Description
The Substance Plugin for Houdini lets you load Substance Archive files (SBARs) into Houdini in COPs (our own texturing context). This gives you the ability to chain Substance nodes together, feed the output of Substance graphs to all parts of Houdini (Terrains, Materials, Geometry) and many other workflows.
We have worked closely with the Adobe Substance team to provide the best integration between the 2 powerhouses of proceduralism, and will continue to do so as we support it.
Quick Demo
Substance in Houdini allows for the marriage of full procedural models with full procedural textures. Now you have the capability of an end to end procedural pipeline where you can generate an infinite number of models, have the geometry information baked out and fed into a substance material for infinite variations of textures.
Installation Instructions
For Houdini 17.5 the plugin is distributed with the GameDevelopment Toolset
GameDevelopment Toolset Installation Instructions
For Houdini 18.0 the plugin is distributed with SideFX Labs.
Note
The plugin is initially released only for the Windows Platform. Linux will be released shortly after the Houdini 18.0 launch and Mac will follow shortly after that.
High Level Features
Native Workflow
Physics Based 3d scattering, Fast Maps Baking, and all of the other great parts of Houdini are now exposed to your Substance workflows in one seamless experience. 
Deep Integration
By integrating Substance at the COPs context, its potential are unlocked to use Substances in all parts of the pipeline, instead of only limited to a rendering context.
Using Houdini's Image Planes as different textures, several new workflows fall into place.
Usage Info
Substance Material SOP
The easiest way of using Substance in Houdini is through the Substance Material SOP.
Simply add the Substance Material SOP to your sop chain and select a SBAR file. The Substance Parameters will automatically populate and you should be able to see the results of your Substance applied to your mesh.
The Substance node will be automatically connected to a Principled Shader, and the Diffuse, Roughness, Metallic, Normal and Height usages connected to the proper locations on the shader. Please ensure your usages are set properly on your Substance Output Nodes.
Note
The Substance Material SOP doesn't currently have any input support. This is something that can and will likely be added in the near future.
Substance Archive COP
For users that want full control, the lowest level node is the Substance Archive COP.
The Substance Archive COP will process Image Layers as different textures, on both the input and output. This allows you to read an appropriately named PSD file, feed it the the Substance Archive COP and then have it generate your final textures as separate image planes.
You can also chain different Substance Archive COPs together as well as mix regular Houdini COP nodes, like Gamma or Rename.
Please see the built in documentation for a complete description of how this node works.
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