Substance 2020 Updates with Jeremie Noguer & François Cottin | Game Dev Unchained Episode 224

I [Music] what's up everybody welcome to another episode of gain Devon Shan hosted by blue champs the number one game development podcasts about game development in the lifestyle of era I am your host brain and fam and I want us welcome our special guest this episode from the substance team I'm gonna go with your first name Jeremy and Prince hua how you guys doing I'm gonna unmute you a quick here alright so uh this is the part I think it's best to kind of let you guys introduce yourself let's start with you Jeremy where you introduce yourself to our audience and listeners out there who you are where you're from where you hidden in right after that of course Francois you can come in as well it sounds good

yeah hi everyone so I'm Jeremy I'm currently principal project manager and there'll be on the free side of things and before before it'll be it was I was working at agreed with the substance team for about 14 years that was my action my first job coming at college I come from France like most of the substance team and I'm now in San Francisco and II out of the office all right your turn Francois yeah sure so false well I'm also from France I'm the marketing director for everything 3d at Adobe I being with substance for years I started when we were only developing substance designer for the game community and we went a long way and now we have a suite of products that

you will know and we're serving not only the game development those were all right so we're getting slight lag but let me kind of switch over to this right now and this is kind of like the last few months right of course in pandemic is no no mystery hopefully it's no surprise to everybody but what I like to kind of start it off with is kind of getting like a survey of the industry of how everyone is coping either small or triple-a or tool developers like you guys how has this shifted your marketing plan your development plans of any in the past couple three months I guess so yeah I can talk about that it's been a change for sure but I think the world never played that many video games yesterday so all our customers are all

these in these game boosters are it's a bit complex to organize now that everybody is working from home but the number of players grew and also extensions like your headsets have never sold that well and so people have time for video games people have time to try new things also very good times for the video game industry I would say even if it's complex organized it's a good movement for the industry what's your view on it Jamie how are things are really on this development site I mean yeah I think for us it's been it's been an adjustment as well and I think we're having that the way we work is is it's somewhat similar to against you were

still even though we're in the big company were a small part as a big company and we have small teams and while working from home so it's been it's been a challenge but after the first couple of weeks everything feels like the new normal and then things are going on smoothly but yeah it's definitely changed it was fantastic so I've been the fan before of you guys for a long time ever since the day one it feels like ever since your announcement of substance tools that kind of the the industry by storm and I don't know if this is true the game industry was your first industry that substance was revealed and and now it's broadening as we were talking about before the interview but you were talking about us being a smart team and being a part of a bigger team now and the acquisition was one of the biggest news last year for sure how has this kind of I don't know how much you can talk about how has it freed you guys to develop on ideas that before was kind of more on the back burner of things and now you guys have free rein of really developing these

ideas to the next level yeah I can take this one it's been interesting of course there's been there's been a little bit of adjustment adjusting period to integrate such such a larger team but now that we're kind of settled in we have we have so many resources that we could only dream off before typically adobe has not uh people know this probably has a gigantic research department with hundreds of researchers and and as people have been I've been working on research in the 3d field for years but they've already had a receptacle look product to actually to actually put these to use and now we're here they all coming to us like can we can we put that in usually put that in the tool and it's super exciting for us it's kind of overwhelming but there is there is just so many opportunities it's it's a really fun time to be able to be touching the substance seem and of

course Francois you've been part of the team for a long time now you're part of a bigger unit it's probably more helpful to have more marketing guys around the office for sure any changes in that front that you've been kind of gaining just overall development yeah sure choosing two things there I would say first is that we brought back gaming to Dubi Dubi was not extremely focusing on gaming before the collision will occur at meek and this was part the acquisition of substance was to bring gaming back into to eternity and Adobe today is is making efforts to better support the gaming community as a whole with 3d tools obviously but but

