Disappointed

[Josh27419452w8gs]

I used to work with Adobe Dimension professionally for years, creating product display mockups to sell in to clients. It had some bugs, but it got the job done. 

When support was stopped for Dimension, I convinced my company to invest in the Substance suite as it was the next evolution of 3D capabilities from Adobe. I only really need Stager to do my job, but I had no choice but to pay for the entire suite. I understand that the full suite is very useful for some, but for anyone who was happy with just Dimension, they now have an enormous financial hoop to jump through for similar capabilities. Further, if you are expecting a 'new and improved dimension', I highly suggest you lower your expectations.

Here is a short list of bugs I encounter consistently:
- Program crashes when I try to import a separate stager file into a current project

- "Generate UV" Just completely breaks the UV mesh, and "undo" does not return it to normal
- Scaling objects randomly switches between scaling proportionally or scaling on single axis
- Moving an object with "Collisions" turned on makes the object move extremely erratically and unpredictably. This tool is un-useable. 

- Cannot delete old cameras. Sometimes when I try to delete a camera, the program freezes and I have to force quit.

- Overall moving extremely slow, saving taking forever, one viewport movement will take 15 seconds before I can perform another action
- Turning on "Ray Tracing" makes the program unuseably slow, or crashes the program entirely
- Sometimes cameras will still move, even if the layer is locked
- Cannot move a graphic if there is another object in front of the graphic

Overall this just feels like an unfinished program, with new bugs constantly appearing and disappearing. I work on a 2021 Macbook pro with the M1 Max chip. I know this is not ideal, but it's a relatively powerful chip, and also an incredibly common machine for designers. Maybe this suite of programs works perfectly for people with machines built specifically for 3D work, but my complaint is that Adobe has completely squeezed out the average Joe who wants to have some 3D capability in his/her workflow. 

I hope someone can tell me this is a 'me' problem and not a common experience. For now I will be focusing on getting better at Blender.

[AlanGilbertson]

Dimension is still around, still works, and still has an active forum, but I don't know that it would run any better. When the port to M1/M2 is complete, and if Apple doesn't pull another surprise pivot, I'm sure these problems will mostly go away, but it may take a while. 

There's a hidden economic reality at play here: There has been little demand from the design community for 3D presentation software. Not many designers took up Dimension in its first 5 years, only some of those have moved to Stager, only some of those are on Mac, and only some of those are running M1 hardware. By contrast, professional 3D artists almost all run Windows or Linux.

So, to be fair, I think it's less a matter of Adobe "squeezing out the average Joe" than the sad fact that the average (designer) Joe never showed up to the party. I hate to say that, because I'm a designer who uses Stager, but I think it's the reality of the situation.

[ClausJ]

I agree that performance is an issue, I'm coming from Keyshot and Stager is indeed much slower. For me however the whole Substance package is half the price of Keyshot and I have come to really appreciate it. I follow the advice given, keep Stager files simple, delete unused materials and don't use functions I don't find helpful. In addition I report bugs I find and hope they get fixed. While I did not expect to I have started using Substance Painter, it's a mouthful to learn but fun and powerful. I know my attitude is different because I'm saving money, unlike you.

[Alexandre Becquet]

Hi, just to be clear if you can switch to Substance Stager is the better way. For more infos have a look to this link : https://substance3d.adobe.com/dimension-stager-faq/

1 - 

Will Dimension be updated?

Dimension provides a simple workflow for visualizing designs in 3D. Dimension is part of Creative Cloud All Apps and is a supported product. It will continue to receive technical and security updates, like the recently released M1 support.

At this time we have no new workflow features planned for Dimension. The team is primarily focused on developing new workflows and functions in Substance Stager.

2 - 

Can I transfer work from Dimension to Stager?

Yes!  Stager can open Dimension files.  Because of technology changes in the rendering engine and material model, scenes may look slightly different when transferring, but should remain largely the same.  Differences can be minor changes in roughness, metallic, translucency and other rendered appearances.