Adobe releases Substance 3D Painter 8.1
Adobe has released Substance 3D Painter 8.1, the latest version of its 3D texture painting software.
The update adds support for ICC colour profiles and physical size in Substance materials, plus three new texture bakers and procedural noise types, and updates the eyedropper tool and automatic UV unwrapping.
New features for product design and visualisation
Substance 3D Painter 8.1 includes a number of new features targeted towards product design, including support for the Adobe Color Engine (ACE) colour-management system used in Photoshop and Illustrator.
ACE, provided as an alternative option for colour management to the more VFX-centric OpenColorIO, makes it possible to use ICC profiles for accurate colour calibration of monitors and print output.
ICC profiles can be automatically extracted from imported images, or embedded in exported texture maps, and users can save and reuse colour management settings as .json files.
The update also adds support for physical size in Substance materials: something first introduced in sibling application Substance 3D Sampler earlier this year.
The change is intended to make it easier to match the look of real-world materials, with users now able to visualise scale by toggling a viewport grid beneath the model being textured.
New texture bakers and procedural noises
Other changes include three new bakers for baking information from 3D meshes as texture maps.
Bent Normals bakes occlusion data, which can be used to improve the realism of the viewport display; Height bakes surface height information; and Opacity bakes information about holes in mesh surfaces.
The bakers were previously only available in Substance 3D Designer, Adobe’s material authoring software.
The update also adds three new procedural 3D noises, plus over 100 new noise presets; two new procedural 2D cloth patterns; and 20 new 2D grunge bitmaps.
Substance 3D Designer’s eyedropper tool for picking colours gets a number of UX improvements, and automatic UV unwrapping has been updated to produce “more natural segmentation” on organic meshes.
Pricing and availability
Substance 3D Painter 8.1 is available for Windows 10, CentOS 7.0/Ubuntu 18.04+ Linux and macOS 10.14+.
It is available via Adobe’s Substance 3D subscriptions. Substance 3D Texturing subscriptions cost $19.99/month or $219.88/year; Substance 3D Collection subscriptions cost $49.99/month or $549.88/year.
Subscriptions to the Linux edition require a Creative Cloud Plan for Teams priced at $1,198.88/year.
Perpetual licences of the software are available via Steam and cost $149.99.
Read an overview of the new features in Substance 3D Painter 8.1 on Adobe’s blog
Read a full list of new features in Substance 3D Painter 8.1 in the online release notes