not only and this is this is the second topic is that by connecting to Derby we have more memes but we also have more colleagues and we can connect better there's many tools to all the 2-d tools so that Adobe is publishing also and this is opening new opportunities for better productivity more creativity smoother pipe lines between the 2d tools and the 3d tools so we're working on that also because it brings value to two very one Indian and I would say we are bringing game to Derby we brought game to Adobe but also do we broaden the scope of the impact of 3d as many of you may know but the 3d field is

is led by the game industry more or less so you have game developers that are hired by automotive companies for instance or even furniture companies because these know-how of how to build nice 3d experiences is something that is useful for way more than only gaming for the film industry architecture and those different examples and so we're also better connected now with the Adobe to serve this market so it's a forest it's an extension of the gaming market and for Adobe the acquisition of algorithmic is an extension into gaming we definitely agree with that being a game developer myself I've been seeing the trends movement or it's using real time for changing workflows in all industries and it's

great to kind of hear that Adobe is bringing back the gaming community within his toolset it's an important community as always I mean everybody it started in industry with Photoshop and it's great to kind of hear you guys having more resources to kind of grow your toolset and everything and a little bit about this topic actually I would love to hear you guys more insight about this you know the game industry our game tools specifically or are being used in all these other industries like architectural or animation movies we were seeing the mandalorian using digital sets of unreal to kind of help not bore the actors right in front of a green screen so we're seeing like these revolutionary ways to work now and being integrated so so importantly in these industries are you seeing like this influx of other developers that have been coming into substance tools that are using not used to it or now like loving and discovering it along with all

these other tools that we we game developers have been using for years now so we can't hear you oh yeah we got cut off so I just was just muted do you want to go to to give some examples to dive into that judge me or secured that there is there is a ton of examples I don't know if I can if I can talk about any of it because a lot of thing is confidential but there's there are there are tons of we see tons of like farmer said industries that that come to videogame because that's where if you want the best visual quality the best feedback iterative loop you need to go with real-time solutions and and all those real-time solutions come from the game industry so we see we see tons of other industries picking up and real Unity game engines and and game tools to

build frontal VR experience but not only also they use it as you said for the effects even in the design process of consumer goods let a lot of luxury brands for example use our car brands will use real time in the design phase while their build a car they build the conceived a designer purse and so the the game technology allow them to reduce 2zt receive look extremely cheap tuned extremely fast turnarounds obviously it looks better but also just save them money just because of the fact that instead of designing a purse instead of actually having to source the leather and build that purse in real life to see what it looks like you can just design it in unreal or in user package and see it pretty much as close as possible to reality see you pretty much every every kind of industry in the world is looking in real time to to basically save money

oh I can't hear you anymore I'm sorry it definitely sorry I muted myself for a fine salon it definitely helps you know with limiting well not eliminating completely but always limiting the post-production process in what these industries or other industries are pretty much used to and I'm kind of changing the workflow and stuff in my experience too I want to kind of throw this back at you Jeremy like you know our game development tools have been in evolving for the last 20 30 years you know going through I always track it to the Sony console generation is just easier the track ps2 the ps3 with normal mapping and then moving on to lighting and rendering and in retracing now do

developers have been kind of there every step of the way but like now these industries are kind of going there kind of have to fast learn all these tricks basically how have you who've been wrapping their head around this concept of just game development I mean how how challenging has that been it depends on the industry I guess and each it industry is different and each player in the industry is different we'll see some companies picking up this new technology super fast and and creating stuff that is really and crazy quality in a short amount of time and you'll have industries where we've been trying for years to bring to kind of evangelize real-time 3d and in-game tools and it's still hard it really depends I think it depends on on how critical that that transition to digital

is for each industry and how far they were in the first place we see some like the giant ice reader there are people there that are just really very proficient with really already and are picking up these tools just because again it's a it's a it's a pipeline issue and cost issue that they need to address now other other other industries like for example architecture are little slower because they've been doing 3d for a long time but kind of an old-school 3d and for most of the time it still works fine for them because it's it's static and they may not need or they may not field neat you have real time real time 3d in in in this industry so it just it just depends they're all kind of more or less slow to your dog or fast to adopt but I think in the end every industry and every single company in the world will likely use 3d real-time 3d min is this back over to Francois I think

