Adobe Explains How It Rebuilt Substance 3D Painter’s Baking Workflow

Adobe has made Substance 3D Painter workflows a major priority and delivered three updates throughout 2026.

The latest update, Substance 3D Painter 12.2, introduces cage painting, allowing artists to adjust projection distances directly on their models using familiar painting and Polygon Fill interactions. It builds upon the skew painting and automatic rebaking introduced previously, while a substantial Polygon Fill overhaul, Texture Set Highlighting, and Order Independent Transparency address several other sources of friction in complex texturing projects.

In this interview, Adobe Substance 3D Painter Product Manager Laurens Corijn explains how the team renewed its focus on baking, how Painter’s painting system was extended into baking mode, and why user-interface development accounted for a significant portion of the work.

Substance 3D Painter now serves industries ranging from games and entertainment to product visualization in fashion, automotive, and physical goods. As the product expands, how do you continue supporting the game artists who formed Painter’s original audience, particularly with specialized workflows such as baking?

Laurens Corijn: Good question. Anytime we plan for new features, we try to make sure we cover as many industries as possible. That can be through individual features for each specifically, but often we can make a feature offer value to people in different industries if we take their needs into account from the start. So smaller features like Physical Size matter less for artists working in entertainment, whereas a big feature like Ribbons was a big hit across industries.

Recent updates make baking a major priority, introducing skew painting, auto-rebake, a redesigned baking interface, and other workflow improvements. What did that release establish for the team, and why was now the right time for these updates?

Laurens Corijn: We felt we had been neglecting baking for a while, and this is mostly gaming/entertainment, so we decided to focus on it for this year. So much so that we squeezed out 3 releases in 2026 even. The reason was that we were hearing more and more people were, despite preferring not to, bypassing Painter for baking and using other tools.

The journey of then reimporting their bakes in Painter can be a hassle, so we wanted to accommodate that workflow much better. After some rounds of user research, we established Skew, Cage, Bevel, overriding settings per object, and baking multiple copies of the same map were the most missed features, so we started prioritizing these and took them on in that order.

Cage painting is one of the headline additions in the newest update and addresses a capability artists have requested for some time. Can you explain how it works and why bringing cage adjustment directly into Painter was technically challenging?

Laurens Corijn: Cage painting connects nicely to Skew. Skew is the direction of your bake rays, and cage is simply the distance they travel. To be fair, Cage was less challenging than Skew, as we had already established the basis with Skew, which is enabling Painter's painting system inside the baking mode. It also involved creating a new hidden type of layer stack to hold this painted information.

On top of that, for Skew we determined early on that some form of automatic rebaking would be a must, as you’d need at least quasi-instant visual updates. That system took quite a while to build, but with it in place for Skew, it only took a day or two to hook it up to cage painting.

Of course that’s only one part of it; at least half of the effort goes into UI design and programming, and I made it a personal goal to get as much UX improvement for the baking in as we could. Little things like renamed and changed buttons and text, better default values, etc.

How does painting cage adjustments inside Painter change the iteration process, particularly when artists encounter projection errors in difficult areas?

Laurens Corijn: You can simply work faster and more efficiently, without leaving your favorite texturing tool. Using Painter’s familiar, world-class 3D painting tools makes it all the more fun to paint these maps. Especially for cage painting we tapped into our revamped polygon fill tool, to give artists per-object cage offsets, rather than having to manually try to color in an entire object.

Painter now allows artists to use familiar painting interactions to correct both skew and cage-related baking problems. Why was it important to make these technical corrections feel more like the creative workflows artists already understand?

Laurens Corijn: Painter’s about having fun with 3D and texturing. I come from the old Photoshop, 2D texturing days, constantly toggling a UV wireframe layer on and off, and doing a little export roundtrip to a 3D app. We want to avoid all of that as much as possible in Painter and Substance tools in general. Things need to be accessible, interactive, direct, easy to find, and fun to use. Baking is inherently technical, so it’s especially important here to not overload it and make it even more complicated.

The Polygon Fill tool is also receiving its first substantial update in roughly a decade. Which limitations had become most apparent in modern production, and what can artists do with the improved version that was difficult or inefficient before?

Laurens Corijn: Haha, well, number one is: no more selecting through objects with Marquee/drag selection! This one drove me nuts, and it’s a muscle memory I’ll have to unlearn even, having gotten so used to the limitation!

We’ve also got the Polygon Loop and Partial Loop tools, making it much easier to use clean quad geometry for quick texture mask operations. And there’s a preview visual now, as for some of the complex Partial Loop selections, it was very tricky to use without. We even got some technical things in, like the per-action blending mode for polygon fill, a requirement for cage painting, where every action is relative and needs to blend additively on top of the previous one.

Cage painting and the Polygon Fill improvements address workflows that many artists have historically handled through other specialized tools. Was part of the goal to let artists complete more of the game-asset workflow inside Painter without sacrificing precision or control?

Laurens Corijn: Pretty much yes; the more you can do inside a single app, the better. People have high expectations of Painter. We wanted to go above and beyond and allow for more control than people would expect, with things like Edge Protect for Skew, or Polygon Fill for Cage. We also plan to keep polishing some aspects of these features with smaller releases, like we did with Skew, adding some extra options that were missing at release.

Texture Set selection highlighting is a smaller addition, but it could make complex, multi-material assets considerably easier to navigate. How does the feature work, and what kinds of production scenes or assets benefit most from it?

Laurens Corijn: Before, the only way to tell what texture set was which part of the mesh was to frantically toggle visibility states on and off. Now we have a very nice way to preview visually, in two directions. Hovering over the texture set lists highlights in the viewport; holding Ctrl + Alt in the viewport highlights it there, but also in the list, and with a name tag bottom left. Right-click then switches to that texture set. Honestly feels like something we should have had for ages; I’m happy I pushed for this to go in.

Painter also now introduces Order Independent Transparency rendering. What visual problems does this solve, and how will it improve the experience of authoring materials for layered, overlapping, or partially transparent surfaces?

Laurens Corijn: As any artist can attest, transparency in a real-time, non-raytraced viewport is not easy; it often doesn’t look great. We’ve improved this a lot with OpenPBR, but the sorting of transparent surfaces (think layered glass), has just been an inherent limitation of real-time rendering. With OIT, that’s now much improved. You only really notice in specific scenes, but you don’t get weird layering artifacts for transparent objects rendering behind each other.

Between the baking overhauls, OpenPBR support, cage painting, and the renewed Polygon Fill workflow, Painter appears to be strengthening both its interoperability and its role in game-asset production. What should game artists and technical artists see as the larger direction behind these two releases?

Laurens Corijn: I think people can tell there’s an underlying idea here that we want to make it easier to actually start texturing, start painting. Not to say we want to rest on our laurels regarding texturing, but the thing holding more people back from actually learning Painter is not that the texturing tools are bad or difficult, but all the other steps around it. Preparing a mesh, assigning texture sets, baking, etc.

You really need to understand and keep track of a lot; even pro artists often have to do a few round trips to Blender, Max, or Maya before their Painter file is set up. Baking was/is a part of that; having to bake in external applications slows you down, is complex, and slows you down from getting to the fun part. So it’s that aspect that we want to improve: get people started with creative texturing quicker and smoother, whether it’s by manual operations or assisted by automatic processes and AI.

Laurens Corijn, Adobe Substance 3D Painter Product Manager