With the introduction of Substance Painter and the potential introduction of additional applications, Allegorithmic acknowledged that its cumbersome build process was a risk for the company. This procedure heavily relied on detailed knowledge from developers.įigure 1: Substance Painter adds texture to a 3D model of a fire hydrant.

Setting up new workstations-from code checkout to successful build-was a complex procedure that often took more than a day.

They required separate build and packaging processes for Windows and Mac OS X.

The setup scripts were not cross-platform scripts.

Without a link between the source code and the various versions of third-party libraries, it was difficult to revert to earlier versions of the project build.

When the process incorporated a new dependency or compiler, the updated zipped file was manually deployed to all of the computers.

The build process required third-party libraries, which were manually maintained in a zipped file that each developer had to store on his or her computer.

Many handcrafted scripts were used to set up environment variables to specify items such as dependency locations, platform types and compilers.

Code was stored in a single, monolithic Subversion (SVN) repository that had a mix of libraries, in-house tools and application sources.

The build process for Substance Designer was tailored over 10 years. It was built with QMake, which comes with Qt. Substance Designer was originally developed in C++, using the Qt framework. They focused on a tool called Substance Designer. When Allegorithmic first created Substance Painter, the company only had a small team of software developers. Major game studios now use the application.

Substance Painter is an application that has helped Allegorithmic become a leader of the texturing industry. Sébastien Deguy, the CEO of Allegorithmic, describes texturing as “touching with the eyes.”įour years ago, Allegorithmic launched the development of Substance Painter, which is shown in Figure 1. With texturing, a 3D model of a wall can look like it is made of concrete. Texturing is a virtual process that helps make a three-dimensional (3D) model appear realistic. Allegorithmic makes applications for texturing.

Allegorithmic substance designer