Saturday, February 9th, 2019 Posted by Jim Thacker

Check out Mesh Importer for Substance Designer


Xolotl Studio – aka developer Ymmanuel Flores – has released Mesh Importer for Substance Designer, a new tool that enables users to import meshes into Substance Designer as nodes within the graph view.

Regular readers of CG Channel may remember Flores from his other material-authoring tools, including Substance Painter Live Link, which connects Substance Painter to other DCC apps.

Import meshes into Substance Designer for use within Substance materials
Mesh Importer for Substance Designer imports meshes in OBJ format directly into the graph: that is, not simply using the model for a 3D preview.

That makes it possible to use the meshes as elements within a Substance material – for example, to create bas relief effects of the type shown in Flores’s ArtStation gallery.

Users can import a mesh either as a heightmap rendered from a specified angle, or in fully rotatable form, with functionality similar to the native Cube 3D node.

The latter generates renders of the mesh from 40 different angles, making it possible to scatter the object within Substance Designer.

The height maps are rendered in Blender: Flores says that he initially wrote his own standalone render engines, but found that performance was better with Blender.

According to Flores, using Blender, a machine with an AMD Ryzen 7 1800X CPU can generate a full set of renders for a one-million-face mesh at 1K resolution in seven minutes.

Availability and system requirements
Mesh Importer for Substance Designer is available for Substance Designer 2018.3.1+ and Blender 2.79, running on Windows only. It costs $15.

Flores says that he is working on macOS and Linux support, and will add the option to use other render engines if there is enough demand for them.

Read more about Mesh Importer for Substance Designer in Xolotl Studio’s Gumroad store