koobas.hobune.stream
substance designer (any advantage)
I know what it can do, and along with their other products
What I want to know, since because you can make textures with SD, or even convert over handmade texture or photos with Bitmap2Material
What I want to know is if the smaller textures files (aside from smaller game files) will you gain any performance in the game...like load times, better frame rates, that sort of stuff.
Depends on the platform, on a programmable GPU, yes smaller size, and better/faster streaming. On a Mobile Platform a lot of things have to be pre-composited, and then stored to a storage medium, and read back at render time, because the GPU doesn't have the horsepower to do this on the fly. So the bottom line with that is that typically "Beefy"
Machines that have plenty of storage, and possibly a fast HDD/SSD have the capability to benefit from the flexibility substance affords. The ones that would really benefit, like mobile don't have the GPU/CPU to do it on-the-fly, so they typically are about the same as traditional materials.
So, mobile, no performance, but it benefits form the smaller texture files?
But say a decent PC or the most current home consoles system would take better advantage of substances?
$$anonymous$$obile would get little to no benefit, for the consumer. Since it has to compress the textures at compile time, and hard code the resolution. So size is also fixed.
For the author it's nice since if you're over budget you can easily re-configure the node to spit out a smaller texture to achieve your goal of being below say for example 25mb in textures. Then before ship Retina Display's hit and now your stuff looks dated, you could re-compile with a 100mb budget, gain 4X Texture quality and do 1/2 hour worth of work.
On the high end side, you can do things like age a texture with 1 parameter, to blend in a slightly weathered normal and spec, and since they could be all generated off of 1 noise-map, that 40 $$anonymous$$aterials share, it costs no extra memory, and a little gpu time.
You could do a time travel game where you see ancient Greek artifacts/weapons, when they were new, and then have a "Detective story /game" on how they ended up all rusted and in a swamp that preserved it" etc... all without having to re-uv / or deal with having to generate new materials for each time period. And see it age before your eyes.
Or say in a horror game to have blood run over surfaces, you'd do the effect 1X and then apply it to all the materials in your scene, and when you told it so, it would just run over the surface. And you could change the look until the game ships, and tweak it globally...
