After recent preparation for use in production, the Substance in 3ds Max plugin now raises the bar even higher with a release focused on workflow enhancements. The team has been hard at work to further improve the plugin, in order to make sure that the foundations of Substance in 3ds Max are truly solid, resulting in more enhancements to the overall workflow as well as a series of bug fixes.
Keyframe Substance Materials
With today’s release, the $time Substance Engine variable has been properly exposed and can be keyframed for animating Substance materials. The Substance parameters can now be keyframed just like any other parameter in 3ds Max and edited using the animation editor.
V-Ray RT, Redshift and Others
In this release, we have increased renderer compatibility across the board starting with preliminary support for V-Ray RT and Redshift. These renderers can now be used to render static images, and our team will work further on enhancing this support in the future.
When the plugin is presented with an incompatible renderer, you will be prompted to automatically apply a pre- and post-render script, which will allow the Substance material outputs to be used in the rendering engine. These scripts can also be removed from the Render Settings menu.
Rendered using Redhsift
Network rendering support
Rendered using Redhsift
Continuing Workflow Enhancements
First things first, you can now enjoy the added comfort of silent installation. We’ve also added scripting functionality to determine how many shaders a specific Substance material is hooked up to in the scene, as well as a scripting call to determine the plugin version.
New automated workflows have been added for Redshift and any renderer that accepts the standard physical shader.
Substance half-float outputs and unsupported compressed formats set in the .sbsar file are now handled by the plugin, so that 3ds Max always gets an output it can use, regardless of what is set in Substance Designer.
Rendered using V-Ray
Want to learn more about Substance in 3ds Max? Check out our course on Substance Academy.
