3D painting application Substance Painter got an update today, its first since Adobe bought parent company Allegorithmic in January of this year. The new version of the software makes displacement mapping and tessellation features available through the Substance Painter real-time viewport and in the Iray renderer.
The company said the addition of both features will help artists make more precise sculptural changes to meshes and textures, allowing them to work more freely and at higher levels of detail in real time.
Also new is Dynamic Strokes, a system of 3D brushes that evolve over time. As examples, the company said an artist might be saved painting individual leaves and branches of a vine, instead using the brush to simulate a pattern of organic growth, or that a footprint on a beach could easily be painted into a trail leading into the distance.
Dynamic Strokes incorporate a range of parameters including randomness, time cues, fades, color changes and transformations that execute based on how long the brush has been in use. Substance Painter will ship with 20 preset Dynamic Stroke assets, but artists will also be able to create their own.
A Compare Mask effect lets artists easily blend and layer materials to quickly create tileable environments in conjunction with a Seamless Material template. Spherical and planar projection modes expand fill-layer options; radial symmetry helps artists create complex geometric shapes; layers in a stack can quickly be made visible and invisible, Photoshop-style; and a number of other tweaks are designed to improve workflow and create new shortcuts for 3D artists.
The new version of Substance Painter is a free update for Substance subscribers. The Substance Texturing Suite, including both Substance Painter as well as Substance Designer, is available to new users on a 30-day trial basis, followed by Indie ($19.90/month) and Pro ($99.90/month) subscription plans. Substance Painter is also available as a perpetual floating license with 12 months of updates and support ($990).
To date, Adobe has given no indication of whether Substance will be sold alongside or integrated with its Creative Cloud application suite.