you're about to start but I want to hear your thoughts about this my take is that they have been 3d in other industries for a while but mostly for manufacturing processes of course ultimately for our architecture has been using 3d for thousands of years but it was for a completely different purpose and today they are discovering that visualization in 3d is something that is using different methods then if you really want to achieve high quality and interactivity and be able to reuse easily your assets for a lot of different purposes you have to do that using the techniques coming from the

game and also what what it brings the real time thing that is happening these days as you were saying the new console generations and all that is that in the past interactivity with was at the cost of visual quality but it's it's not really the case anymore for a lot of use cases you cannot unless you're specialists you cannot really make the difference between an offline rendering and real-time rendering depending on on the use cases of course but for a lot of use cases the difference is not that big anymore the gap is not that big anymore so it means that previously as a creative professional you had to work in a kind of abstraction and you were you were working all day long on something

that was an abstraction of the final product the final media the final sequence or it's not the case anymore now with real time you can iterate directly on the final product and it is changing everything and this is also why the Dubey is embracing 3d today because if you look at the other tools to Derby there are all real-time tools I would say when you're working on Photoshop you'll note not working on an abstraction of the final image you're working on the final image and or if you change a pixel you change a pixel in the final image in 3d until recently you were working on something that was an abstraction lower quality simplified geometry simplified Lighting's simplifying materials and then you had to render in

these abstract face the the meant that people who were not specialists were unable to to predict what the final result would look like it's still completely the case for very advanced 3d like VFX and you were talking about in the DeLorean or of course when you are at this level of extreme quality you still have a difference between the final product and the different steps before but for more everyday purposes 3d I would say now you can you can go real-time and you can iterate in real time and this is we see this happening in many industries in the game industry obviously also in the other industries and it's changing everything while

speakers changing everything I kind of want to dive a little deeper on that of course increasing workflows increasing speed can mean two things that it means that we can get quality faster but it could also mean that producer want more things at once right and so I kind of want to talk about that like what type of workflow changes that this is creating for all industries right now do you think the quality of product of course with large teams we're going to get better but that being even true or with the smaller teams even because now tools are so accessible and can you're using essentially the same tools at bigger studios to produce the same level or it just depends on your time I want to hear you guys thoughts of PAL the last two years especially just influx of great tools like substance and and other tools how the changes been for from your

perspective I would start rapidly with saying that at substance we don't differentiate all tools depending on the level of proficiency or on the cost of the tool it's it's very important it's a very important choice we made and students today get substance for free and it's exactly the same product as what triple a studio would use so there is absolutely no differentiation in the product say the accessibility of the tools is key to to spread them but also to make sure that the the industry has enough enough people to hire and that

that know how can fluidly go from the bigger studios to smaller studios from students to to to students it's a transitory I think this is an important choice we made on the substance side and this is something that is that is part of our success probably today and yeah you're the result is that small studios have exactly the same tools as big studios so yeah creativity wins in the end yeah that's pretty good news for everyone for sure so I want to ask you Jeremy like um well with all these tools being better and we're talking about you know the uncoming new consoles that are basically gonna up up our quality and output and at the end of year right so

my question is that with with all these tools coming out and especially every consulate generation let me kind of go back a bit every console generation is defined by the lighting and rendering pipeline and texturing right from the norm out to retracing now so what is the next leak that we're going to be seeing with the next console generation is going to be more quality stuff or are there different techniques that you feel and I see substance being at the forefront of defining what what our quality and next leap is what are your thoughts on that yeah I think there are some some just obvious things like we'll have higher resolution textures obviously and higher poly counts and and more complex complex meshes but but I think well will be truly differentiate this this new this

