I love what Algorithmic has done with the Substance packages!
The procedural tools of Painter alone are worth the investment but there's a huge untapped treasure trove to be found for those who can master Designer and become a texture author.
I've got a little bit of experience working with node based software after a particularly taxing Unreal Engine 4 environment (see below) forced me down into the blueprint system which, elegant and powerful as it is, has a barrier to entry that isn't appreciated with deadline rearing its head. When I delved into Substance Designer for the first, second, eighth then tenth time I seemed to bounce clean off it. To stray from the tutorials was to sail into uncharted territory and the hungry maw of a kraken, or in this case, PBR texturing. Ironically, the setup for SD is very easy, it's understanding the language it wants you to speak that really takes some getting around.
The wizards who create entire buildings in the software operate on some other plane of existence I think as I'm still struggling to make rocks look like rocks and not dough-balls squished into a wall but I think it's starting to make sense. Anything can be built from anything essentially. The graph below is a very poor attempt to make a brick wall and mortar for a project I'm working on, and thanks to the intuitive nature of designer, the easy shapes are built into their own generators (i.e bricks) which can then be overlaid with more and more variables until they stop being simple black and white height maps and start be complex bricks with damage and wear and mortar and grain.
The power of SD comes from understanding the pivotal effect certain nodes have in conjunction with one another; a Gaussian blur on its own is a loose scattering of black and white values, but scaled, level adjusted and multiplied over another shape and you can begin to form wear and erosion patterns that will become the standard for the degradation to work off of.
It's early days, but I'm confident that in time I can start to get my head around it, spending a bit of time on every project authoring my own materials has already started me down the path to unlocking its secrets but it's a time to go still. There's whispers on the vine of a new piece of software called Substance Alchemist which seeks to remedy the disconnect between designers logical approach and painters more creative style, so perhaps this will play a big part in remedying my ignorance. I started in Zbrush only a year and a half ago roughly and now I glide around it with ease, using it as my main workflow software, so hopefully substance designer will slot into that tool belt too one day.
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