All The Announcements from Substance Days Hollywood

What came out of Friday’s Substance Days keynote? Allegorithmic brought over 10 major announcements, including new tools, new partnerships, and the latest on where Allegorithmic is going next.

• Substance Painter 2017.2 – Features include Anchor Points, new filters, performance boosts and scripting options. More info on the features can be found here.

• Live Link from Substance Painter to Unity – The scripting API has been updated to allow Substance Painter to transmit data continuously to third-party applications. The first experiment with this new feature is a Unity plugin creating a live link between the game engine and Substance Painter, allowing artists to see the results of their texturing process in-game, in real-time! 

• Substance Automation Toolkit – This toolkit allows users to automate their workflow using command line tools and a brand new Python API. Not only will this cut iteration times, it will help users texture massive amounts of assets automatically. Substance Automation Toolkit comes free with subscriptions to the Substance Indie plan and Substance Designer Indie licenses (paid for pro users). 

• Substance Source in Unity –  Starting in August, users will have access to Substance Source in Unity. Just hit the Substance Source button in the Unity interface, download your Substance, and your material will be instantly available in the Unity asset library. 

• Substance Source in Unreal Engine 4 – Substance Source is also coming to Unreal Engine 4! Instantly access Substance Source and download your materials from a library of over 1,000 options. The plugin will be available on the UE4 Marketplace in August.

• AxF Support in Substance Designer – Soon, users will be able to import AxF files in Substance Designer by using dedicated SBS and MDL templates for scan post-processing. Create hybrid materials by adding procedural parameters on top of a scan. This is just one step of bigger developments to make scan workflows with Substance easier and smoother. More info can be found in the X-Rite press release.

• New After School Offer – Last year, Allegorithmic made Substance licenses completely free for students and teachers alike. This year, graduating students can access the Substance monthly plan at half-price ($9.95/month) for their first year out of school. Available this August.

• MeetMAT Art Book – The top entries from the Meet MAT 3D Painting Contest are being compiled into a book! Coming soon.

• ArtStation Partnership – For every subscription to the Substance Indie monthly plan, users will soon get a free two-month ArtStation Pro account to help artists build up their portfolios! With an ArtStation Pro account, you can:
  • Create your own domain name
  • Customize your portfolio page with premium themes
  • Unlimited bandwidth, pages and projects
  • Appear at the top of searches
  • Get a Pro badge

• New Research and Development Prototypes – Allegorithmic is currently conducting research on high-quality, real-time lighting and shadowing, automatic UV mapping, interactive surface seaming and artificial intelligence for materials.