Fall Update to Substance Designer Brings 16 New Features

The 3D material authoring software, Substance Designer, by Allegorithmic, has been updated with seven new noises and filters to ease the creation of complex shapes and patterns. Additionally, new support for X-Rite’s Appearance Exchange Format (AxF™) provides a professional method to author custom materials for design applications.

The Importance of AxF

AxF is a format that communicates all aspects of a physical material’s appearance—color, texture, refraction, translucency, gloss, special effects, and reflection properties—in a single, editable file. Once a material is saved in AxF format users will be able to add procedural edits to the data and go on to create custom materials with a very high degree of accuracy and photorealism.

01 – The fall update for Substance Designer adds 16 new features and improvements.

• Flood Fill node – A black or white mask can now be used to generate height maps, as well as assign random colors to each white zone with a height variation
• Shape Mapper node – A new way to build stunning patterns by duplicating and mapping repetitions onto shapes
• Swirl node – Inputs can now be easily deformed via direct controls in the 2D viewport
• Histogram Select node – Isolating a height range from a height map is easier than ever
• Vector Morph node – Inputs can be deformed according to a normal map
• Cube 3D node – Simulate a 3D cube to use in patterns
• Arc Pavement node – Design perfectly formed arch pavement shapes
• Support for non-square workflows – All nodes now include a “non-square expansion” option for visualizing textures and materials in rectangular formats, perfect for tree barks. Users can also now scale noise to any desired level.

Thanks to a new development cycle, Allegorithmic has also been able to build customer requests into the user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) of Substance Designer even faster. New updates include:

• Graph Photos – Users can now produce images of any graph using the Photo icon in the graph toolbar.
• 3D Viewport Preferences – Any environment map can now be set as the default selection.
• Project Preferences – Users can now specify a “default state” file while using the new Project Preference parameter, simplifying synching defaults across multiple users.

A free 30-day trial of Substance Designer is available here.

Pricing and Availability

The new update to Substance Designer is available today at no cost to current subscribers. Following the trial period, individual users will be able to subscribe to the Indie or Pro plans. Subscriptions to Substance Indie cost $19.90/month; Pro plans cost $99.90/month. Substance Designer is also available for individual-license purchase, which includes 12 months of maintenance. Enterprise and education pricing is available upon request. Students and teachers can request a license at no cost.

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