Substance 3D Painter 12.2 is out now! Cage Painting, Polygon Fill improvements, Texture Set Highlighting, and more!

We recently released Substance 3D Painter 12.2, bringing improvements designed to make baking and everyday texturing quicker and more direct.

Cage Painting is a big addition. You can now paint the cage distance directly onto your mesh, either with a brush for per-pixel control or with Polygon Fill to change whole sub-objects at once. That means you can spot problem areas and clear baking warnings in specific places before you bake, cutting down on the back-and-forth.

Polygon Fill gets some upgrades of its own. You can select loops of polygons with a live preview of where the loop will land, or grab just a small patch with the new Partial Polygon Loop mode, alongside the existing rectangular marquee. A new Visible Polygons Only option also stops a fill from spilling onto the back of your model, which is especially handy with clean topology.

Texture Set Highlighter makes it easy to match texture sets to geometry. Hover over a texture set in the list and the matching part of the mesh is highlighted in the viewport. Hold Ctrl/Cmd + Alt while hovering over the model and it works in reverse, highlighting that part’s texture set. It’s a quick way to find your bearings on assets with many texture sets, or if you’re working on a project built by somebody else.

Order Independent Transparency, found in the Display settings, tackles a common problem with low-opacity materials. When several translucent objects overlap, it can be tricky for the renderer to determine how the objects are arranged, and the result can look unrealistic. With this option switched on, Painter sorts them much more accurately.

You can find more information in the Painter 12.2 release notes and in our article on 80 Level. 

We can’t wait to see what you’ll create!