Welcome! Plenty of things to discuss this time around, so let’s get right in.
Substance News
New releases: We recently put out a new release of Substance 3D Sampler, which now gives artists the ability to send materials to third-party applications with a single click, using Substance 3D Connector technology.
We also released a new version of Substance 3D Modeler, featuring a new asset panel, a scene outliner better allowing you to keep complex scenes organized, and improved import and export.
You can find more information on our Adobe blog post about these updates (amongst other things).
Substance Days at SIGGRAPH!
SIGGRAPH, the Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, is upon us; this conference takes place in Denver from July 28 – August 1. We'll be present, giving a keynote presentation, and our artists will be giving talks at the stands of some of our partners: HP, Dell, and sessions with Autodesk. Get the full conference program, and more information, here.
Substance Online
The GDC Speakers Playlist!
Each year, we’re fortunate enough to host some truly outstanding speakers from the field of gaming, and this year was no exception – this year’s talks featured artists working on Baldur’s Gate 3, Prince of Persia™: The Lost Crown, Alan Wake 2, and more.
All of these talks are up on the Substance 3D YouTube channel – and, moreover, we’ve organized the talks by our GDC speakers, from this year and previous years, into a single, easy-to-find playlist. It is, quite simply, an outstanding resource into the approaches and practicalities around the creation of games of every size. Take a look.
And this is of course a great opportunity to showcase one of our latest speakers’ talks right here – in this case, Alena Dubrovina discussing the character art of Baldur’s Gate 3.
Izakaya’s Paradigm
Oh, this is a good one. A little while ago sculptor Romain Van den Bogaert and filmmaker Gaêl Astruc made the short film Izakaya’s Paradigm about how Romain had adopted the Substance 3D tools – specifically Modeler, Painter, and Stager – into his creative process, and how he moves back and forth between 3D and real-world creation. Absolutely exceptional.
The film’s four chapters are available on our YouTube channel; moreover, Romain and Gaël helped us put together a Behance post about the film, giving us a little insight into their behind-the-scenes processes (an inside look at their inside look at Romain’s creative process, if you like).
But, just for fun, let’s also post the 16-minute film, in its entirety, right here.
Chapter 1, in which we meet Romain Van den Bogaert
Chapter 2, in which Romain discusses his use of Substance 3D Modeler
Chapter 3, in which Romain textures with Substance 3D Painter
Chapter 4, in which Romain creates his scene with Substance 3D Stager
Sabrina Feist’s Traditional Kimono Material Collection
Freelance texture artist and Game Art Lecturer Sabrina Feist recently gave us an in-depth walkthrough of her remarkable library of materials to recreate traditional Japanese kimono fabrics. Find out more right here.
10 Years of Painter!
We recently celebrated 10 years since the release of Substance 3D Painter! It’s hard to believe our cute little texturing app is already 10 years old… To mark the occasion we livestreamed a ‘meet the team’ event, giving some insight into the events surrounding the birth of Painter, as well as delving into some of the most recent updates to the tool.
10 years of Substance 3D Painter
Lead Software Engineer Alexandre Chassagny, one of the original (and current) developers of Painter, also took a moment to write up some of his thoughts about the launch of the tool…
Alexandre: The idea for Substance Painter first came up in 2012. We originally envisioned it as an element that would be integrated inside Substance Designer, but rapidly decided it made much more sense to keep the two tools completely separate. We had some specific requirements for the tool. It had to be non-destructive, of course, like Substance Designer, so that artists could, for instance, change resolution or change their UVs on the fly. And this was around the time that PBR materials were becoming the standard in texturing, so we wanted to be able to paint full materials in an intereactive way, with a unified layer stack. And this all had to be really fast – so everything had to be GPU-based.
We developed a couple of prototypes, one to experiment with 3D painting, another to test out particule painting. Then at GDC 2013 we assembled a user group of texturing experts to demonstrate these prototypes. This group, the first people outside Allegorithmic to ever see this tool, were really excited. This was a big validation for our work on and plans for the tool. This led to Sébastien Deguy formally launching the project. We formed a team of engineers, and wrote the first line of code for Substance Painter at the end of April 2023. This was the start of 10 months of intense work. We started to tease the arrival of Painter online a little, and this generated a lot of interest – and then, at GDC 2014, we released on open beta of Substance Painter on Steam.
We were of course anxious to know if people would actually buy the software or not, so we developed a small program that ran on a Raspberry Pi inside our old office, plugged into an old TV that we had sitting around. The program gathered sales statistics from Steam, and displayed them on the TV screen. We kept that display active for several weeks, making sure everything was running smoothly.
And the hard work continued after that. At GDC 2015 we released Painter 1.3, which was kind of the ‘real 1.0’ for us. This version of Painter introduced Smart Materials and integrated our bakers inside Painter, and these features defined the tool that Painter has become in the years since. And subsequent versions of the software were released one after the other – the inclusion of UV tiles was a big milestone, for example; it was also really exciting for us when we implemented 3D curves last year.
I feel that the Substance Painter team, past and present members, have done outstanding work on this software. We’ve always wanted to make tool for artists – software that allows artists to express their creativity, without limitations. This was true at the inception of Painter, and it remains true today.
... and also
Featured Node
For this month’s Featured Node section, we’re looking at the Triangle Grid node, selected by our own Technical Artist Louise Melin. The triangle grid is a powerful and versatile node that lets you create triangular patterns. It can be used to create either geometric ornaments or organic patterns thanks to its randomness options (for instance, think about leather, or skin cells in general). And you can push things even further if you drive it with a vector map or a height input!
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Get more information on the Triangle Grid node documentation page.
That’s all for now. Take care, and keep creating!
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