Substance 3D Designer evolves: Stunning new renders, smarter workflows

Substance 3D Designer, for 15 years at the forefront of digital material creation, is now more powerful and user-friendly than ever, with new features that bring both visual impact and workflow clarity to artists of all levels.

At the core of this updated release is a new 3D render engine with a unified raster and path tracer architecture. Paired with post effects like bloom, depth of field, and tone mapping, you can now better see exactly how your materials will react under different scenarios. You can also import fully-textured 3D scenes into the viewport using USD or GLTF, speeding up your workflow by letting you see materials in the context of scenes rather than in isolation. And finally new interactive tooltips on the core atomic nodes of Designer will help both newcomers and seasoned users work faster and smarter.

New high quality 3D rendering

The latest release of Designer introduces an advanced 3D renderer, featuring rasterizer and path tracer modes. This new renderer enhances the viewport with features such as shadows in rasterizer mode and improved quality and performance, and it is engineered to support future enhancements, like MaterialX. This improves upon the existing OpenGL and Iray renderers in Designer and aligns with the renderers available in other Substance 3D applications, ensuring visual consistency across Substance 3D products.

New post effects

With the addition of the new 3D renderer, Designer now includes a suite of post effects to visualise how the procedural materials you are developing will react under certain real-world and in-game conditions. This includes high-quality bloom, which helps you better visualize emissive surfaces, depth of field, and tone mapping, including popular profiles like ACES and AgX. All these post effects can be accessed via the camera menu, giving you a closer preview of the final look of materials.

Designing materials in context with your 3D project

When you’re authoring materials, it can be incredibly useful to see how they will work on a 3D model or within a complex 3D scene. With enhanced format support and improved support for textures and cameras, Designer can load 3D scenes. That helps artists see materials directly on a mesh and preview their work in full context. In addition, it is now possible to create a graph from a texture already applied to an imported scene and override this texture or material in the USD scene as a new layer.

Faster learning with rich tooltips

This release makes Designer easier to learn with a set of new, rich tool tips that help artists easily identify and work with nodes. These tooltips, currently available for atomic nodes, include visuals that demonstrate the node's effect and provide a direct link to documentation for detailed information, including the list of parameters, tips, and tricks.

Other improvements

There are also other smaller improvements that you can read about in the release notes, including support for additional 3D formats, such as USD, USDA, USDC, USDZ, PLY, STL, GLTF, among others, and performance-based, GPU-accelerated functionality for baking.

Fifteen years in, Designer continues to evolve thanks to the global community of artists who push the boundaries of what’s possible. We’re more excited than ever about what’s ahead and grateful to everyone who’s been part of this journey.

You can download the latest version of Substance 3D Designer via the Creative Cloud Desktop, as well as learn more about Designer’s enhancements.