Adobe brings a whole raft of new releases to the Substance 3D ecosystem, the collection of applications and content empowering artists to create in 3D. Let’s delve into the releases one by one.
Substance 3D Painter 9.0
The latest version of Substance 3D Painter now includes some great improvements whether you’re in product design or making games:
1. Path Tool
Painter’s new Path tool allows users to create 3D curves on the surface of a mesh, allowing designers and artists to easily place detailing such as stitching on 3D models. The Path tool provides a familiar, intuitive way to create vector paths on 3D models using paint layers or effects. Brush properties and path points remain modifiable at any time throughout the design process, and paths can be mirrored with Painter’s Symmetry tool.
2. New Default Base Materials
This new release of Painter includes 58 new materials, replacing the application’s previous default materials. These base materials have been designed specifically for Painter, featuring an upgrade in their overall quality, and in the wider possibilities for parametric personalisation available. In all, this allows you to get perfect results at any skill level, for any type of project. Also note that the materials that shipped with previous versions of Painter remain accessible on Substance 3D Community Assets.
Substance 3D Designer 13.0
For our texture creators, this newest release of Designer includes a number of improvements:
1. Splines
The addition of a range of Spline nodes to Designer lets you draw, edit, and assemble precise curved lines as part of the material creation process. It’s no longer necessary to send base shapes through 2D transforms and warps to create specific profiles! This gives you a wide range of new possibilities: you can, for instance, map your curves to a path, allowing you to create details such as pipes and cables as part of your material, or use depth data to cause your curves to twist around one another, or even splatter additional shapes along your curve. The Spline nodes let you determine the shape of your curves via a set of points, providing you with absolute control over their final shape, and curves created in this way remain editable after creation. This collection also includes a new set of Path nodes that enable you to convert any pattern within a greyscale image into precise curves.
2. Portals
You can now use the Dot node to hide connections in your graphs, as if your inputs and outputs are travelling through ‘portals’. This huge UX improvement — which remains entirely optional, of course, if you prefer to see all the connections right there on your graph — will make your graphs much easier to read. No more spaghetti-style node graphs!
3. Home Screen
If you’re new to Designer or a long-time user, you now have access to a new home screen, much like those in other Adobe products. This screen enables you to quickly create a new graph, see the list of all the recently opened files, and access a Learn section where you can find links to learning resources.
Substance 3D Stager 2.1
Quickly iterate and showcase your designs with the latest additions to Stager:
1. Fast GPU Denoiser
Imagine rendering your product shots! With the new AI powered denoiser leveraging the GPU, you can deliver high quality renders in a fraction of the time it would typically take to render an image. It is now enabled by default in Render mode and should result in blazing fast renders.
2. USD Interoperability
A welcome enhancement to Stager is improved support for the USD file format, allowing a comprehensive round-trip workflow between Stager and other apps within the Substance ecosystem, as well as third party applications. Stager can export and import full scenes through USD, including Stager specific data like ground plane settings, backplates and more.
3. Animation Improvements
This updated version of Stager includes a range of animation improvements. Most importantly, this lets you edit your scene while previewing an animation, greatly speeding up your overall workflow. Users can now also set the animation frame rate, ensuring the correct playback speed for playback and video export, and display frame settings as timecode.
4. Video Export
Stager can now export animations as video files, in GIF or MP4 format without having to rely on an external application. Users can export entire animations or a custom range within the animation as required.
Substance 3D Modeler 1.3
Substance 3D Modeler introduces a range of visual and interactive updates for everyone modelling 3D assets:
1. Hardware Ray Tracing in Capture Mode
Modeler now gives artists the possibility of creating screenshots of their models with high quality ray traced lighting directly in the application. Ray tracing requires an NVIDIA RTX GPU.
2. Boolean Preview
Make smarter choices when performing intersecting operations by visualising how clay layers will be combined before committing to the operation. Be precise, confident, and even experimental with how the Boolean shape is going to affect the other content it touches. This makes it easier to place clay layers relative to each other before applying an operation such as Union, Subtract, or Intersect.
3. Copy and Paste Scene Nodes
Moving objects between different places in the project hierarchy is now possible. Simply by copying and pasting the scene nodes, you can organise your project hierarchy however you like.
Substance 3D Assets
Substance 3D Assets — currently the largest curated library of 3D assets in the world with more than 18,000 assets — continues to add new ready-to-use, professionally produced 3D assets, to help boost the efficiency of 3D projects of all types.
Regularly updated, these additions to the asset library include more than 50 human forms, in a wide variety of realistic poses, allowing artists to be creative without having to design custom geometry. Importing such models into a workflow is an easy way to showcase fashion or product designs, or as a base for sculpting character designs.
The library now also includes a range of skull models, for use in projects that lean toward the anatomical, or the downright spooky.
Get in contact with Dax Data for more information on Adobe Substance 3D and keep checking our blog for the latest and most exciting updates on all Adobe Creative Cloud solutions.
