Before the end of the month, we just have time to squeeze in the March edition of the Substance 3D Community Digest!
Substance 3D News
The big news this month: GDC 2024 happened! And so we presented one of our world-renowned Substance Days! The big news:
Our Blender plugin 2.0 update which was released recently, bringing in refactored plugin architecture, improved stability and overall performance improvement, new image formats to export textures, bit depth selection for each map type, Substance Engine selection support (defaulting to GPU), and much more.
In Substance 3D Painter, some news for our spring release: Access Substance 3D Assets directly within Painter. Also, a preview of our new Text Resource, to add lettering to your surfaces.
In Substance 3D Sampler: Text to texture powered by Adobe Firefly – provide a text prompt, and receive a selection of modifiable textures. This is available today in the Beta panel of CC Desktop!
In Substance 3D Designer: previews of USD lossless support and MaterialX graph edition, coming later this year.
In Substance 3D Modeler: public beta of Substance 3D Modeler on Creative Cloud for PC. If you have an Adobe ID, you’ll be able to get an early look at new features, and help inform the direction of new technologies. Modeler now also includes the possibility to search Modeler’s asset library by shape, the release of surfacing tools, new cameras allowing you to refine the composition of your models in desktop and VR, warp tool improvements, giving you more control over flowing, organic shapes, and better upres, giving cleaner, smoother results when increasing your model’s resolution.
We’ll post the video of our keynote presentation discussing each of these points in more detail soon. In the meantime, take a look at our post on the Adobe blog for more information about the latest developments in the Substance 3D tools.
Phenomenal Guest Speakers
Alena Dubrovina presents the character art workflow for Baldur's Gate 3.
We had amazing speakers this year. From Larian Studios, Art Director and Lead Character Artist Alena Dubrovina presented The Art and Technology Behind Creating Characters on Baldur’s Gate 3; from Remedy Entertainment, Head of Environment Art Miro Vesterinen and Principal Technical Environment Artist Benjamin Lindquist presented Environment Art Technology and Workflows of Alan Wake 2; coming from Ubisoft, Jean Baptiste Rollen and Loïc Anquetil, respectively Lead Environment Artist and Senior 3D Artist, discussed their work on Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, presenting A Versatile Approach to Stylized Environment Art; and rounding things out, 3D Character Artist Anna Beganskaya from Dardo Studios presented Tips & Tricks in Adobe Substance 3D Painter to Make Semi-realistic Textures.
Videos of these talks coming soon!
Online Resources
Substance 3D on Behance
We’ve just posted Play with Clay! This is a bite-sized video walkthrough detailing how to create claymation-looking scenes with the Substance 3D tools, notably featuring the Modeling Clay material on Substance 3D Assets. Huge respect to our internal artist Maximilien Vert for creating the outstanding visuals for this post.
Other featured resources this time around include:
SUBSTANCE 3D PAINTER: Wes McDermott discusses how to set up project templates in Painter.
SUBSTANCE 3D DESIGNER: Vincent Gault takes an in-depth look at Designer’s While Loop node.
SUBSTANCE 3D SAMPLER: Anna Natter discusses how to create a hand-painted look in Sampler’s Stylization filter.
Under Discussion
SUBSTANCE 3D DESIGNER: Once again, QA Support Artist Cyril Dellenbach has picked out a frequently occurring issue raised in the forums, and proposed a handy solution.
Issue: Gradient color changes display as visible bands in Substance 3D Designer, as in the image below.
Recommended solution: This is caused by the bit depth of one or more nodes in your graph being set to 8-bit, thus causing one or more outputs to be rendered at 8-bit depth. When nodes in your graph are set to 8-bit depth, the computed image uses 256 values per channel (RGBA for color, Luminance for grayscale), which isn’t enough to describe smooth gradients. Switching to 16-bit depth increases that range to 65,536 different values.
The solution therefore is finding the node that is responsible for downgrading the bit depth to 8-bit. This can be done by starting from one of the last nodes in the graph that is impacted by the low bit depth, and going upstream until the ‘culprit’ node is found. The bit depth of each node is indicated beneath each node in the graph: ‘L8’ signifies a node set to 8-bit depth, ‘L16’ signifies 16-bit depth (with the ‘L’ standing for ‘Luminance,’ for those who are curious). Once you have identified that node, set its Output Format to 16-bit.
Here, the ‘Clouds 2’ node and the ‘Blur HQ Grayscale’ node are set to 16-bit depth (indicated by ‘L16’); the ‘Uniform Color’ node is set to 8-bit depth (‘L8’).
To change a node’s Output Format, look for the ‘Output Format’ menu under the ‘Blend’ tab, as seen below. From this menu, you can select:
- Relative to input, which causes the node to inherit the bit depth of one of the nodes immediately upstream (Primary input); this is a potential cause for your material rendering at 8-bit depth, if any node upstream is set to 8-bit depth;
- Relative to parent, which causes the node to inherit the bit depth of the object that hosts the node, which is the graph.
- Absolute, which allows you to manually set the bit depth as you prefer.
To learn more about inheritance in Substance graphs, please take a look at our documentation on the subject.
You can also find more information on this point in the Substance 3D Designer documentation page dedicated to incorrect image outputs.
... and also
SUBSTANCE 3D DESIGNER: Featured Node: Cartesian To Polar
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In our Featured Node section, we pick out a perhaps less-well-known Designer node, to receive some love. Here, QA Community Artist Cyril Dellenbach has chosen to look at the Cartesian To Polar node. This node takes a given input with Cartesian X/Y coordinates, and sweeps it around a circle, transforming this data into Polar coordinates, with Angle and Radius data. |
A material created using the Cartesian To Polar node, by Cyril Dellenbach.
Find more information on our documentation page about this node.
Users' Ideas
It’s no big secret that you – the 3D artists who use our tools; the community of 3D artists overall – are our most valuable guide when it comes to the development of our apps. And so we’re introducing Users’ Ideas, a group of dedicated spaces on our forums where you can post any and all ideas you have for the future of our tools.
That's all for this time; have fun creating!
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