So PBR is here…
There are many PBR apps out there with Adobe Substance Painter, or PT in short, being one of the best out there.
Some might think “Hey I will still work on Photoshop” well good luck with that… Things have evolved and personally I used PS only to convert TIFF files to DDS, and since PT BMS plugin came out I didn’t even use it anymore.
Other PBR apps are:
- Blender + addons but it’s kinda tricky and not that open and deep as PT
- Quixel Mixer
- 3d Coat
- Armor Paint
- Marmorset Toolbag
All payware if i’m not mistaken. For Blender I mean the addons… and I don’t mean the PT Plugin which is free but it doesn’t make Blender an actual PBR app it lacks many things and workflow from PBR apps and it’s super hard to use it from what I’ve seen compared to working on PT.
So now we have Blender as a free good solid 3D app with a good future and recently I discovered InstaMAT.
https://instamaterial.com
It’s free and license wise for their called InstaMAT Pioneer License they just want a reference and splash screen on your product for their product. But a member can’t ask to do that for BMS.
So in their Attribution license which you can read here:
https://docs.instamat.io/en/Products/InstaMAT_Studio/Licensing/Free_Pioneer_License_And_Attribution
they declare:
If you're sharing (or selling) content created with InstaMAT online,
Provide a link back to the InstaMAT website in the description
OR apply the watermark where it is reasonable to do so.
So I believe a txt in your files declaring so is sufficient in order to be ethically ok with them. OR - AND their watermark can be added on the textures in an area that is not used by the 3D model.
All you need to do to download the app is to create an account (free) on their site.
Now that we have this out of the way and we are ok with everything let’s see how the app stands up compared to the Elephant in the room which is PT.
I haven’t tried the app yet (I’m still downloading) but went through doc’s and tutorial videos.
First off it’s not just an app it’s a platform and for those familiar with PT it includes kinda Substance Designer and Substance Sampler. So it’s a powerful platform and u use the same UI and not different apps. U just open tabs and you can have more than one project at the same time.
It’s procedural, it has same masks as PT, Materials, Layers, Ankers, High-Low Poly workflow and some other stuff that PT doesn’t…
It’s for Windows and MAC and they also have in the same licensing InstaLOD.
https://instalod.com
InstaLOD is another great studio that advertises One Draw Call but doesn’t give full access to all features… remains to be discovered if it can help us in the free version.
This doesn’t mean it’s better than all but what I see is that it covers what is needed to PBR a model for free.
Details are kinda different but they fall in the way like as 3DS MAX is different than Blender, but in general it looks much closer to PT than Blender to 3DS MAX.
Good news is that it goes up to 16K (they say, didn’t see it) and it has Export Presets similar to how PT has which means an export preset for BMS can be created to match the files and structure of the BMS PT export preset. Unfortunately it doesn’t export to DDS as the BMS PT Plugin does but hey you can always use PS if you have it or use Paint.NET which is also free for the DDS convert.
InstaMAT has some nice tutorials here:
https://www.youtube.com/@InstaMAT_io
Here is one presenting some basic staff:
So have free fun…