ToolTalk: Allegorithmic’s New Substance Designer 5.6

Allegorithmic’s Substance Designer is the industry leader in materials authoring for the 3D visualizations industries. The focus of the tool is the creation of 3D textures.

New Filters Add Amazing Textures

This latest release update features brand new filters for scan blending and weathering. For instance, the new tweaks to the Material Blend node use the Height Blend method to blend two full materials using their height map data, as well as making sure the albedos match properly.

A new Snow filter adds a snow cover to any pre-existing material. Again, height data can enable the filter to intelligently pile up snow in realistic ways and parameters in the Snow filter enable the user to choose how thick or thin the snow cover is or to simulate a windy blizzard condition where the snow piles in specific real-world ways.

01 – Substance Designer 5.6 offers new exciting new filters for blends of scanned images. The Snow filter shown here in action is just one such new feature.

The new Ambient Occlusion filter generates an accurate AO. Using real world scale and the depth of the surface, it creates an image similar to that of a raytraced bake in only a few milliseconds.

Useful in Architecture and Landscapes

The next two filters are useful for the architectural visualization markets in particular. The Color Match filter allows you to fine-tune scans of, say, dirt or ground cover areas, that have two very different color tints. Using this filter, you can blend the tints of (disparately tinted) images without over-riding colors in each which you wish to hold onto.

02 – A new Water filter enables the creation of puddles in images.

The new Water Level node enables the user to create or add puddles of water into texture images. Sophisticated blends use the height information from one image to determine the “water level” in the combined image.

Other Filters

Other filters include the Real-World Height to Normal filter. With this filter, you set the width or length and the maximum height of the surface in centimeters, and it generates a world space accurate normal map.

A Height Blend and Non-Uniform Histogram Scan round out the other filters new in Substance Designer 5.6.

Substance Designer 5.6 runs on Mac, Windows and Linux operating systems. To learn more visit here.