Allegorithmic has announced a new version of its procedural material creation tool Substance Designer. The Spring update includes several features aimed at the needs of the VFX industry including a new UDIMs workflow that includes the following features:
- Bakers have been updated to support UDIMs and provide real-time feedback during the baking process. In addition, performance has been improved when using high-poly models thanks to a new geometry cache system.
- The new 2D view allows users to see the baking process in real-time and cancel should anything need further adjustment.
- The graph view has been updated to support a UDIMs workflow with the ability to texture multiple UDIMs with a single graph, while letting the software take care of the relevant baked textures for each one. The 3D view displays the currently selected UDIM.
- New export options allow the user to export at different resolutions from the working resolution and batch export all UV tiles or UDIMs in one go.
- New features in the Function Graph that allow the user to shift the current UDIM tile position for various effects.
- In order to implement these changes, large parts of the core have been rewritten with promises of up 30% performance gains for large graphs.
- Several new 3D nodes to aid with seamlessly texturing 3d objects.
A perpetual license for Substance Designer costs $149 with rental options starting at $19.90 per month for the entire suite plus the right to purchase a Perpetual license after 12 months. For more information and demos of the new features visit the Allegorithmic blog and see a video demo on YouTube.
The 3D nodes deserve more attention. Essentially you can sample 3D noise by plugging in a position map, which means you don’t have to do triplanar mapping with procedural noise anymore.