Adobe has announced the release of Substance 3D Designer 14.0 has been released with several quality of life improvements and a range of new nodes including tools for color manipulation, including the Quantize Color node for reducing color numbers in an image and extracting a palette, along with nodes for creating, modifying, and applying color palettes. The Anisotropic Kuwahara filter allows users to create painterly effects by applying directional blur that conforms to image details.
Additional nodes include Curvature Smooth, which now supports all tiling modes and offers enhanced accuracy and performance; Histogram Equalize, which balances grayscale image values; Bevel Smooth for drawing gradients or flat colors from mask borders; and Directional Distance for gradient drawing in specific directions. The Normal Uncombine node removes surface details from a normal map described by a height map.
Quality of life improvements focus on performance enhancements, such as faster node removal and reduced cooking times for graphs. Inherited parameters now display the currently used value rather than the default. MacOS trackpad support has been reworked for a more natural feel, and node movement beyond Graph View borders is now smoother. The 2D View improvements include better value checking across tiles, and users can now shift gradient map keys using the mouse middle click. The Edit Function widget allows for custom function injection through parameters.
API improvements feature four new scripting methods, including setting and getting graph types, opening package resources in editors, selecting resources in the Explorer, and focusing on specific nodes in the graph view.
The update also aligns with the VFX Reference Platform recommendations, leading to changes in Linux requirements, now necessitating RHEL version 8 or 9, and updates to plugins due to deprecated functions in Qt6.
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