Substance 3D Painter update adds Ribbon Tool, real-world displacement, and more

The new Substance 3D Painter introduces a range of updates designed to help artists work faster, with more precision and control. Whether you’re building game assets, crafting cinematic VFX, or visualizing product designs, this release streamlines every step from concept to production. Let’s take a closer look at what’s new.

Paint with precision using the Ribbon Tool

The new Ribbon Tool makes it easier to paint complex repeating details — like stitches, zippers, welds, or even text — along curved surfaces and intricate geometry. Instead of manually placing elements or dealing with stretching artifacts, you can now paint with patches that stay visually consistent.

Why use Ribbon instead of Path?

• Stretch a single image or SBSAR across the entire path
  Regular paths repeat the pattern, which can lead to visual breaks. Ribbon lets you stretch one continuous image or material along the full length for a seamless look.
• Handle sharp corners with control
  Ribbon neatly stretches over corners and gives you options for how the stretch happens, so your details stay clean and precise.
• Create assets with distinct start, middle, and end segments
  This is the most powerful feature: you can assign different inputs for the beginning, middle, and end of your stroke. Perfect for assets like zippers, where you need a head, teeth, and stopper. Plus, we’ve included a custom asset template so you can insert your own start/mid/end images or SBSAR files.

Better symmetry controls for fills and effects

Symmetry tools in Painter now extend beyond brush strokes. With the latest update, you can apply symmetry to fill layers and effects directly in the layer stack. This means mirrored decals, patterns, and projections are easier to manage and more consistent across your texture sets.

The new symmetry section in layer properties includes a flip option for instant mirroring, supports 3D projection modes, and is accessible via the Python API for studios creating scripting tools.

Real-world displacement for digital twins and product design

Painter now includes Physical Displacement, allowing you to define and preview surface geometry changes using real-world units. This is especially useful for product visualization and digital twin creation, where scale accuracy matters.

You can switch between normalized and physical units, view contextual height in centimeters, and set project-level displacement parameters. These updates make Painter a more reliable part of the visualization pipeline, ensuring that textures and materials reflect the true scale of physical products.

Vulkan support and Baker API updates for smoother workflows

Native Vulkan support is now available for Windows and Linux, delivering significant performance gains across complex projects. In internal benchmarks, interactive viewport performance demonstrated improvements on AMD Radeon GPUs when working with high-resolution textures, dense geometry, and complex layer stack calculations.

Painter also now includes significant updates to the Baker API that simplify baking tasks and give artists and technical teams more control over baking in automation.

Extend Painter with Creative Cloud Desktop (CCD) Plugins

Substance 3D CCD Plugins are now supported in Painter and Substance 3D Designer, offering new ways to automate tasks and customize workflows. These plugins use a public Python API and integrate seamlessly without cluttering the core UI.

Check out the first two plugins, already available via the Creative Cloud Desktop app:

• Random Seed Batch Changer (Painter) allows you to quickly generate texture variations by changing all random seeds within a project.
• Node Snippet Saver (Designer) can be a huge timesaver in material creation, allowing artists to save and reuse custom Designer node graph setups as they would macros.

These plugins are ideal for standardizing tasks across teams or projects, and users can build and share their own tools via Creative Cloud to solve specific workflow challenges.

Ready for your next project

These updates are built for modern 3D workflows — helping you deliver your best work faster and easier than ever. Update today through the Creative Cloud desktop app and start exploring what’s new in Substance 3D Painter.