Inspire Tab

I didn’t use the Inspire tab that much as I was building one-off materials and didn’t really need to build up variations. But it feels like magic! I was poking around a bit and it’s really interesting how fast you can get a new color scheme. I particularly enjoyed recoloring materials by color schemes extracted from famous paintings. Like anything in Substance Alchemist – it’s very easy to play with and experiment,

Extracting Height Data

Alchemist has an improved version of Bitmap2Material and I was really surprised what you can extract from a single source. The results are not perfect all the time but with a little massaging and preparation you can usually get something really decent. You can also choose what to keep – many times I just kept the extracted height data and re-surfaced it with other materials.

Expect magic but don’t expect miracles. Height data you extract (from a single photo) usually comes out softer than it should, which works well for organic shapes though. For other times I wish we had some more control over how hight channel is generated, but I guess you can make your own height filters in SD – I might even try that! Nevertheless, it’s a great tool for building that first step of your materials and I see huge potential for AI to help with this.