I meant something more tangible. Do you have an effect in engine where we can see the benefit of Substance? I’ve hovered over the buy button many times, but I can’t seem to convince myself that it solves any problems I have.
To add tools to your library, just make a folder wherever you want them to be, go in Edit/Preferences/Projects/Library and add the path, it’ll go over it and populate the library with whatever it finds there!
To make your own tools, try adding a blank input and output nodes, and put something in between and expose some parameters:
So if you drop this substance inside another graph, it’ll have input and output plugs and some parameters you can tweak. Note that you can also add functions to control those parameters and whatnot. You can right click a node and open it up to see how it was made, try that too!
@Partikel It doesn’t solve problems that other tools wouldn’t be able to, it’s just a quick and fun tool to use to generate textures, kinda like Filter Forge, with really fast iteration. Since it’s a very complete solution you can bring in meshes, bake textures or masks out of them, you can paint bitmaps or draw vectors inside it as well. Supports up to 32 bit HDR, so you can even create IBL probes in it.
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Unfortunately I can’t share anything in engine due to everything I have made thus far has been used for production purposes.
@Mez just as Bruno and Travis said, I too use it for creating textures. One can use it for alphas and masks too. I haven’t created any “tools” yet so I’m not exactly sure how that’s done but while making materials you can expose for example a “cracks” parameter to the material and change it on the fly instead of going into the cracks node and messing with the values, if that makes any sense.
While I personally use photoshop more than substance designer, designer works waaaaay faster. Specially tweaking the initial nodes can lead to the end result. Also it helps create tileable from the get go, unlike photoshop which has a few more steps involved to do so.
Check out this: [start at 20:17] from 20:17 to 21:35 he shows how he exposes it. So instead of travelling to the roughness node every time to change he just exposes a parameter and can change from the root.
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For my work it’s a tool that is super handy to have (every texture is tileable, node based editing makes non-destructive changes really easy and quick), but I definitely wouldn’t call it a MUST have. @Bruno also has a bunch of helpful tools he’s provided on Substance Share, one of which i’ve been using pretty extensively to help quickly generate threshold maps.
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Hi guys, I have a hard time creating textures for VFX and also finding Tutorials about it. I started to try around with Substance, found this thread and I would love, if we could start to share practical examples in here. I will start and show of my first tests 
Hot Cloudy-Clouds
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nice! i really like this idea. I’ll share more of my graphs as well. this one is a set up i use to grey pack some textures quickly. nothing special texture wise. it does let me iterate quickly though.
a lot of stuff i do usually involves rotating and transforming and then using a make it tile node.
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Those look good! That would take me an hour or so in Fume and it wouldn’t tile
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Very cool. Let’s see more! If you want to try and push this fire even farther within Substance, give a look at these for inspiration.
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think i might jump on this bandwagon, designer looks great fun…
I’ve seen videos where it looks like geometry is also made within designer, does anyone know if that’s possible. and to be able to export the geometry?
“For instance, we needed a few medals to be built. Traditional 3d modeling/rendering would have been sufficient but time-consuming. Instead with a substance I created, we can now generate as many medal permutations as needed with very little effort.”
makes it sound like he made the geometry with in designer?
he is just referring to creating normal/height and other maps. no modeling in designer. i think he is just saying he saves a bunch of time by setting that up in designer instead of having to sculpt/bake each one in other programs.
shows the process he used in substance to get his final result. You may be able to pull the displacement into a 3d package and extract the geo? I haven’t used displacement for anything, so idk how all that works now or what your options are.
2.5D Modeling to be exact. 3D detail on a 2D plane. I recall back for Halo:Reach, Bungie updated the medals by modeling and rendering them out. Had it been done today, the same effect can be done and much more quickly in Substance Designer.
Just found this on twitter and thought, it might be very useful for VFX textures too. Will try around with it later
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I use substance designer regularly for all my textures needs since 2 years now, flare, dust, noise, impact crater and threshold maps. I have the chance to be really free to try new things on production and have time for this.
I built small tools for snow wave/sweeping on ground and I was able to iterate quickly my flipbooks thanks to Bruno tools !
I even used subtance for explosions flipbook for normal map tweaking.
Just the fact you can preview the texture tiling just by pressing spacebar in 2D view is a blast for me.
I think its a good start to switch your brain into procedural thinking.
I admit its hard to get away from photoshop at first, but it like any package and get out of your confort zone. But the speed you gain from iteration is tremendous.
My ultimate goal is to have handpaint blizzard style but procedurally. I’m pretty sure its doable with enough tries 
Here a substance I did :
substance file
Be sure to have @Bruno 's altlaser !
Will post the snow crawlings in the next days.
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Thank you! I would love to see your substance-craters, if you’re allowed to share how they where done
One other thing I will add, is that if you’re going to be using SD in a pipeline with other artists you should be very deliberate and careful about maintaining the same SD version across your project. My experience is that even what looks like a minor point release will kill backwards compatability, and i’ve been bitten more then once by someone versioning up a file or installing a plugin from a new version. The result is usually quite destructive =/
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Totally agree, we have always that issue when a newer version is released and our artist updates manually by themselves.