Hiya everyone, first post here, nice to meet you all!
Nice thread with some cool examples. I also recently started using Substance for VFX textures. I mainly see it being useful for things like erosion masks, plasma shaders, warp tunnels, cracks etc, maybe some normal maps. Also for every abstract game you can do pretty much anything with it in theory. Some cool ideas in this thread.
However I find it hard to imagine Substance would be useful for more realistic textures like fire, explosions, smoke, water etc.
As a reference I can share what tools we mainly use for textures:
- Houdini FX. Fire, explosions, smoke, water, liquids
- Sometimes FumeFX for explosions and fire.
- Photoshop for every single texture in some way, even if it is minor tweaking. For static textures we often paint them by hand or use a photo for reference but we avoid static textures as much as possible and prefer animated ones.
- Fusion FX for compositing. We used After Effects a lot but transitioned to Fusion FX because it is node based. AE is still ok and best suited for some types of effects. Nuke would be ok too but is too expensive!
- Maya/3ds Max for texture modeling. Sometimes we model in Houdini for example normal maps.
- We also film much of our material with high speed cameras, fire, small explosions, water drops etc
Cheers,
Andreas
Visual Forest