Substance Designer 5.6 Released

New filters dedicated to the blending and weathering of scanned materials as well as new Normal map and Ambient Occlusion filters.

Allegorithmic released v5.6 of its Substance Designer adds with new filters for the blending and weathering of scanned materials as well as new Normal map and Ambient Occlusion filters. Let’s take a look at the new update. 
 You can find the full release note right here.

Material Blend Height

A variation of standard Material Blend node which uses the Height Blend method to blend 2 full materials using their height map, as well as making sure the albedos match properly, all in a single node.

2 materials are seamlessly blended using their respective height maps.

Snow Cover

This Snow filter allows you to add a snow cover to any pre-existing material. The snow will pile up realistically and parameters allow you to choose the thickness of the snow, add a melted snow effect or simulate a windy blizzard situation. Works best with a contrasted mask as input. 

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Horizon Based Ambient Occlusion

This new Ambient Occlusion filter generates an accurate AO by taking into account the real-world scale and depth of the surface, rivaling the quality of a raytraced bake in only a few milliseconds. Compare that to the time it takes to manually generate a high poly displaced plane before baking it to a flat quad without artefacts and you have a game-changer!

On the left an Ambient Occlusion raytraced from a high poly mesh, on the right, the new Horizon Based AO node.

Color Match

The Color Match node allows you to fine-tune the overall tint of your scans without destroying the color of small elements. This is useful for example to blend 2 ground scans where the dirt may have a different tint and need to be adjusted but leaves and grass patches should remain untouched. Just pick a median color of the target albedo and you’re done.

2 materials with very different albedos are matched to blend perfectly.

Height Blend

This Height Blend filter was made to ease the process of blending multiple materials and create height-based masks for realistic blending and effects.

2 materials represented by the blue and red areas are blended using their height map

Author: Artyom Sergeev

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