Changes are waiting for you in Painter, Designer, Modeler, Stager, and Sampler.
During Substance 3D Livestream 2022, Adobe shared what we should expect from its products in the near future.
Adobe announced that Substance 3D Painter will soon be able to export .sbsar files, not just texture maps. This will pack all the maps correctly with the right channels and the right information".
Other than that, Painter will get the option to apply effects to folders, tag favorite assets, apply blending mode and opacity to all channels, and a lot of other quality-of-life improvements. The update will be live in October.
Substance 3D Designer 12.1 and 12.2 are expected in March and July, adding USD support and an update to VFX Reference Platform 2022 – a set of tool and library versions used as a common target platform for building software for the VFX industry. New nodes will also be added to the tool.
Before that, in October, the Designer will get geometry subgraphs and instances to reuse a set of nodes in various other graphs.
Substance 3D Modeler's next beta release will see stamps, first built-in, like rocks and primitive shapes, and you'll also be able to create your own stamps from clay layers and import meshes to use as stamps. The company continues to iterate on the prototypes of the Buildup and Crease tools.
Adobe also mentioned it's working on support for more brands of headsets other than Oculus, which is available for Modeler now, but there's no timeline now.
Substance 3D Stager will introduce triplanar projection, which is supposed to eliminate the need for UVs in September. Another addition is a new material showcase sample scene, it allows showing your materials all set up, with the right lighting and displacement. To reinforce the feature, an autosave feature is introduced.
Other changes include support for Structure models with subgraphs, exporting materials in MDL, and mapping textures to materials by a keyword.
Substance 3D Sampler will soon introduce photogrammetry, it will automatically convert photos of real-world objects into textured 3D models with “no fiddling with sliders or tweaking values”. You will be able to import photos of a real-world object, and the software will automatically generate masks isolating the object from the background of the images. You can then export the scan as a point cloud, high-poly model, or decimated low-poly geometry.
To learn more about the upcoming changes, check out the stream here. Also, don't forget to join our Reddit page and our Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.