Substance 3D Designer Adds New Renderer, Post FX & Context Editing

It's been a while since the last Substance 3D Designer update, with version 14.1 releasing in February. Now, the software returns packed with numerous improvements designed to provide artists with true-to-final previews, professional-level polish, and full context editing.

At the heart of Substance 3D Designer 15 is a brand-new 3D render engine featuring a unified raster and path tracing architecture. It enhances functionality with shadows in rasterizer mode, improves quality and performance, and is engineered to support future technologies like MaterialX. Complementing OpenGL and Iray, it ensures a consistent experience across the Substance 3D ecosystem.

Combined with post-processing effects such as bloom, depth of field, and tone mapping, it also enables more accurate visualization of how materials respond under varied lighting and scenarios.

Additionally, users can import fully textured 3D scenes into the viewport via USD or GLTF formats, streamlining workflows by allowing materials to be previewed within their actual scene context rather than in isolation. Finally, new interactive tooltips on 3D Designer's core atomic nodes will help both beginners and experienced users work more efficiently and intuitively.

There are also other improvements that you can read about in the release notes, including support for USDA, USDC, USDZ, PLY, STL, among others, and performance-based, GPU-accelerated functionality for baking.

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