Substance 3D: The latest updates to Substance 3D Painter and more

November saw new capabilities, new ways to work and improvements to the tools you love in Substance Painter. As we head towards the end of an amazing 2023 for Adobe Substance 3D, we’re not slowing down and continue to be committed to delivering innovative 3D tools and workflow improvements to Substance 3D tools — stay tuned for December’s Substance 3D Assets updates — and more!

Substance 3D Painter 9.1

Substance Painter, the industry standard for 3D texturing, has received numerous updates throughout the application in November. Everything from quality-of-life improvements to new vector import support and new interoperability with Adobe After Effects.

Resource import and management

One of the big improvements in Painter addresses usability and optimization. You can now easily drag and drop resources to a variety of areas within the project. This new universal drag-and-drop functionality makes texturing workflows in Painter more intuitive than ever before. You can work faster by simply dragging and dropping Painter resources into the viewport, layer stack and slots.

Diving further into the latest Substance Painter release optimizes resources within project files utilizing lossless compression, effectively cutting the file sizes of project by up to half. This not only makes your Painter files more manageable and portable but also significantly reduces their storage footprint.

Path Tool enhancements

For the Path tool in Painter, multiple enhancements have been made based on user feedback. Now you’ll have more control over the tangents of a path and path points can also be adjusted with manipulators for finer control and precision. Each path now has its own visibility control to turn its display on and off in the viewport, and disabling a path’s visibility also removes its effect on the final texture without having to delete the path. It is also now possible to copy and paste path positions and brush properties. This makes it much easier to match up a path as part of a complex shape or share a specific look of a path across other multiple paths.

Learn more about the Path Improvements in Painter here.

ASM Shader Transparency Support

Adobe Standard Material (ASM) shader support in Painter has been updated to support transparency, translucency and absorption properties. This is essential when creating materials such as glass, plastics or a surface that is affected by light passing through it or light absorption. This also allows you to better view your materials in real-time in Painter’s viewport without the need to switch to a different shader to work with materials using a transparent property.

Vector Import

Painter now offers vector import support, allowing designers to bring in vector designs from Adobe Illustrator using SVG without compromising visual quality. This resource can be used in layers, as part of the paint tools, and more. Designs retain their scalable qualities as textures and decals and allow access to layers within the SVG file. This is beneficial to any texturing workflow where Illustrator is part of the design process. SVGs can be imported via the menus or simply drag and dropped onto an existing mesh or layer stack.

Send to After Effects

Now Painter features ‘Send to After Effects’ making it easier than ever to texture a 3D model and send it directly to Adobe After Effects with a single click. This workflow caters especially to motion design workflows using the new native 3D support in After Effects. Textures can be iterated in Painter and updated in After Effects for a seamless connected workflow.

With the addition of Sampler and 3D Assets in these workflows, the Substance collection offers a powerful 3D model prep and a library of ready to use 3D assets for motion design.

Substance 3D Assets

Substance 3D Assets — a library of over 18,000 high quality 3D assets exclusively available as part of the Substance 3D Collection — continues to add new ready-to-use, professionally produced 3D assets, that can be used in 3D projects of all types.

For November, the Substance 3D Assets team introduced a brand-new set of stylized dioramas focusing on motion design as part of a new Icon collection. This includes 100+ assets that can be used for a variety of creative 3D design projects. Choose from various UI and UX based designs alongside other dioramas to inspire your creative design needs.

Be sure to check back in December for more updates to the Substance tools you use and love.