The days of the calendar keep on ticking by, and we’re already into the later days of August. What’s going on in the world of Substance 3D? Let’s find out... And, bonus info for the Modeler aficionados: if you want to skip straight into the Modeler-related goodness, we have a juicy little interview with Substance 3D Modeler powerhouse Danny McGrath, just a little way down the page...
Substance News
Big events over the last month, and fun things coming up:
Coming up: Substance 3D at Promised Land Art Festival, Lodz, September 8-10
From September 8 to 10, the Substance 3D team will be at Promised Land Art Festival, organized by CD PROJEKT RED, in Lodz, Poland. The event will be full of lectures, discussion panels, and sessions and workshops in drawing, digital art and sculpting, and miniature painting.
Notably, Technical Artist Louise Melin will be presenting a demo session: Making a Creature of Myth: A Showcase of VR Sculpting and Stylized Texturing. She’ll show how she creates a mythological creature, starting by sculpting in VR in Substance 3D Modeler, and then taking an in-depth look at stylized texuring in Substance 3D Painter.
I won’t say which mythological creature Louise will be creating. But a bit of a clue: just think ‘eyes’. You can register for Promised Land Art Festival right here.
Coming up: Substance 3D at IBC 2024, Amsterdam, September 13-16
The International Broadcasting Convention, IBC, will take place again at RAI Amsterdam from September 13 to 16. This event brings together world-class professionals in global media, entertainment, and the technology industry. If you’re in the neighborhood, stop on by the Adobe booth, and we’l chat about how the Substance 3D ecosystem can help boost 3D motion design projects.
Find out more about our presence at IBC right here, and you can register to attend the conference right here.
A new release of Substance 3D Designer
At the end of July we launched the latest version of Substance 3D Designer, featuring:
- Nodes dedicated to color manipulation, including the Quantize Color node, which allows you to reduce the number of colors in an image, and to extract a palette from it, as well as a range of nodes giving you the ability to build and apply your own color palette.
- An Anisotropic Kuwahara filter, allowing you to generate a number of painterly effects, such as giving your materials a stylized look.
- … and a range of other nodes, including Bevel Smooth, Directional Distance, Normal Uncombine, a Histogram Equalizer, with its companion nodes Histogram Render and Histogram Compute, and a new version of the Curvature Smooth node.
Take a look at the release notes for this latest version of Designer to learn more.
Also, to learn more about how to use the Quantize Color and Anisotropic Kuwahara filter, we’ve prepared a handy tutorial:
Substance Days at SIGGRAPH 2024
Also at the end of July, the Substance team attended SIGGRAPH 2024, the world’s foremost conference on computer graphics and techniques, in Denver. The keynote talk by Adobe featured, among others, Sébastien Deguy, VP and Head of 3D and Metaverse at Adobe; Sébastien and the team presented some of the latest news and research coming out of the Substance 3D team.
Our teams on the showfloor were present at the booths of our partners HP, Dell, and Autodesk, showcasing some of the newer features in the Substance 3D tools, and demonstrating effective workflows.
And, of course, a fundamental component of every Substance Days event is the chance for our team to hang out with you, our wonderful community, over food and drinks, and share notes and experiences and good times overall. Thanks to everybody who was able to attend; we hope to see you again next year.
Substance Online
Sources of 3D knowledge and inspiration continue to pop up online, some created by our own internal artists, some by members of our outstanding community. To pick out a few choice selections:
How to work with 3D Models in After Effects: Anna Natter explores how to send models from Substance 3D Painter to After Effects, as well as her tips on creating fun animations.
Adobe Live: Wes McDermott and Victoria Nece: Motion Design Workflows with After Effects, Substance 3D, and Maxon Cinema 4D
On August 27, Substance 3D rock star Wes McDermott and Principal Product Manager for After Effects Victoria Nece discussed motion design workflows with After Effects, the Substance 3D apps, and Maxon Cinema 4D. Take a look – you might learn something extraordinary.
The Izakaya's Paradigm playlist is up!
The Izakaya’s Paradigm playlist is now available on our YouTube channel! The outstanding film by Gaël Astruc explores how sculptor Romain Van den Bogaert brought the Substance 3D tools into his workflow, and moving back and forth between real-life and digital creation. We released this last month – but we’ve now collected all four chapters of the film into one playlist, so you can easily watch it all in one 16-minute gulp.
Featured Artist
Danny McGrath has been a 3D artist for around 20 years, most recently working as a sculptor of miniatures and collectibles in the area of 3D printing, molding, and casting. Danny was kind enough to give us a quick insight into his approach to 3D art, and to show us one of his sculptures.
What’s the most important thing to keep in mind when creating a piece of artwork? For me, the most important thing is that I'm enjoying the work, the process, and hopefully learning and improving with every project. I always try to improve with every piece I create.
Can you talk about one of your favorite projects? I’m really happy with my scrambler motorcycle piece. This was 100% modeled in Substance Modeler VR. There's nothing like sitting on the bike you're building to check the proportions. 😄 Texturing was a lot of fun too. That was in Substance Painter. The rendering was done in Substance Stager. You can see the final, textured version on my Artstation page. The 'send to Stager' feature of Painter is so useful for look-dev.
What advice would you give to someone aspiring to become a 3D artist? I would say that 3D has to start with passion for the process. You have to love it. It's a life-long learning experience and path of improvement. Try to push yourself with every project. We all go through the ups and downs during a project, no matter how experienced we are. Yes, It takes a lot of dedication and practice, but it comes with great rewards.
In 2022, Danny was also walked us through a few more of his creations, for our article Hard Surfaces Aren’t Hard. Well worth a look.
And... Substance 3D Modeler Public Beta is completely free!
Also, a quick reminder that the Substance 3D Modeler Public Beta is currently COMPLETELY FREE. You'll need to create a Creative Cloud account - but it is NOT necessary to have a paid subscription to any apps. Modeler allows you to sculpt in both VR and desktop mode - you don't need VR hardware to use Modeler. So, if you've been thinking of trying out Modeler to see if it's your figurative cup of tea, now's kind of the perfect time. Find out more right here:
... and also
Featured Node
Ah, it’s once again time to share the love for some of the useful-but-perhaps-less-well-known nodes in Substance 3D Designer. Gather round, gather round! This time around, Technical Artist Louise Melin has picked out the Tile Random 2 node for a little appreciation.
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Tile Random 2 is a powerful node that generates a grid with advanced randomization features. Not only can you randomize the size and offset of the tiles, but you can also randomize the slant to break up the angles. On top of that, all these parameters can be driven by texture maps if you need to be more precise.
That’s all for this month. Be awesome to one another, and keep creating. Byeeeee!
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