I recently posted a tutorial (of sorts) about integrating MoI and Modo with Substance Designer when creating real-time game assets for Unity. Not really a tutorial so much as it's an explanation about how each application can be leveraged into a pretty bullet-proof content creation pipeline.

Here's the URL:

http://www.ronnieashlock.com/?p=999

I'm about 3 years into using MoI to make game content and it is really a tremendous tool. It's great for prototyping/whiteboxing as well as finished high-resolution models. I even start my game-resolution meshes in MoI, then optimize the meshes in Modo for import into game.

Substance Designer is a really great addition to my workflow and pretty much eliminates the need to work in Photoshop. I never thought mighty Photoshop would become irrelevant, and, in truth, it's not, but I can get a better result in Substance Designer in half the time. It was made specifically to help 3D artists become more productive and less frustrated and I have to say Allegorithmic has succeeded brilliantly.

Substance Designer makes good use of the SVG format. I would love it if MoI would export SVG files directly. It looks like SVG support is on your to-do list Michael, but I just wanted to give you another vote of "Yes, please." MoI is so good at making intricate patterns, it's a bit frustrating not being able to go directly from MoI to SD. At the moment, I have a hacky workaround that isn't the best since Inkscape's support of MoI-created .ai files is lacking. I guess it wouldn't be an issue if I had Illustrator, but, even then, I'd prefer to just go straight from MoI to SD.

Anyway, I'm not complaining. :) I love being able to use these tools, as is! Hope people get something from the post.

Man, that's cool!!!

Thanks, Mike. I really appreciate your many tremendous tutorials, as well. You've provided a set of invaluable resources.

Hi SurlyBird, cool tutorial!

re: SVG - it's on my list but I do not have any prior experience working with that particular format, and that generally means that there will be a fair amount of ramp up and just studying time involved. The SVG spec itself is something like 500 pages in length.

So it's more likely that I'm going to get to DXF import and export and probably PDF export before I will try to tackle SVG.

Does Substance Designer _only_ support SVG and no other 2D vector formats at all? Because that's pretty unusual for a program that is actually focused on 2D work to only support a single format...

- Michael

I think SVG is the only importable vector format supported by Substance Designer. A lot of image resource files are supported, but I only see one file format I know for sure is vector-based and that is SVG. If Inkscape would open the version of .ai that MoI outputs, it really wouldn't be a problem. I could just push the MoI-generated .ai through Inkscape and export an .SVG from there. I can approximate things by using Inkscape's trace tools, but it's a tad unpredictable and requires more cleanup than is useful.

Inkscape does import DXF and PDF, too, I think. If I could go from MoI-to-Inkscape-to-SD via DXF of PDF, that would make me just as happy. After getting an idea of the magnitude of the task involved in getting SVG working I totally understand other things taking priority. And I also realize that I am asking for a feature that is kind niche. And it's a feature I would use for very specific instances, so it's not a huge deal. Thanks for directly addressing it, Michael. Appreciate all the work you do for us!

oi surlybird!

did you try uniconvertor?

http://sk1project.org/modules.php?name=Products&product=uniconvertor


it says command line tool on the package, but it actually got some kind of ui (in windows at least). eats MOIs-.ais and converts them into .svgs.









~marco

And...problem solved! Thank you, Marco! UniConverter works like a charm! I had never heard of it until you mentioned it, so you have my eternal gratitude. This made my day!