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Is Substance Painter dead? Or does Quixel Mixer still have some room to grow?

Thumbnail Art by Thuan Nguyen Minh Duong
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/ERVbv
https://www.artstation.com/duongnguye...

When learning how to become a texture artist, the learning curve one must climb isn’t always the easiest. As a rule, 3D Software isn’t particularly intuitive, and there are a lot of concepts that any normal person simply would have no reason to know about. If you’re just starting out, even knowing which software to use can be a bit of a puzzle. Texturing software—the topic of today’s video—is no exception, and each software package comes with its strengths, weaknesses, and price points.

The two most well-known pieces of software for this purpose are Substance Painter and Quixel Mixer. If you’ve never used texturing software before, what makes it unique from simply painting on the model directly, is the ability to use procedural effects based on the shape of the mesh you’re working on.

Before we get into the video,
For the beginner, the first step in the process is what we call baking the maps for the low-resolution mesh. Basically what this means is we use a piece of software (a baker) to create a series of images—or maps—that capture specific details from the high-resolution mesh. These maps can be the object’s thickness in certain places, its curvature or its surface normals. A normal map is complex enough that it could be its own video, but for the sake of brevity, it basically allows us to fake the lighting to give our objects the illusion of depth.

Another reason these maps are important is they enable procedural masking. A mask is basically a black and white image that dictates whether or not the masked layer is visible or not, and when a mask is procedurally generated, this means it has been created by the application rather than painted being by hand. This is why the baked maps are important—they serve as the input for the procedurally generated masks, and without the maps, the masks won’t work.

Long story short, the baker creates the maps that are used to generate the masks.
This idea of texturing an object without painting it completely by hand is called Procedural Texturing and it is one of the central pillars of any modern texturing process. If you’re like me and can barely keep between the lines of a coloring book, it’s a great way to get really nice looking results while never putting pen to tablet.

Both Substance Painter and Quixel Mixer rely on this extensively, so let's take a look at what the workflow with each piece of software might look like.

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