new generation I think we we saw it with the very few images that we've seen of next-gen stuff is first the shading I think the last generation we had the PBR shader the advent of PBR shading and that kind of caused to be deep in the realism of materials in general in games but it's still it's in most games today in the current generation is still fairly limited you basically have and you have a color of roughness mythili and a normal map and that's pretty much all you have in your initiator unless there's some specific cases I think the next generation we're gonna see materials gets much more complex with much more complex material reaction like Sheen and clear coat and thin film there's all sorts of physical properties to materials in real life that the simplified pyramidal we use in the current generation does not account for and I think this will really bridge the

gap between the rendering uctv and and what could be seen as like a real life object or photo that's one thing and especially applied to characters and that kind of object I think we're going to start to see characters are equality in artisan cinematics maybe not in gameplay but the matter in real-time cinematics that will have the same quality as what you would find in VFX today the second part is also also I think linked to characters is I think we're at a point where we finally have the power and the knowledge and the algorithm to do proper hair for enclosed simulation in a very realistic way which was kind of we had some of that this generation but it was very kind of approximations and tricks and kind of cheating I think we're gonna get we already see that we have some there are some papers from I mean unreal

and in frostbite there is already some some interesting interesting work on that I think we'll see in the next generation characters are really lifelike I think that will be to be the big leap welcome hooray from character teams all around the world we've had like you know character artists from the sony monica team and the one frustrating thing that always comes up is the hair and in cloth well hair especially because they're still using alpha cards and that's a ps2 technique and that has not changed for tooth generation so it's definitely one of those things yeah I think I feel environment has have been benefiting from these console generations characters you know at least until said that they've gotten more to play with for sure but they've always been stuck in that just carding hair is like making grass on people it's frustrating for sure yes so well I mean what are the biggest features that you guys are working on I

know substance 20/20 has been making a lot of waves the last few months any of that you guys want to talk about I can talk a little bit about about what what what just came out and what's coming up so we have a new version of substance painter coming out tomorrow actually and and that will bring some of some some really cool features there are none silly new shiny exciting features but are more features to you again just improve your workflow and make your work more enjoyable everyday and so that goes through will revamp the export process a lot of people are complaining about the exporting in substance painter you now have much more control and more feedback about how you export textures and what what the huge point what format what resolution and and those kind of things we also since last year we introduced automatic you v's in substance painter

and that was a huge milestone for us because that's always been kind of our one of our when I guess we have multiple one of our Holy Grail is to get rid of the UV process goats we have just I don't know a lot of people like making movies sing that way and so we improves that that automatic UV system but once you add your too many TVs exporting that mesh back from substance painter was a little bit painful and we didn't read I create good options for this so we improve that as well and now you can bring in a mesh create automatic TVs and you can export it back as an FBX and will keep your triangulation your quads your handguns if you have any will keep the structure of the scene the bones in the end everything so everything is kept said that that mesh can just flow through the pipeline through substance painter we added a few other more options to the automatic UV so the goal is way to make it production proof right now we think it works good it can work great so we're still working on it but

it's this is getting some nice improvements and I think the other thing we're excited about was the bakers because as you know in substance painter and pretty much any workflow today baking maps for your assets is a crucial public work focus a lot of automation that can that can that can go on during your workflow and a lot of effects your builds are based on curvature and them in seclusion and the way you can create edge where automatically and all that kind of stuff and people rely on that very heavily and so getting the quality of the bakes as as good as possible it's always one of our people and so with this new version we have a new curvature Baker that is miles better than the previous one and and and faster as well so are super excited about this should help a lot with the creation of smart Sheils and wear and tear and stuff like that and I think the other thing that that that I'm personally very excited about because I played a lot with it and I can't wait for people to get their hands on it is our I think we presented a

