When comparing Substance Designer vs ArmorPaint, the Slant community recommends ArmorPaint for most people. In the question“What are the best 3D texture painting softwares?” ArmorPaint is ranked 4th while Substance Designer is ranked 14th. The most important reason people chose ArmorPaint is:
ArmorPaint allows artists to paint across multiple maps at once. This allows for easy creation of coherent color, roughness, and bump maps.
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 Paint on multiple maps at once
ArmorPaint allows artists to paint across multiple maps at once. This allows for easy creation of coherent color, roughness, and bump maps.
Pro Entirely GPU-run
Supports GPU acceleration. Since it is run entirely on the gpu, it makes painting huge maps nice and smooth on modern graphic cards.
Pro Node-based brushes
A simple and robust "blender-based" node system to modify brush channels.
Pro Open-Source
ArmorPaint falls under the zlib license. The zlib license has been approved by the Free Software Foundation (FSF) as a free software license, and by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) as an open-source license. It is compatible with the GNU General Public License. As such, the program is FREE if you compile it from source, and (as of August 2, 2020) costs only €16 to purchase pre-compiled binaries.
Pro Epic MegaGrant's recipient
ArmorPaint received a $25,000 Epic Mega Grant. This is a large donation of money given by Epic Games through their MegaGrant Program to programs that show great promise. These grants are unconditional and recipients are expected to continue program development as they see fit. These grants can not be used to purchase unpurchasable software (open-source software).
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 It's NOT free (even though it's open-source)
Armor Paint is open-source, but the official binaries are not available for free.
Unless you can compile it yourself, or you run Arch Linux or a system based on it and can use an AUR package that'll build it for you - you'll have to pay to use this program.
Con Beta
It is not completed yet, which may lead to support drop, or a software that is not entirely usable.
Con No lossless upscaling of brush strokes
When exporting your maps in higher resolutions in Substance Painter - it'll re-draw all your strokes in the background to make sure the exported textures have as much detail as possible. Armor Paint doesn't have such a feature so far - if you paint on a small resolution texture - you're stuck with it, or you'll have to manually re-paint it yourself to get a higher resolution texture.
Con No projection on normals
The brushes are projected with a simple viewport projection, which can lead to weird warping of the brush on irregular surfaces.
