Bring CAD & Data Prep Directly Into Substance 3D Painter With This Plug-In
The latest RapidPipeline plug-in brings powerful CAD preparation tools to speed up and enhance material preparation workflows, right inside Substance 3D Painter.
If you're a Substance 3D Painter power user, you are probably familiar with the many great ways you can use it to equip your 3D models with beautiful materials. From texture painting to quick assignment from a material library, from games and VFX to e-commerce and product marketing – whatever material creation workflow you need, Substance 3D has you covered.
However, you might also be familiar with this problem: 3D and CAD models usually need a lot of preparation steps before they become usable in Substance 3D. You'll need to make sure that 3D models can be loaded in Substance 3D Painter in the first place – which doesn't really work for CAD formats like CATIA or SolidWorks, for example. But in addition to that, you'll also need to make sure that winding orders are correct, that the tessellation matches the level you desire, maybe remove occluded parts, and a lot more – in short: you'll need to prepare your 3D model's geometry first, and have it in the right format. In addition, you'll also need to make sure that your model has the right UVs for painting.
Getting there can take many hours per 3D model, sometimes even days. Wouldn't it be great if there were a tool to make all these preparation steps much easier and faster, so they could be done with one click? This is exactly where RapidPipeline for Substance 3D comes in.
RapidPipeline for Substance 3D: CAD Import & Data Prep with One Click
With RapidPipeline for Substance 3D, instead of manually converting, cleaning, and UV-mapping CAD data and 3D models through a bunch of other tools, artists can now import a model into Substance 3D and apply essential preparation steps on-the-fly – such as tessellation, winding order correction, mesh simplification, and invisible geometry culling. It is also possible to generate paintable UVs, or those that allow for the simple assignment of tiling materials, during the same step.
The CAD import step can be combined with the plug-in's three main workflows for UV generation that artists can choose from:
- Paintable UVs per Material: Generate non-overlapping UV islands for each material, preserving material IDs and enabling targeted painting. Ideal when you want per-material control without manual UV unwrapping hassle;
- Paintable Single Atlas: Create a unified UV atlas for the entire model, perfect for workflows where a single texture map simplifies material management or is used to fit a performance budget;
- Tiling UVs: Assign tile-ready UVs using a triplanar "box" projection, which is great when you want seamless textures with tiling patterns. These actions wrap powerful optimization logic into simple, painter-friendly controls that artists can invoke with just a couple of clicks.
All processing runs 100% locally, ensuring fast performance, full data privacy, and no cloud dependency.
The new workflows enabled by RapidPipeline for Substance 3D are especially relevant for companies working with Digital Twins, for example, for e-commerce and marketing content creation.
Powering 3D Digital Twin Workflows
While 3D tech art has been a discipline that was traditionally focused on games and VFX, more and more artists are transitioning into other industries, which are increasingly demanding 3D tech art expertise. CGI has replaced traditional product photography in many areas already, working with digital twins of real-world products is becoming more and more common, and do does the need to equip CAD models with realistic materials, for example.
For users who need a higher throughput to prepare entire libraries of CAD models, the recipes used through the Substance 3D plug-in (and other RapidPipeline DCC plug-ins) can also be leveraged at scale, through the automated RapidPipeline CLI batch processor – a powerful tool for 3D processing automation in the backend; this workflow is currently being leveraged by multiple large tech companies.
In case you got curious about RapidPipeline for Substance 3D, we have good news for you: the integration is available as a free 14-day trial (no credit card needed). You can explore all the features, and even chat with the human RapidPipeline team of 3D tech artists, providing support and answering questions.