couple of weeks ago during our keynote is a a I image - material in some chemists and so a lot of people have been using bitmapped material for a long time we this came out I think like 7 to 8 years ago now but because material was just our simple tool I was crazy but before that made by another guy looks cool you just imported photo and generates normal map and roughness and whatnot from from your photo and and he worked it works okay for how simple it is to use but there's a lot of cases are tricky and doesn't work because in the end it's it's very simple math a plan on the image and so this new AI based system instead of being simple math based on the pixels of the image you fit it you fit to it it it uses AI to look at this image and try to figure out what is actually pictures in that image and from that it will figure

out where shadows are with the highlight sees and and remove the shadows and make sure that a bump should be a bump and a hole should be a hole based on on actual learning so what we did is we we that algorithm we trained it by feeding it tons and tons of photogrammetry data so that he can reconnect recognize if you take a picture of a rock everything as it's a rock and it should be kind of a bump or if you take a picture of I don't know like a row of cracks who work on these are cracks and this should be calls and so that works that works that works so much better than because too much it's much better than any other similar application out there that I really feels like magic and that should come out in the next month or two um and where you can't wait for for people to play with it it's really fun yeah definitely I feel like a lot of software companies like yourselves at least on the Trello board one of the biggest thing is to make automation as

as possible and at the utmost quality and which also frees up a lot of the artists it's time to kind of dive into creativity part of it right you were asking the girls - yeah yeah I think it goes to you rather than like the automation doesn't replace the artist it just it just helps him get better at what he does and just helps him kind of not spend too much time on stuff that is not dye important Jian yeah definitely oh I mean you've ease I'm the same boat as you I don't know how many people actually enjoy the UV process I met a few but I feel a lot of them are gone through so much of a torture and like a piece of it they just don't know any other way they just find it meditative I mean that's the reason they say it's like guys this process is gonna be gone someday they just haven't figured that so I'm glad to kind of hear the substance we just kind of tack on that problem because I rather be doing something else than you being for sure but to talk more about the automation

part of it right it seems like more and more tools are moving towards this to kind of free up the developer artists this time what kind of benefits besides the obvious right do you feel like this is gonna be at the end product gonna give everybody to the you basically to the to the user at the end the clients I think both I think both quality and can in quantity really or either both every depends on the goal of the developer in the game you building but in the end whatever you put every time you save you can spend creating more content or creating creating better content and and and I think and I think it shows already when you compare the games that are built this generation compared the games they were built to generation before the amount of content you have your game is it's just it's just phenomenal and it's something that I know that that

bigger like the the studios even the big studios they don't they don't expend their team indefinitely cannot they snow it she's just not an artist out there and you can't read that budget so much so the same amount of art is the creating worlds games that are so much bigger and so much higher quality I think we'll see it will keep we'll keep seeing that that trends in the next generation I don't know how big in xgg is gonna people it's probably gonna be like a full continent Oh what are the and I can see this can go to both you guys one of each I think in the past year or something uh well VR has kind of been on the rise right I think before it was more like people were super excited but then realistically people kind of salt saw like a slow adoption but I think in the past year especially where we're hearing more and more developers just profiting from their gains finally right they're not relying on a publishers for for the

income they're actually getting money back from from their from their work right which is like a regular game developer they're actually a business now one of the big acquisition after you guys were you know the the medium tool I don't know how much you guys can talk about that but at that point VR has always been my favorite frontier for developers I'm using the VR mode and on the rail right now and not particularly for any reasons but just to look at my assets inside the world in VR and just notice things that I didn't notice before I don't know how much you guys can talk about at least on that side I where's your stance on VR using it within substance at least painter and all that so there are two different phases where immersive Atia brings makes a whole difference there is consumption and there is authoring the consumption

part has been a roller coaster like all the new all the innovations I would say so the first generation the habits were not completely ready on the visual quality was low it was very complex to set up you had some from sickness and so we worked with the first generations of oculus and vive headsets and it was a nightmare oh really there were so many constraints that it was it was the beginning of an innovation so it was deceptive and then like all the innovations after a while the headsets get better the visual quality is now really great interaction is super

