Substance Designer 2019

Allegorithmic has announced the latest version of Substance Designer with an update to the core engine that allows it to process both values and textures. According to Allegorithmic “Using the new “Value Processor” node, users can manipulate values from within the composite graph itself, helping to drive parameters and optimise their workflow with even more creative flexibility. Rather than working with nodes that represented elements like colour, users can add the colour value directly, simplifying and strengthening the design process. Users can also pass values from one node to another, and create global variables at the graph level. Over time, nodes/filters will attain the ability to become smarter throughout the graph as they receive additional data.”

Several new filters are also added. including two new Flood Fill nodes, an Atlas Splitter node that allows users to divide an Atlas in order to isolate and exploit the separate elements of a scan, Directional Warp Filters, the ability to render Height maps as 3D depth and rotate the resulting shape as a 3D object. There are also updates to the Triplanar node to improve the blending formula and random offset, as well as improvements to Normal Vector Rotation. 

The performance of the bakers has been improved and the addition of Optix for the AO, Bent Normal and Thickness bakers will now produce speeds at least five times faster than CPU ray tracing. The .obj loader has also been optimised and multi-threaded, leading to a significant decrease in loading times.

For technical users, the update brings expanded options to the Python Scripting plugin system. Users can now create GUIs for plugins within Substance Designer using the Python API. The plugin system has also been standardised, allowing for plugins to start when the application loads, aiding in the creation of persistent plugins. 

Find out more on Allegorithmic’s website.