Substance Painter, Alchemist & More: Adobe’s SIGGRAPH 2019 Updates

Substance SIGGRAPH 2019 announcements

Adobe showcased several exciting announcements for its Substance product line at this year’s SIGGRAPH conference.

First, they demonstrated advancements in UDIM workflows within Painter, including the ability to paint across UV Tiles. Two demos were presented: one importing a project from Mari and the other creating a project entirely in Substance Painter. This feature is currently undergoing a closed beta, with more news expected later this year.

They also unveiled Project Anorigami, the Substance family’s approach to automated UV creation. The technology is designed to automate the entire UV process, encompassing segmentation, unwrapping, and packing.

Improvements to Alchemist were also revealed, including modifications to material management, such as the ability to connect with local folders, material tagging and rating, real-time monitoring in two dedicated views, and a live link to the launcher. The delighter filter is also being enhanced, and a new method for material scanning is being introduced, allowing materials to be reconstructed from photos taken with a fixed camera under any lighting conditions.

Substance Alchemist is now accessible for free trials to everyone. Previously available only to beta testers with a Substance subscription, this provides an excellent opportunity to explore its features.

Regarding materials, Substance Source will soon feature over 400 new procedural materials geared toward architecture. This addition brings the total number of customizable materials for visualization to approximately 600.

Furthermore, some long-term R&D projects were disclosed, encompassing content-aware material filling, spot filling, seam removal, material cleanup, albedo extraction from a single image, texture streaming for path tracers, painting in VR with Oculus Dash, a new denoiser, a new agnostic shader graph, dual viewports: MDL and GLSL, and the capacity to export to MaterialX, among others.