fluid the setup is super simple the price of the headsets have been falling down etc etc so now it's I would say its major four four games in terms of experience it's great for the country consumption phase and the best proof is that these days all headsets are out of stock I think there there cannot be any better proof that this is really enjoyable not today and since consumption is is great it's a good experience Studios go more and more in this direction and the quality of the games also tend to improve a lot and this is becoming just another way of consuming games and it's great and it's growing and it will continue to

grow there is no reason why it's more intense as an experience because it's you can spend as much time in emissivity as you would spend just in front of your TV but our computer but this is something that it's a great experience and then the second part is that immersive 'ti in in the authoring phase is also very interesting especially for the authors for the artists as you were saying the first time you encounter your creator in real life not in real life but in nomura civet ii it's it's a shock when you're I don't know if you're painting a character or monster dragon and assets whatever it is and you can walk around it and you can see the reflection of the

light just by moving your head or you can just feel the size of the character by walking around it it's it's it's completely different experience for uttering game assets for sure but also for authoring assets that will be in real life as you can imagine this is completely changing everything for architects to be able to dive into the final the final building or for product designers for car designers for all these people they have to same need which is encounter an object that is more less looking like what they are working on and so back to the game industry we we think that immersive 'ti will be more and more used during the

authoring phase as you probably so we we already showed a prototype of substance painter in VR it's a great experience now it's not a product this is something that is on the prototype phase in trollee but being able to to work on the surface of your object because now it's not only textures but its textures and a little bit of scouting that you can do in substance painter being able to do that in immersive IDI it's more intense but it's there's a relation between you and your creation then it's completely unique and this is also what we laughed with medium [Music] is that it's so natural to sculpt in medium the it can be impressive to see

these people wearing headsets and because it's it's it's immersive it's intense but once you try it's so natural that if you're a good sculpture in in real life you can immediately please dice using me and there is this is really an astonishing experience for those who never try it I would say even if you're not a good sculptor it can actually create a nice happy medium because I'm terrible and I can create some pretty decent stuff in there so it's really fun to play with yeah so I come from the environment background right and it's only until recently you know I've always been since day one I think most gamers love VR I forget it it's just the potential is there and everything it's just not there yet until recently right with products being better you don't have to have ten cameras set up in your room your wife is not yelling you for taking up so much room so it's just a headset now with the

new oculus so it's great so it's heading to the right direction but it definitely as an artist now that I'm using VR to kind of look just look at my product I have that relation that we were talking about you know I'm not just creating a prop and just you know for games it's just like prop in the corner just you don't walk by but now I'm looking at it as if I'm like an industrial designer you know how does this actually function because I'm like right next to it and I'm reaching my hand I was a how would I actually turn this thing and it's just unlocking a part of the creativity I think another layer as an artist to to kind of interface and and think of it as a real product like these other industries are using it for so I kind of want to throw this back to you Jeremy like well what what part of that are you pretty excited about just kind of see I know you guys still in testing phase and and everything but I want to hear your thoughts from the developers side of what potential this can unlock for you for for you guys definitely that there's as much from cities there's a lot of lot of potential and and painter and I am

medium I think artists touching on the potential to this there's so much more we can we can deal with it and again I can talk specifics I will have to wait longer to talk more about in detail about what we're doing but oh yeah I think just the presents of being next next to your asset can can help not only with painting and sculpting but pretty much any any kind of medium any part of any part of the of the pipeline really the same like you're visualizing assets in Vientiane chest you have a sense of the scale and the way to look in the world having every every step of that every step that pipeline could be and translated to VR and that's something that we can that we can finally do because again as Francis said that the hardware is good enough now that we can a couple years ago you would put in a headset and after 20 minutes your eyes would start tearing up

