When comparing Substance Designer vs Quixel Suite 2, the Slant community recommends Quixel Suite 2 for most people. In the question“What are the best 3D texturing tools for game development?” Quixel Suite 2 is ranked 2nd while Substance Designer is ranked 4th. The most important reason people chose Quixel Suite 2 is:
If you like Photoshop so much, Quixel Suite is for you as you never have to leave any tools behind.
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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 You don't have to leave Photoshop
If you like Photoshop so much, Quixel Suite is for you as you never have to leave any tools behind.
Pro Massive material library
You never have to download textures off the internet ever again as it comes with a very large material library to work with.
Pro Ability to paint directly on 3d models
The included 3Do viewer allows you to both view and paint on your models so you don't have to guess where that one spot is within your UV unwrap. Note that this is limited to painting masks, you cannot project 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 High hardware specs for smooth performance
This loads alot of texture data during typical use and comes with a fancy 3d viewer. If your hardware isn't up to spec, you will experience some major slowdowns when using it.
Con Obviously isn't free
It's the price of the full version of PixPaint plus $10
Con Only Works with Adobe Photoshop
Lack of options when it comes to Image Editing Software, especially since Photoshop is.not even free.
Con No longer supported
The development has stopped.
Con Doesn't always play nice with manually added layers
Quixel Suite basically takes over Photoshop in terms of layer creation and management. While you can still create layers manually, Quixel isn't always aware of it and may confuse the software.