The Substance 3D team has been doing all the hard work so you can get the most out of your Substance 3D collection. This month, they’re doing a deep dive into the unique and versatile tool presets that make the Path tool in Painter simple to use with great looking results. Adobe will also reveal some incredible benchmarks generated by using the new GPU denoiser in Substance 3D Stager. To top it all off, they’ve got a brand-new garden collection from the Substance 3D Assets team to help bring your outdoor scenes to life.
Superb detailing using Tool Presets for Paths
One of the big standouts for Substance 3D Painter is the new Path tool. The response has been phenomenal. Already, artists are benefitting from using paths in their workflows. With this new tool, it’s never been easier to add precision detailing to your 3D assets by drawing a path along your 3D object to define exactly where to apply detailing. Any brush or brush preset can be driven by the path tool, and all properties of the brush and the 3D path are non-destructive, so they can be edited at any time.
Tool presets make it easy for anyone to get started with the Path tool in Painter, so you can start adding detail straight away.
For fabric and organic detailing, the stitching presets in the Pen tool are amazing. Simply draw a path on your model, choose the tool preset from the libraries and change the type of stitching. There is also a welding tool preset to show metal joinery that can also be customised to whatever your project needs. All these tools, including the presets for top stitching, seam, puckering and welding, are included with Painter.
To learn more about how to use tool presets, check out this tool presets tutorial.
Custom Tool Presets
It is also possible to create your own tool presets for Paths if you have a specific need for your workflow. These tool presets are custom-built scripts that are a combination of brush, alpha and materials. So, you can generate your own custom presets for a specific type of detailing or just to experiment creatively.
Vince Gault, senior Substance 3D technical evangelist, created a “parting shut line” tool, that can be used for detailing metal work, like a car for example. The real benefit is that you can create libraries of custom tools for your production pipeline or even share and download tools created by other Painter artists. Vince’s tool can be downloaded free of charge here.
Benchmarking the GPU Denoiser
When Stager 2.1 was released last month, it came with a range of improvements, and one of the key features is a new GPU-accelerated denoiser, powered by machine learning. The goal of this new denoiser is to massively decrease render times without compromising on the rendered image quality.
The GPU denoiser is the product of a partnership forged by the Adobe Substance 3D Tech Transfer team, who collaborates with Adobe Research and the Substance 3D product teams to develop and ship fundamentally new and innovative technologies that make our tools more approachable, delightful, and powerful.
Benchmarks
If you are new to Stager or an existing user, the speed of the GPU denoiser is quite substantial. To demonstrate this, the Adobe Research and the Substance 3D teams ran a series of benchmarks to help illustrate the gains when using the accelerated GPU denoiser.
They rendered animation sequences in previous and latest releases of Stager across platforms, and then proceeded to compare the render times and the energy consumption.
With the new GPU denoiser in Stager 2.1, draft render speeds are improved 70 percent and 93 percent and when rendering in high quality mode, rendering speeds are improved between 33 percent and 52 percent. Rendering speed varies depending whether you’re working on Mac or Windows, but in both cases, the performance benefits are substantial. Your speeds will also vary depending on the complexity of your scene, but you can expect to see similar numbers when rendering in Stager 2.1 for your projects.
In addition to speed improvements, the GPU denoiser can significantly improve the quality of draft and medium renders in Stager 2.1 which can also save on overall rendering time.
Using the GPU denoiser in Stager 2.1 also consumes much less energy per render. On average our testing shows that the rendering speed improvements can reduce energy consumption by half, since the denoiser not only runs faster but also tolerates much noisier images, reducing not only the number of rays you trace, but also your carbon footprint.
Best Practices using the GPU Denoiser
Here are some best practices you can use to get the most out of the GPU denoiser in Stager:
When creating a new project in Stager 2.1, make sure you have updated your GPU drivers (on Windows) to the latest version. You will find that ‘Draft’ quality with ‘Denoise export’ enabled will provide fast, good-quality results for most scenes. When you need to create final quality renders, raising the quality to ‘Medium’ is usually sufficient. Reserve the ‘High’ quality setting for especially difficult renders.
When opening an older project in Stager 2.1, it is important to re-apply the render preset to benefit from the lower SPP defaults. For example, if your current preset is set to ‘Medium’, try switching it to ‘Draft’ and then back again to ‘Medium’. As a result, you should notice the ‘Samples’ number decrease. This will help in speeding up the rendering. Remember to turn on ‘Denoise export’ to take advantage of the benefit of the accelerated GPU denoiser. You should have great-looking renders in no time at all.
Substance 3D Assets
Substance 3D Assets — a library of over 18,000 high quality 3D assets exclusively available as part of the Substance 3D Collection — continues to add new ready-to-use, professionally produced 3D assets, to help boost the efficiency of 3D projects of all types.
This month, explore the Garden collection of 3D assets and discover a range of models, scanned textures, and materials to help you build your dream outdoor space. For starters, the scans comprise of various ground textures such as soil, which can be used as the basis for the garden. The ground can be further developed by mixing the scans with the various parametric materials for a unique look. With such high-quality assets, you can customise your garden however you want. Plus, you can even use the Garden collection to set the scene for a hero product or spruce up product packaging.
Get creative and make a garden that is uniquely yours! Contact Dax Data to find out more about the Adobe Substance 3D Collection.
