Substance Designer Version Backwards compatibility.

[MatthewCurrey]

Hey all!

I'm currently doing a bit of research for my company to upgrade to Substance 3D Designer from the Non-Adobe CC installed version, and I am unable to find the info I need.  For context, we are still using the non-CC verion and want to upgrade to the newest one, we found the upgrade and update process of the old version of the application to be quite disruptive across outsourcing and within our studio and we want to know if that process might be smoother now.

With the new version of the app, are graphs created in a newer version backwards compatible If only partially so, which version updates are backwards compatible and which aren't. would 11.2.1 be able to open an 11.3.1 file,  or is it that version 11 wont be able to open version 12 graphs? Some other situation?

Thanks!

[Luca Giarrizzo]

Hello Matthew,

Sometimes, new features added to Designer require that the Substance 3D file format (SBS) is updated to support them. The user is prompted to update the file when loading it, but the original file is left unchanged until it is saved in Designer. After saving, the file is not backwards-compatible.

We understand this is inconvenient for the reasons you mentioned. Our recommendations for managing this limitation are listed under the Application is too old to open URL section of this page. We do not have plans to share yet regarding backwards compatibility, and I appreciate your patience.

I will make an addition to our documentation with a list of file format versions and associated minimum versions of Designer which support it, as a reference for facilitating collaboration across teams.

Best regards.