsides is the price tag. I've used a ton of texturing tools over my career, and nothing has come close to the level of options and freedom that the Substance Suite offers.

[iluvmomndad]

Fantastic video, mate! Im definitely going to head into alchemist now haha.
Quick note as a Houdini User in the industry- DO NOT get into houdini as your starting 3D software, it will put you off of any other 3D software. DO NOT get into it if you're not technical with your art or struggle with technical side of art. It's FANTASTIC for people who love a challenge, are open to coding in a (kinda) new language and have a very strong will hahaha. Houdini is a software that will misguide you into thinking that you know what you're doing one moment, and the other moment telling you that you dont deserve to touch a computer xD
It's a complicated, challenging and very realistic simulation and procedural modelling tool. It's a powerhouse.
But dont touch the very complicated, high end stuff until you know what you're getting yourself into.

[tiagotiagot]

If I understand it right, Blender can also sorta replace Painter as well; just might need a bit of manual setup with the nodes to get painting to affect the mix of materials.

[mothrahdizaztronaut]

Thanks for helping me get these straightened out. Houdini is free to learn, though.

[ProbablyGavyn]

@9:55 you meant to say designer not painter. Great video! I am pleased to say I knew / understood all of this and just need to practice the programs. Also 69420 subs congrats! Been here a long time :)

[ellythedreamerHQ]

Thank you so much for the breakdown of all software. This really helps me to understand which one i wish to start with for my projects. Love! <3

[cool_turul]

I'm really thinking about getting into Substance Painter(actually I use the program frequently in my free time but I'm planning on crossing the hobby line) so now I'm trying to save some money to get the 3D coloring book. Can't wait to learn to create such beauty I see in you videos :)

[rtea_academy]

very nice and usefull explanation.. Congratulations and Merry Cristmas!!!

[RANInkTV]

While watching I was thinking, I don't see much on these programs. Later, you mentioned not many people do tuts on them.
Looks efficient to me. Great beats in the background also

[arieltheartist]

As an artist, I love Painter but I cannot fathom Designer. We have a senior artist that lives and dies by the Designer and Unreal workflow, but I just find node workflows to be tedious and love layering systems like Photoshop. I really enjoy using Mask Tools with Blender, but whenever I can, I prefer to paint directly on my assets. This video is an awesome guide, and I will definitely begin looking into Alchemist as it really seems like something I would really enjoy using in my workflow. Thanks for everything!!!

[cyber_robot]

Really super good and quality based video, especially for beginners.

[reidmoto]

Great explanation on the confusing 3d software from Adobe! I agree with your groaning when you said it is NOT included in the All Apps subscription. It's corporate greed at its worst, and I think they should rename the All Apps sub. to "Most Apps, except for the new apps we have to invest a lot of $ to play catchup."

I'm deep down the rabbit hole with learning AI, but 3d has always interested me and I used Strata's 3d program for a couple of years and loved it. While watching your video, I started thinking that 3d modeling might be the next BIG THING that everyone wants for their video content, similarly to video content creators salivating at the possibility of using Sora. Do you think this is true?

If so, and with further research, I may allocate an hour a day to start with Adobe Substance Painter.

(Ten minutes later) I signed up for your Coloring Book Teachable program...It looks like it will save me oodles of time!

[junweidong]

You said that blender could somehow replace SD, and I did think so when I first know SD. But now(with blender v3.6), I would admit that in the field of texure/material designing, SD is still the best one, since there are too many built-in templates there, which are lacked in blender.

[Freefire_lo_mejor]

After looking this video it's very useful and I have subscribe your channel

[gouravdas]

Wow i was looking for this video and you just posted it yesterday. Guess i am lucky.

[josephvanwyk]

I just don't know the what pipeline to use or I mean, what is the standard practice? 
Model/Sculpt in Blender, and instead of texturing assets there, do you go directly to Substance Painter and then to game engine (unreal/unity) ?
Also, do you build your texture atlas / texture maps in Substance Painter so that your assets are optimised for game engines?