Friday, October 20th, 2017 Posted by Jim Thacker

Allegorithmic releases Substance Designer 2017.2


Allegorithmic has released its latest update to Substance Designer, its material-authoring software, adding support for the cross-platform AxF material format and seven new noises and filters.

In keeping with Allegorithmic’s new ‘numberless release cycle‘, the company’s blog post refers to the release as the ‘Fall 2017’ update, but if you follow the release notes, it’s version 2017.2.0.

Support for the AxF material interchange format
New features in the update include support for X-Rite’s AxF (Appearance Exchange) format.

Intended as a vendor-neutral stanard for transferring materials between CAD and DCC software, AxF is also supported in a number of render engines, including Maxwell, KeyShot, Iray and AMD’s ProRender plugins.

New Flood Fill system for generating realistic ground and rock textures
The update also adds seven new noises and filters, including a “long-awaited” flood fill system.

Shown in the video at the top of the story, the new Flood Fill node can be used to fill cellular patterns with random colours, leading to realistic rock and ground patterns when the output is used as a height map.

New filters include Shape Mapper, which produces complex geometric arrays; Histogram Select, for isolating height ranges from height maps; and Vector Morph, for deforming source images according to a normal map.



Updates to existing generators, support for non-square textures
Other changes include updates to the existing Splatter Circular and Scratches generators, the latter (shown above) designed to produce “more natural and tweakable scratches”.

According to Allegorithmic, the resulting normal map generates more realistic circular highlights when rendered with a path tracing or ray tracing renderer.

Substance Designer also now supports non-square texture maps as standard for all noises and patterns; and procedural noises now have a scale parameter, enabling them to match the scale of a 3D scene.

There are also a number of smaller features and updates, which you can find via the links below.

Pricing and availability
Substance Designer 2017.2 is available for Windows 7+, CentOS 6.6+ or Ubuntu 12.4+ and Mac OS X 10.10+.

New Indie licences of the software, intended for artists and studios earning less than $100,000 per year, cost $149, including 12 months’ maintenance. Further updates cost $75/year.

Full Pro licences cost $990, including 12 months’ maintenance – a rise of $400 since the previous release.

Subscriptions cost $19.90/month for Indie users; $99.90/month for Pro users.


Read more about the new features in the Fall 2017 update on Allegorithmic’s blog

Read a full list of new features in Substance Designer 2017.2 in the online changelog