Explore Procedural Modeling with Designer!

Substance model graph: expand your procedural mind!

We’ve added a whole new Substance model graph to Substance Designer, allowing you to create fully procedural models. The concept is simple: play around with basic shapes, merge them together in a kitbash manner, and expose different parameters to make your models completely parametric.

You can also import your own models and add in the details with procedural geometry. Use a variety of nodes to multiply, add, merge and create variations of your geometry. The possibilities are endless! Here are some examples:

You can work on your model graph and material graph at the same time, seeing the result in the 3D viewport.

The Substance model graph can be opened in Substance 3D Stager, Adobe’s new staging and rendering app. You can now export your model and keep tweaking it until you get the perfect render.

This is only the first release of the model graph and there are many things we want to add and improve already, so please don’t hesitate to provide us with any feedback to help us do just that. We can’t wait to see the beautiful and crazy creations you come up with! In the meantime, get inspired by these beauties, made with Designer during beta testing:

Leverage the Substance 3D ecosystem

The new “Send to” option allows you to easily export your assets to Substance 3D Painter and Substance 3D Sampler; no more time wasted between the different tools! This new functionality also allows you to iterate on a graph and re-send it in a click, automatically updating the asset in Painter or Sampler.

Designer → Painter:

Designer → Sampler:

You can also directly browse your asset library in Adobe Bridge, a powerful creative asset manager that lets you preview, organize, edit, and publish multiple creative assets quickly and easily, directly from Designer.

Bridge → Designer

Publish your assets faster

We’ve refreshed the publish experience: you don’t have to save your SBS file before publishing your SBSAR project any more; you can easily see which graphs you are publishing, and generate missing icons, all in one step!

Play with new content

In this release we’ve focused on raytracing techniques applied to 2D textures. 5 new nodes make their way into Designer!

Generate accurate AO with the Ray-Traced Ambient Occlusion node:

The parameters are the same as the ones you can find in the bakers.

The Ray-Traced Irradiance Node can be used to generate a realistic emissive map that considers the material height/displacement and/or bake down the illumination produced by an HDR environment:

Generate directional masks or compute simple lighting thanks to the Ray-Traced Shadows node:

The Ray-Traced Bent Normal node: bent normals are usually associated with meshes: this map gives us the direction that is least occluded by the surrounding geometry. Since the underlying algorithm is very close to the ambient occlusion, we thought it’d be interesting to apply this principle to textures!

The Ray-Traced Caustics node accurately simulates the interaction of a directional light and a liquid surface represented by a height map. In combination with animated noises, you’ll be able, for example, to generate nice loopable and tileable sequences or flipbooks.

You might wonder if your RTX card can help make a difference, but you don’t need powerful GPUs to run these nodes. That’s because these GPUs are good at tracing triangles, whereas here we are dealing with pixels. Nonetheless, the underlying math and accuracy is all the same!

Unify your material workflow with Adobe Standard Material

Adobe Standard Material is a PBR material specification that introduces new material behaviors such as clear-coating, advanced subsurface scattering, sheen, anisotropy, and specular edge color.

All applications in the Substance 3D ecosystem now use this new material definition by default, allowing for total visual parity and consistency between all Adobe apps. It’s designed to be compatible as much as possible with third-party applications like 3ds Max, Maya, C4D, Unity, and Unreal Engine.

Manage your content with custom metadata

You can now add custom key values in the metadata of your asset, allowing you to customize your pipeline and easily search content and display information.

This can be used, for example, to display the physical size of your material and calibrate it to scenes in third-party applications, to identify the supplier and color code of a specific material, or represent any other kind of information.