3D architectural rendering with Substance 3D.

At its heart, architecture is focused on the service of others through the design of the built environment. But at a day-to-day level, architects must perform this role while being pulled in a range of directions by varied and often conflicting, practical demands — clients who modify initial concepts, concerns regarding sustainability, even garden-variety tight deadlines. All of these factors and many more can play a determining role in the final outcome of an architectural project.

Fortunately, taking a 3D-centred approach to an architectural workflow can go a long way toward satisfying many of these requirements.

Of course, quality is of paramount concern in any architectural endeavour. An architect’s work must be the best it can be, every single time. Here, 3D tools like those in the Adobe Substance 3D toolset are an ideal solution. These tools allow architects to create utterly photorealistic images. Assets created can easily be placed within a full 3D scene, to show projects in their full context.

But speed and reactivity to changing requirements are also critical needs in an architect’s work. Here too, an approach centred on 3D tools provides a range of solutions. The Substance 3D toolset gives architects the ability to create and modify assets easily and quickly, as needed. Moreover, the Substance 3D asset library provides a vast wealth of ready-to-use 3D models and materials.

As real-time 3D visualisation, including virtual reality and augmented reality, increasingly becomes the go-to way to present architectural projects, Adobe is focused on providing a range of 3D tools that allow architects to boost the efficiency, flexibility and realism of their architectural visualisation projects.

Ultrarealistic, fully customisable materials are vital to creating high-quality visuals. For instance, if you want to propose a marble surface to a client, it has to look and behave like marble in every way — it must be the right colour and have the correct level of reflectiveness and the patterns of veins within its surface must be accurate. Anything less and the visual just won’t be convincing. What’s more, you have to be able to create realistic, compelling scenes quickly.

“Substance is at the heart of my material workflow.”

— ROBERTO DE ROSE, ART DIRECTOR, STATE OF ART STUDIO

Fortunately, the Substance 3D toolset lets you texture your assets and scenes with parametric, modifiable materials. Using these materials is as simple as dragging and dropping them onto your assets and tweaking the sliders to obtain the precise look you need.

There are a range of sources for these materials

A perfect, utterly pure material simply does not exist. In reality, it is a material’s imperfections that render it credible. The truth is in the details.

The Substance 3D toolset allows you to create and apply your own realistic materials, imperfections and all. You can create materials completely from scratch with Substance 3D Designer or you can build on data from your preferred material scanners, such as those created by Vizoo or X-Rite. You can use the material exactly as it is or you can modify it further, changing its components or adding completely new characteristics — in our marble example, for instance, you might choose to change the colour of the marble or add veins where none existed before.

Alternatively, you can use Substance 3D Sampler to create your own digital materials. Simply take a photo of your material sample and input the image into Sampler — the tool will convert it into a 3D material. As with Designer, you always have the capability to modify a material’s characteristics as needed.

Whichever material creation approach you use, you can create tillable materials of up to 8K resolution and save materials with presets as required. Any image created within the Substance toolset can be exported in a range of formats, to all major 3D tools.

A treasure trove of ready-to-use 3D architectural assets.

If you prefer to draw upon existing resources, you can import 3D materials as needed, whether from third-party sources or from the Substance 3D asset library. The 3D Assets marketplace contains thousands of ready-made 3D materials — including, for instance, a huge number of different types of fully parametric wood, marble, concrete, glass and much more — as well as a vast range of models, HDRIs and image-based lighting (IBLs).

“The Substance 3D asset library is a great tool to use for the creation of realistic materials without the necessity to produce them from scratch. For example, the carpet of the work area was made starting from a Substance 3D asset library.”

— MIRKO VESCIO, CEO, ONEIROS

Creating or finding the asset to meet your needs is easy and fast and will allow you to quickly establish your own individual material library.

The Substance 3D toolset makes it easy to create variations of your design proposals. The procedural Substance materials allow you to generate an essentially infinite matrix of materials, enabling you to experiment with mood and material possibilities as much as required — and to render each one as a high-quality image, if needed.

The net result is that you can increase your creative proposal output, in comparison to more conventional design methods, while maintaining ultra-high levels of image quality for each of these proposals.

Another advantage of a 3D-centred architectural workflow: 3D assets can be used in a wide range of presentation formats. Possibilities include high-end image rendering, films, 360-degree immersive experiences and virtual tours created in tools such as Unreal Engine or Unity.

Your 3D assets can fit smoothly within whichever presentation style works best for you.

The Substance 3D toolset features easy interoperability between its various applications, as well as seamless integration into all major 3D tools, both off-line and real-time. Substance 3D plugins allow you to import, edit and visualise Substance 3D materials in directly within drawing tools such as Sketchup; in modelling tools such as Revit, 3ds Max, Maya, Rhino, Cinema 4D and Modo; in 3D rendering engines including Lumion, V-Ray or Corona; in the Enscape VR plugin; and in major game engines, such as Unreal Engine or Unity. Whatever your tools of choice might be, the Substance 3D toolset can fit into your workflow.

Interested in getting your architecture firm to use Substance 3D? Learn more.