A Year of Substance: Livestreams

A look back at the outstanding livestreams of 2020!

  • Architecture
  • Community
  • Design
  • Fashion
  • Film
  • Game

2020 will stay in our collective memories as the year where our social lives went online. In order to celebrate, we thought we should share with you the best of our 2020 livestreams. But here’s the kicker: they’re all the best. It’s impossible to choose and, truthfully, we don’t even want to try.

So, thank you for being there, thank you for making magical art, and for making us laugh. We raise our metaphorical glass to you!

Enjoy every single livestream we broadcast on our YouTube channel in 2020 by scrolling just a little way down the page – and also don’t forget to take a look at the other articles in this series:

Meet the teams

Meet the teams behind the tools, sometimes joined by incredible artists who worked on release-specific artwork. The Substance Painter team and Damien Guimmoneau talked about the new UV Tiles (UDIMs) workflow, how it works, how and why it was built, and showed some cool tips and tricks to make the most of it.

Daniel Margunato joined the Substance Alchemist team as they talked about how to build an archviz scene and use the Image to Material with AI feature to quickly and painlessly bring materials from the outside world inside a 3D scene.

The Substance Source team shared a little bit of what they know of fashion design: how you can create materials just for fashion, and how you can use them to make clothes. But that’s not nearly all the Substance Source team did in 2020!

Along with massive internal releases, the team also worked with the best Substance material designers in the world for beautiful signature releases.

Substance Source signature releases

The year began strongly, with a mind-blowing series of ornate architectural environment materials by Naughty Dog’s Jonathan Benainous. Jonathan gave a great look into his thinking process in this livestream

Our favorite comment in the livestream: “Is this for real? I love this guy!” We feel the same.

Enrico Tammekänd joined the growing list of super Substance Designer experts with his theme of choice: Fantasy Battlefield. Enrico also had many great insights and shared a lot of them! We also had the pleasure to see Gaëtan, from the Source team, who talked a bit about the specific challenges of creating materials which need to be optimized for every user.

Our favorite comment from the chatroom: “I feel so much more motivated after watching this stream.” Because it helps, sometimes, to hear that experts failed a lot before getting to their level!

We took a trip in the Caribbean, in a cove where pirates and treasures lay in wait. Eric Wiley’s signature materials introduced two new types of materials we’d never seen before: trim sheets and procedural atlases. Eric then gave us a full breakdown of the creation of a parametric atlas.

Our favorite comment from the chat: “The optimizations you’ve got on these graphs are mind-blowing, learning a lot!” Eric shared lots of little tricks to get the most out of Substance Designer, so give this stream a watch!

Vincent Dérozier‘s approach to material creation is contextual. First, he decides on a scene, and then he chooses the materials he’ll need to create for his scene.

Our favorite comment from the chat: “​Vincent’s material is more organized than my life. oof D:” In any case, Vincent answered many, many questions in this masterclass.

The final signature release of 2020 was a homage to the cloth weavers of the world by Pauline Boiteux.

Our favorite comment in the chat:”​iteration is key, the perfect painting is never made on the first brush stroke.” Pauline spoke about two materials: the French lace, because she hated making it so much that she made it as parametric as possible to ensure she’d never have to do it again. And the beautiful lehenga, because it’s probably her favorite.

Guest artists talk about their projects

Miro Vesterinen explains how brutalist architecture inspired the creation of materials for Control.

In the chat: “​*goosebumps*

Jeryce Dianingana gets his inspiration from a variety of African cultures. This time, he chose to share his admiration for the Ndebele painters.

In the chat: “African art is so full of wonderful shapes, materials and colors.” We agree.

Magdalena Dadela is an expert at character creation. Her cute and creepy mandrake babies will have no more secrets from you after this livestream!

From the chat: “Learnt a loooooot from this stream!!

Tangi Bodio loves him homeland, the Celtic coast of Brittany, in western France. His love letter to his childhood shows great mastery of hand-painting technique.

No favorite comment, but a note: probably half of the texture artists from Québec city (where Tangi lives now) were in this chatroom.

Spin VFX: the team behind the special effect in The Expanse and Zombieland share their knowledge of 3D materials for films.

In the chat: “​I want this 8k overlay insanely.” UDIMs, high resolution, detailed work for film, the team explained it all.

Cem Tezcan is a tinkerer. And one of his favorite tools to tinker with is Substance Designer. He created a full vintage game console in Substance Designer!

In the chat: “I appreciate his devotion a lot. I will need to rest even after watching this.” Watch the Cem magic as it happens!

Roberto de Rose is maybe more famous for SOA Academy, the international training center for archviz. But when the time comes to get his hands dirty inside the tools, he’s only happy to share incredibly technical trick for using Substance with Unreal Engine.

In the chat: “​Lord!” True, this is not a beginner’s livestream.

Eugene Golovanchuk goes by Skeeva. He talked about his latest work in an Adidas campaign, with UDIMs!

In the chat: “officially, my mind’s blown.”

Can you believe that William Ruhlig, who won the Meet MAT 2 texturing contest, had only recently started to learn Substance?

They also couldn’t believe it in the chat: “How can someone who does work like that have just started on the software?” William hand-painted the displacement, and his “Polar Climate Scientist” is definitely the best MAT of the contest. And the competition was very high.

We had the pleasure of having Gio Napkil for a talk around VR sculpting in Medium. Let your instincts lead the way and create:

In the chat: “​This is so insanely fast… You could wake up from a dream, hop onto Medium and literally sculpt your dreams before you forget em. I mean, you’d have to be as good as Gio though.”

And finally, the last livestream of the year was all about workflows! Steve Talkowski, the robot creator, stress-tested the Medium to Substance to Dimension workflow for us, and had lots of cool ideas about it.

In the chat: “Great to be a student, with a great enthusiastic teacher!

Thank you, from everyone at Substance, at Medium, at Dimension: thank you for making 2020 a beautiful year.

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