Substance by Adobe is ready to join CG artists for some creative summer fun with the release of Substance Painter 2019.2. Key updates include majorly faster bakers and dozens of new smart materials.
More info on these updates available on the Substance by Adobe blog.
Baking allows users to record surface details from a model and transfer them into a texture — an essential pipeline element since the advent of procedural texturing. The new bakers in Substance Painter take full advantage of high-end GPUs to deliver up to 200x the speed of former bakers, with the same high quality. Working with Nvidia GTX 10xx or any RTX GPU allows for full leverage of the DXR raytracing API, making it possible to bake hi-res maps in a couple seconds instead of minutes. Ambient Occlusion maps bake up to 193 times faster, and Thickness maps bake up to 100 times faster.
Those with an older Nvidia GPU still benefit, as Substance Painter now uses the Optix API to accelerate raytracing and deliver much higher baking speed than previously possible. CPU users will also see a noticeable speed up.
Forty new smart materials have been added to the Substance Painter shelf, doubling the total to 80-plus assets. Some were previously available on Substance Share or in Mood Packs, but are now updated with the latest mask generators and added support for Metal/Roughness and Specular/Glass workflows. Additional smart materials were created by a dedicated Substance crew including members of the QA team and demo artists from around the world.
The update also introduces 20 new smart masks, including damages, splashes, leaks, dust and edges.
The Substance Painter team has also, per studio requests, improved the scripting API with features like the ability to change texture resolution, and a new plugin which allows users to launch the scripting API function directly within Substance Painter — available here.
At SIGGRAPH this week during Substance Day keynote, more big announcements were made.
- UDIM Workflow in Substance Painter: Two demos showing two different workflows allowed for seamless texturing from one UV tile to another — Importing a project file from The Foundry’s Mari, and creating a brand-new project in Painter with UDIMs. (Close Beta)
- Project Anorigami: Automating UV creation across segmentation, unwrapping and packing. More info later this year. (Demo)
- Substance Alchemist augmented material creator is now available for free trial. (Demo)
- New Substance Source Materials TC: The library will be expanded with more than 400 new procedural materials for architecture, bringing the total to around 600 customizable interior/exterior mats. (Second half of 2019)
- Substance Designer Summer 2019: Coming soon, the update will include improvements to the viewport, Node menu, library speed and MaterialX (ILM) support.
- Sneak Peek at what’s coming next from the Adobe R&D squad!
