I’ve been spending more than a few days in Allegorithmic’s Substance Designer, working over a massive amount of textures I’ve downloaded from GameTextures. The process is tedious, especially the Metal PBR workflow, but after more than a few days grinding through a directory with more than 250 base materials, I’m kind of addicted. At night, I go home and work on some simple stuff, assembling my horde of images from CG textures. These are easy as it’s just a single bitmap I have to wrangle. The glue that is making all of this possible is Allegorithmic’s new tool found in Bitmap2Material 3.0. It’s a “Node” that works as a kind of plugin for Designer. Feed the node the images you want to be converted for use in a PBR workflow, and the node does the heavy lifting. But of course, nothing is ever totally easy, and so I wrestle with Masks, Emissive textures, Blend nodes, Levels, and the adjustment of Normals in order to get the Substances just right for our shared library. Between Allegorithmic’s Database of procedural textures (about 850 of them), the 1000 CGTextures, and the 1000 GameTextures files I’m working with, I could be at this for quite a while. In the end, I think this will prove to be an invaluable asset to our team, though I might have a momentum that will demand I just keep going exploring the possibilities this amazing software offers us.