Substance Alchemist: Your Hub For Material Creation

  • Technology

Today, we are taking a new step forward in your material creation workflow, with the new Substance Alchemist release

It’s been a busy last few months. With your help, your feedback, and your answers to our surveys, we have made a (long) list of everything we can do to make Substance Alchemist grow. And then, we got to work. One after the other, we’ve painstakingly tackled the tasks. Some were emergencies and warranted bug-fix releases. Others, we’ve kept in a corner until today.

For instance: channel packing now allows you to export your materials anywhere.

But more on that in an instant. Today, we deliver a long list of changes. So many, in fact, that we’re cutting down the chase and directly giving you a link to the full release note.

And now, let’s show you what you can do with this new version of Substance Alchemist which, thanks to this update, truly becomes a hub for material creation. 

Let’s take a closer look at what this means, through the creation of a material in Substance Alchemist. For instance, this jungle ground.

Substance Alchemist lets you work with any input

Artists like to take inspiration from a variety of sources. Maybe you use photo references you’ve collected while roaming the world. Maybe you prefer using images found online, or assets from dedicated websites. Maybe you like to mix elements from all these different places…

Let’s create a material in Substance Alchemist

Using a little bit of this, a little bit of that, we are going to create a jungle ground in Substance Alchemist. We decided to start with this beautiful ground from Megascans, here.

And let’s add details for realism with atlases from Substance Source. (As a reminder there are tons of atlases on Substance Source – learn more here.)

With just a few quick steps, the material takes shape in Substance Alchemist! Add the finishing touches to your material with the blend mode and filters.

New Feature! Channel packing: use your material anywhere

Thanks to our all-new export window, a revamped UI helps you get better access to new functionalities: you can now export presets to pack textures for specific game engines, as well as automatically save your export setting for your next exports, and import & manage your export presets.

Let’s not forget about the preset selection. This precious new tool allows you to make sure your material is directly packed for a renderer or a game engine! Let’s see what this looks like for Unity HDRP:

We support the following engines and renderers: Unreal Engine 4, Unity Standard, Unity HDRP, Blender Cycles/Eevee, Arnold 5, Corona Render, Enscape, Keyshot 9, Redshift, V-Ray Next, Lens Studio, Spark AR Studio, and of course, PBR Specular/Glossiness from PBR Metallic Roughness.

Let’s see what our jungle ground material looks like in 6 different renderers!

In Unreal Engine:

In Unity:

In Blender Cycles:

In Maya with Arnold:

In 3ds Max with VRay:

In 3ds Max with Corona:

But wait, there’s more!

With Substance Alchemist, studios get dedicated new features as well. You can now access the resource configuration, which helps you guarantee entire teams work with the same resources. Learn more here.
With the update checker, you can control the software versions you use and select which update you want to install. Learn more here.
And finally, you can customize your new export feature to match your custom engine or shader. Learn more here.

The full documentation is here.

Want to learn about Substance Alchemist? Check out our tutorials, designed to help you make the most of this new release!

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