and he was it was very hard to actually work and in VR well but we did the latest headsets at it you can spend like I can spend like a couple of hours in medium playing with playing with his clothes and not sure you see the time go by and and I don't feel tired afterwards so once you're in it it's really you're gonna get lost in your RS I guess that's one of the risk associated to it is that you may end up spending more time on the assets because you don't realize that you're in a different world when you're building when you're working on it and you kind of the outside world is kind of you forget about it but it's it's a it's a fun place to be in when you're when you're in that kind of artistic mode and just just thinking about your asset and nothing else so going back to like how all these different industries are kind of being introduced to to our world grant what unique cases have you guys seen that was

very surprising I mean only some are familiar with architectural product design it's the same way they're being introduced to us we're slowly being introduced to their field of how they're using 3d particularly right statistics any of those case studies that you guys can share where is like oh you know I never really thought of it this way that helped with your product development marketing into substance tools and stuff like that why can we share from sort of the you know the furniture industry for instance has moved considerably to virtual photography and to replace in the photo shoots by synthetic imagery so I can has been leading there and the the catalog you have is mostly CG today it's

very advanced CG but it's it's using the same techniques and techniques from the game industry and it's astonishing to see the flexibility and the productivity Brutes because as you can imagine shooting scenes of interior and furniture is super complex super expensive you have to to transport all the furniture you have to build you have to build custom interiors and to decorate everything and it takes a lot of time and you shoot one picture and then you destroy everything and if you want to make a single change because you want to sell the same same piece of furniture but to a different country where you don't have the different style different environments or or you just want to shape it

a different color the next year you have to redo everything so this whole industry embraced 3d at different levels of quality obviously you can see on some ecommerce websites very simply simple three year I would say but you can see also big companies that have completely revisited the way they are producing all their imagery and they replaced completely photo shoots by synthetic photography by the actual photograph and what we brought on the substance side is the know-how around materials because in the end whatever the rendering engine you will use the main difference in the quality of the final image will will be

thanks to the materials to build ears if it's too perfect it will not look realistic we all know that this is something that is super well mastered by the bloggers boring artists and this is spreading like wildfire in the those industries so everything around ecommerce I would say not only furniture but ecommerce is embracing 3d real-time 3d but also just 3d imagery like super fast fantastic and and also the other other way around we worked a lot with architects the previous years we are working with all the major architecture studios well you can go on our website

and you'll see all the big letters and famous Legos but we learned a lot working with these people because they knew exactly how the materials look like in real life and they they could teach us to differentiate the different types of concrete's and to differentiate the different methods of construction and how things are really made and why this brick is looking differently in Japan that it's looking in Western Europe because it's not the same the same components in the earth and in the end it has to look different and if you go into every single details like that with those who really know because they've been doing that for dozens of years they have material specialists internally

they have material libraries huge material libraries and these know-how around real-life materials it's something that we're bringing back to the game industry so if you go to substance worse for instance and you look for architecture materials these are materials that we made with the best architecture firms and the best architecture experts and it brings a level of realism that comes with these expertise it doesn't mean that everything has to look realistic we just dropped stylized set of materials and substance source and it's super popular and it's working well and game people are were super excited about it but in

some cases you need also to to to stick to reality or at least to understand how reality is to take an artistic distance to these realms so yeah we're also doing it the other way around and bringing in some excused from architecture back into gaming mm-hmm and that's I think one of the most exciting thing about the time that we're in right now the collaboration of different industries and I love the fact that developers maybe in the near future I know they're already starting that artists from different industries can jump between different industries which gives like you know a huge plus and the amount of jobs that you can apply for with the same skill set so I love this merging of all the industries using the same tool sets and same workflows and I

kind of want to ask Jeremy about this on for the developer side you know PBR is something the visual effects taught us and we're still perfecting it you know you're talking about these architectural firms that have been using real-life materials and are teaching us you know how exactly you know how it should react how it's made up and how it is different from one country to the next right which is super important because we are getting into the nitty-gritty of things to make things really good I feel like the game industry before was kind of like the in its infancy I just make it look good that's kind of like the artery just make it look good but now we're actually having the time and creativity to kind of put back into development and so more asking to Jeremy now like what type of workflows that are you seeing that now that not only am i an environment artist and I can build this building but I can build it as if I am an architect right what workflows do you see some of that

