The Substance Day at SIGGRAPH 2019 keynote just ended minutes ago, and we shared some big news with the Substance community.
Substance Painter: Multi-channel Painting Across UV Tiles is a Reality
A big leap forward for the UDIM workflow in Substance Painter! We revealed our very first demonstration of painting across UV tiles during the keynote.
This is what the UDIM workflow will look like in Substance Painter!
Two demos showing two different workflows allowed for seamless texturing from one UV tile to another: yes, native UDIM support is coming to Substance Painter. In the first workflow, a project file is imported from The Foundry’s Mari, and in the second workflow, a totally new project is created in Substance Painter with UDIMs!
Painting across UV tiles is still actively in development, now in closed beta with selected users – we will share more news about a release later this year!
Project Anorigami Unwraps Your UVs
UDIMs allow artists to get rid of the texture set and resolution barrier, but there is still one hurdle and it’s a significant one: UVs. Project anorigami is our shot at automating UV creation to break down that final barrier. We’ve developed APIs which allow to ensure an uncompromisingly qualitative UV creation. Project anorigami also automates all 3 parts of the UV process: segmentation, unwrapping, and packing.
We will share more news about the availability of Project anorigami in Substance Painter later this year!
And as a reminder, Substance Painter Summer 2019 was released just last week and features bakers which go up to 193 times faster, 40 new smart materials and 20 new smart masks, and new scripting API possibilities.
Project Substance Alchemist is Now Available on Free Trial!
Project Substance Alchemist is now free to download on trial for everyone! Get your free trial here or directly in the launcher.
This goes hand in hand with next week’s upcoming 0.8.0 release that will happen next week, which features a lot of new features to help with your material management: the ability to connect with your local folders, material tagging and rating, real-time monitoring in 2 dedicated views and a livelink to the launcher.
The delighter filter is also getting some improvements, with a new version getting close to a public release. Here are some of the results we’ve been getting:
Another subject we’ve been working on is Photometry, or material scanning through a series of photos. Until now, the workflow we’ve been pushing has been to use a simple setup with a fixed camera and precisely and evenly spaced light sources for each picture.
It’s fairly easy to put together but still required a somewhat controlled environment and lighting. This new method is much more forgiving: As long as your camera stays fixed, you can take as many pictures as needed with any lighting conditions, we’ll reconstruct the material automatically.
Substance Source: New Materials are on The Way
This one is for the lovers of extreme realism: archviz experts, VFX, and game artists. Substance Source is expanding its material library with more than 400 new procedural materials for architecture. This brings the total to around 600 customizable materials for interior and exterior creation. Expect them coming your way in a few weeks!
Excited? We have more in store for you. A set of high-quality scanned surfaces and atlases will help you take your environment work to the next level.
The materials dedicated to architecture, the new scanned surfaces and new atlases will be released in the 2nd half of 2019.
The Launcher is Expanding: Here’s what’s New
We released the launcher a few months ago and its user base has been steadily growing. As a result of the community’s enthusiasm, the app’s scope is now more ambitious, and the launcher is turning into a hub for the Substance ecosystem.
The launcher is free and allows you to download and update your software, get access to release notes, product news and user stories, and download materials directly from Substance Source, all in one place!
The next iterations of the launcher will let you send materials from Substance Source to other software, and manage – and update to the latest version – all the Substance integration with 3rd party applications!
Substance Designer: What’s Coming in the Next Release
Substance Designer Summer 2019 will be released in the upcoming weeks; here’s what it brings:
Dot node: it will act as a pass-through and allow you to organize your graphs in new ways. You can add multiple Dots to create custom paths between your nodes:
The viewport is getting an upgrade as well with Anisotropy and Clearcoat support in the OpenGL view.
The Node dropdown menu is getting a few improvements too, like being able to display the menu while dragging out a link to create a new node, by filtering only relevant nodes, and by integrating favorites to make sure your favorite nodes are always at hand.
The library goes faster! The team worked on optimizations which allows you to see your shelf 2 to 6 times faster.
MaterialX support: MaterialX is a material description format developed by our friends at ILM. It allows artists at Disney to create materials that can then be used in a vast array of platforms across many usages: in movies, TV shows, games, and VR experiences, even manufacturing for toys and derivated products. Here’s what the team has been cooking up these past few months and what it means for the future of material creation:
R&D: Sneak Peak at what we’ve got in store for the Future
Here are some of the Research & development projects we are working on:
The team stays at SIGGRAPH for the entire event – come by Booth 773 and say hi!
