In my quest to eliminate Adobe products from my life, I have started adopting a fully blender texturing workflow.
This is probably something that I should have done a while ago, but substance painter works quite well.
Maybe that’s the problem. Most Adobe products do work quite well. I used Photoshop, Illustrator, and After Effects for years. I liked them. They did what I needed them to do. Adobe’s relationship to its customers is something that doesn’t work anymore. And now there are alternatives.
When I bought Substance Painter it wasn’t under the Adobe banner yet, and Allegorithmic, by contrast, was a company that was quite good to its customers. The software, while not exactly cheap, was reasonably priced and the contract terms were pretty good.
Since Adobe bought them, I have not, and will not, upgraded or paid for a subscription. It simply isn’t worth it.
There were a small handful of texturing addons for Blender that did some of what Substance can do. I even used a few to decent effect.
Times change and people like to build things. I don’t know of any addons that cover the full feature set of Substance yet, but there are a couple now that maybe do just enough.
Ucupaint is a real, layer based texturing tool that works in a very Blender like way. It’s not as much a painting tool, as it is a layering and masking tool. Much like Substance. Figuring out ways to wrangle fill layers and procedural masking layers to create the effect you are looking for, while occasionally hand painting a mask or two, is the order of the day. It can be a bit of a puzzle sometimes, but the extreme amount of control you get can’t be overlooked.
Layer Painter does a lot of what Ucupaint does, with a slightly friendlier interface. I haven’t used it since it went completely open source and had a major overhaul, but I remember it being quite easy to get into. I will have to try it again when it’s a little more stable.
HAS painter and Ravage are two that I honestly haven’t tried, but from videos they seem to be doing a lot of the same things in slightly different ways. I will have to look into them.
The long and short of it is, if you are using Blender and you would rather not use Substance painter, you are probably in luck. There are a lot of options and some of them might just do everything you need Substance for anyway.
Now I just need to recreate my texture and material library for use in Blender. It might be slightly more DIY than just using Substance, but I will probably be happier for it.