Community Manager

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2025 Stager Development Update

Forum|Forum|10 months ago
August 5, 2025
9 replies
758 views

Hello Stagers!

Jeanette from the Adobe 3D Product Management team here!

I wanted to send a quick update to the community confirming that Stager is still in development.

We have been working on new architecture and systems, laying the ground work for our future development of 3D applications. This is more than just Stager, we've been reworking our foundations to improve consistency and velocity across the Substance ecosystem and into some of the Adobe Creative Cloud apps, automation, and web services. This work includes new data models, new rendering pipelines, an entire new front-end for UI consistency, better crash and memory management, accessibility support, partnership with open data standards like USD and Open PBR, open source file format plugins for converting data between formats, and more.

You can see the first steps of this new architecture in public use in Substance 3D Viewer (Beta), which utilizes all new data systems and rendering engines for blazing fast performance and improved visuals.

We're making great progress and details on a new Stager Private Beta will be coming soon.
(Yes, the updates include native Mac ARM support and accelerated path-traced (GPU) rendering on Mac!)

Thank you all for your patience! Your feedback and bug reports are still valuable as we want to ensure we address as much as possible in future versions of our tools across the Substance product portfolio!

As always, plans can change. I want to be as transparent as I can, but things in private beta are not official. Features, capabilities, performance, platforms, or the entire product may shift direction.

Jeanette Chow
Adobe Dimension, Substance 3D Stager, Fantastic Fold, Substance 3D Viewer

TreborW

Participant

Hi just been trying the trial of this and i find it so fiddly. There are things missing which should be fundamental

you need these in my opinion

split screen so I can move objects like lights easier in arrays

lights don’t seem to be obvious as instances there need to be highlighted and show which ones are parents

wireframe is essential as can’t see anything at all when doing internal rooms with working outside from a distance

double sided is also annoying when looking from outside as can’t see inside

we need wireframe and back face culling options as well as material/ colour only like in painter

when making animations in low light internal rooms it’s terrible And flickery.
Zero options for mp4 compression. Why?

Creating an animation in low light needs samples of 512 or more which takes an eternity for each frame I need to wait over night for a 6 second sequence

iray option needed as painter seemed quicker

also we must be able to bake lighting and shadows in one time so it doesn’t need recalculating for each frame. Apart from reflections of course which would be different

I’ve tried to make a zoom animation by using an orbit of camera which is grouped with a sphere and sphere miles away so group can be centred. This kind of works but why there is no dolly motion or panning ?

I think because of the low light internal room scene in working on i would have to turn Denoise off and put samples up to 1024 but it looks grainy still and speckles. It seems impossible to get smooth video without flickering details so perhaps if some of it was baked and the rest frame blended

there must be a better way to simulate internal lighting faster. Real-time render doesn’t show anything at all like it is supposed to so it’s unusable with internal scenes as no lights work

Emissive materials don’t seem to give off much light I need a way to boost or simulate area lights

i think at the moment I might be better doing this in Unity or something or placed back into Maya/modo

i hope this program gets the improvements it needs though

thanks

TreborW

Participant

And need to be able change multiple lights at same or at least copy and paste atttibuted to selected lights

can’t seem to see the viewport camera settings anywhere. I mean I can click on any added camera and check its attributes but can’t seem to see the viewport camera one I choose to look through it but can’t see attributes or details as sometimes the dolly zoom goes crazy and I need to reset it manually

TreborW

Participant

More problems

when moving camera forward it doesn’t go back to where it was if I just zoomed back

this is the same when on dolly mode. You dolly back but it doesn’t let you dolly forward to where you were. It seems to slow down increments so it can’t ever go forward enouh

rendering

i cancelled a render and now when I start a new one if seems to start 40-60% already there and stops too early

this program is quite problematic for scenes

i can imagine it’s great for one prop item but not for a scene inside

K

KeithatStorm

Participating Frequently

Hi Jeanette, honestly this can’t come fast enough, I’ve just spent the entire day trying to render a couple of views and the freezes, crashes and renders that refuse to budge have got me almost suicidal. Admittedly the model has a lot of products and some complex lighting but even when I split the model into 7 sections and re-rendered separately it was still a nightmare. And that added another hour to the retouching to achieve a result I think could be better. If the app was native to the architecture I’m sure it would be less buggy.

Matthias 2111

Participant

When I start Stager3D on my Mac I get a message that Intel apps won’t be supported in future updates.

Please give us an update on the roadmap for native Apple Silicone support.

You charge quite a lot since it’s not part of the creative suite anymore like Dimensions was. If I can’t use the full potential of my machine with Stager I might as well switch to a different solution.

P

PandaVega1

Inspiring

It’s been like 2 or 3 years since the turntable feature was added and we haven’t seen any other animation updates since. I think adding a few more presets such as panning, position moves, and dolly moves would be such a game changer

funny_difference0D4C

Participant

Any updates on this? Stager 3.1.8 just dropped today and I’ve already had a crash. :-(