Substance no longer supported?

[simon]

We've just invested in some licences for Substance Designer, which is working like a dream in Unity 3D, however, the 'native' support in 3Ds Max seems non-existent. 

We're using Substance Designer 5 and 3Ds Max 2016 SP3 and whenever we attempt to import a subtstance which uses the newest features of Substance Designer the material refuses to import. Allegorithmic's stance is that it's down to Autodesk to update the plugin as it's a standard plugin and that the only way to get it to work is to not use the newest features of their product.

As far as I'm concerned; if the latest features are not supported, then it's not a supported product. Has anybody else out there had this problem and managed to find a way around it? Is there anyone from Autodesk reading this who has any answers for why this excellent product is no longer supported properly?

[Anonymous]

Hi Simon,

I'm very sorry for this issue. The Substance Engine version 5 (SD5) is not supported in 3ds Max. We know that this is a major issue and we are going to rework the 3ds Max plugin from scratch to support the SD5 engine as well as fix other performance issues.

To use SD5 substances in 3ds Max, you need to use the Substance Engine 4 compatibility mode. In the SD5 preferences under Projects, set the Compatibility Mode to Substance Engine 4. This will then highlight any nodes in your substance that are not compatible with 3ds Max. Once you remove those nodes, you can then publish a usable substance in SD5 for use in 3ds Max.

There are not many SD5 nodes. As an example, edge detect, distance, pixel processor, vector warp are the main nodes. Using the blend node with an opacity input while also adjusting the opacity slider is not supported as well.

Cheers,

Wes

[simon]

Hi Wes,

Thanks for getting back to me. 

I understand that reverting back to using only version 4 features means that we'll be able to use Substance in some form, but it's still frustrating to not be able to take advantage of the newer features in v5. It's good to know that this is something Autodesk are aware of and that you're planning on getting it fixed. 

I read a forum thread on the Allegorithmic boards and someone suggested on there to replace the 'substance_linker.dll' and 'substance_sse2_blend.dll' files from in the root 3Ds Max folder with the ones from the Substance 5 installation directory.  I attempted this and it seemed to work a treat, however, I can't yet confirm how stable this is. One really odd thing I noticed though, was that this workaround only seemed to work on systems that also had Max 2017 installed. I can't really explain why, but when we swapped the .dlls on machines without Max 2017 installed alongside 2016, Max 2016 would throw up all kinds of errors about the Substance plugin. As soon as we installed 2017 on those machines as well, the problem went away.

For now things seem to be working but it's obvisouly not ideal so an official update would be apprecated!

[Anonymous]

that tricks also works with substance designer 6.. maybe is that simple

[Anonymous]

Hi, 

We have a new beta updater to update the plugin to the latest version of 3ds max. We are also working on a new version 2.0 plugin that will release later this year. 

https://forum.allegorithmic.com/index.php/topic,14223.0.html

Cheers, 
Wes