Substance 3D Designer 14 Has Been Released

The latest version of Substance 3D Designer brings several quality-of-life improvements and plenty of new nodes. The tutorial above explains these nodes, demonstrating how to use them for material styling and managing colors more efficiently and intuitively.

New nodes dedicated to color manipulation are Quantize Color, dedicated to reducing the number of colors in an image and extracting a palette from it, a family of tool nodes to build your own color palette (View/Create/Modify Color Palette), and one to apply it to another image using an ID map (Apply Color Palette).

You will also find the ID To Mask Grayscale node to convert your ID map (computed by Quantize Color) to a grayscale mask. Armed with this suite of nodes, you have all you need to create stylization effects using colors.

If you want to go even further with stylization, you can generate some painterly effects thanks to the Anisotropic Kuwahara color/grayscale filters. In detail, it applies an anisotropic directional blur which conforms to the details of the image. The result is an image that appears to flow in the direction of the shapes within.

Check out some other new powerful nodes:

• Curvature Smooth: this new version now correctly supports all tiling modes, adds two new outputs (convexity and concavity) and improves both in accuracy and performance.
• Histogram Equalize: this node equalizes the histogram for a grayscale image by adjusting values to get an equal distribution. It comes with two companion nodes: Histogram Render to output the image's histogram and Histogram Compute to encode a histogram as a row of pixels.
• Bevel Smooth: allows to draw a gradient or a flat color from the borders of a mask (outward, inward, or both). The node Directional Distance draws a gradient too but in a specific direction.
• Normal Uncombine: this node is the opposite of the Normal Combine node, it removes from a normal map the surface details described by a height map.

The quality-of-life improvements include enhanced performance and responsiveness for large projects, revamped trackpad support on macOS, and updated 2D View functionality. Now, with tiled display enabled in 2D View, you can get values even for pixels that are not on the original tile, it helps a lot to check sampling and value transitions across tiles.

Learn about API improvements, VFX platform requirements, and other Substance 3D Designer 14.0 updates in the release notes here and join our 80 Level Talent platform and our Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Reddit, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.