When comparing Substance Designer vs Mari, the Slant community recommends Mari for most people. In the question“What are the best 3D texture painting softwares?” Mari is ranked 8th while Substance Designer is ranked 14th. The most important reason people chose Mari is:
Though it is expensive, if you wish to use it continuously you can constantly renew your trial with lovely fake emails. Learning this can benefit your career into games or film.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Native integration with many game engines
It has the ability to export sbsar files, these can be put into most game engines allowing in engine tweaking of procedural content.
Pro Ability to create custom substance files
Substance designer allows users to create custom substance files, it offers a lot of power with a mix of workflow of working with procedural textures and bitmaps.
Pro Free Trial
Though it is expensive, if you wish to use it continuously you can constantly renew your trial with lovely fake emails. Learning this can benefit your career into games or film.
Pro FIlm Industry Usage
Though Substance Painter is catching up to Mari in terms of texturing wiht higher res textures, this program is what is used in tandem with Zbrush most commonly in Film. For the Game industry it is Substance Painter and Zbrush.
Pro Great at handling large texture sets
Mari can handle 32K textures since 2010. It was used in creating the characters faces and such in the Avatar movie, as close-ups require such high-res textures.
Cons
Con Expensive
The pricing starts at $20 for the indie license and $100 for the pro license.
Con Not good for painting textures
Substance designer is not very powerful when it comes to painting textures, while there are 2D painting tools, they are not very good.
Con The most expensive one yet
Not made for hobbyists or indie game developers.
Con Eye wateringly expensive and inaccessible like all their products
Con Not object oriented