coming back that you you you you feel like you guys for the next two years you need to kind of listen up if you want to stay on top of your game because this is happening right now well let me switch back to Jeremy I'm sorry I muted myself yeah I think I think he circled back to what I was saying about the next generation of consoles and the fact that materials are gonna be much more flex there's a lot of lot of material properties that that we didn't really that I guess game zapper didn't really care about until now just because he was it was maybe too costly and too costly in terms of performance in terms of time spent settings of sending this up that we will see appearing just again to to get closer and closer to reality and some of the stuff that that is being used a lot for the building product design which is very accurate

transparent and Susan C in and serves for scattering and refraction and clear coat with ripple which is like the layer to layer you had the clear layer velocity layer you have on top of a surface for example carbon fiber or things like this that we see a little bit like in car in in racing games today but but very little there's actually a lot of material in real life that that uses these kind of properties and we'll we'll be able now if with the power we have and the reference we have to actually apply it it was too much too many more materials and again if you're going for for a realistic look I guess materials are gonna get I'm gonna just get more complex and our goal is our goal is to you is to to make that transition not as painful as it could be and to and to anticipate that this

material is gonna get more complex and there's new channels that gonna come up and and there's weight waist you to visualize it then to create them easily and that's what we're currently working on in our tools and and we'll be we'll make sure to follow very quickly the evolution of the industry to make sure that when this needs to create as much commercial complex materials come up that the subs on substance on the other beside we're ready to give you tools that allow you to express those materials without pulling your hair up well let's just make it easier for the lazy creatives out there for sure I'm all for that this is a fantastic time actually we're we're we hit the hour mark I want to thank you guys for surviving an hour of the podcast in thank you guys it's time and as always wish you guys are in your families and everyone's super safe during these crazy times this is also the time for me to kind of shut up and hand over the mic to you guys to promote

give attention to to let the good people out there know how to level up their game out there with substance so I'm gonna switch over to your dual camp so you get both click go ahead and take it all right what is it what is coming yeah yeah I think I think with the the where we are at right now is substance I think and I'm not part of the marketing team so I can say that too but I think we're in a really good place for for artists if you if you have the substance suite you pretty much have everything you need and since with substance painter and and the new features for generating TV systematically and and Aldous more materials and everything that are available even even a I would say a

single person creating game and inside even if he's not an artist it's very easy to create good-looking assets by just dropping and dropping a mesh applying smart materials baking is pretty much automatic and you can get some some pretty good-looking assets this way for environments with Alchemist you can same thing you can drag and drop with a photo or or any existing material that you may have that you that you've got on substance source and start layering them to create something unique and you can get some really good results as well so I think we're at a point where I wouldn't say it's easy to make games because it is not but making art per game is is easier than ever and I'm very excited about this because we see so many games coming out that are using substance and we're always so excited every time even though there's been a lot of games using substance were always super excited to

see every new game coming up even if it's a triple-a or a small indie game coming up with with new ways to use the tools and to create some some new art style that we've never seen before there's there's always something exciting this what's called the game industry thing yeah I couldn't say more DDD for sure the Triple A games very advanced games are leading the pack in terms of quality and quantity most of the time but the long tail of smaller games they're very creative bring a lot and our tools are there to help all these creators big companies big studios but also small super creative indie teams and yeah substance is here for everyone well I want to thank you from

behalf of the game developers out there for making great tools and making this transition a lot more fun I mean more than ever people are at home dreaming about being outside so this year of anything should be fruitful for everybody on the tools and games side like we mentioned before I want to think he gets really fun and thank you thank you so much man I learned so much on thank you for having us and it's always fun to have a tool developers on so that's it see you guys next week they saved you [Music]