Wednesday, October 28th, 2020 Posted by Jim Thacker

Adobe ships Substance Alchemist 2020.3


Adobe has released Substance Alchemist 2020.3, the latest version of its material authoring software, enabling the new AI-trained Image to Material filter to generate opacity masks for texture atlases.

The release, also referred to as Substance Alchemist 2.3, also adds new Colorize, Warp and Noise filters, plus material weathering filters including fingerprints, scratches and ‘discarded gums’.

AI-trained Image to Material filter now generates alphas for texture atlases
The update extends the new AI-trained Image to Material filter, added in Substance Alchemist 2020.2, which converts a single source photo into a Substance material, automatically generating texture maps.

As of 2020.3, it can also be used with the new Atlas Generator filter to generate opacity channels for imported texture atlases automatically, rather than users having to create them in other software.

Users can adjust the resulting alpha masks via slider controls, or by painting out areas manually.

Most of the other changes are incremental, including new parameters to control the intensity with which the source image is de-lighted to generate the colour texture, and to add variation to roughness.

The filter, which requires a compatible Nvidia GPU, has also been updated for the firm’s latest Ampere GPUs.



New filters for colorising, warping and adding noise and procedural weathering to materials
The update also adds a range of new filters, including utility filters for colorising or replacing colours within a material, adding procedural noise, or warping textures to break up surface patterns.

There are also a number of new filters for adding procedural weathering to materials, including fingerprints, scratches and ‘discarded gums’.

Sadly, we can’t find any information about that last one in the online documentation, but we assume that it’s for adding blobs of chewing gum to ground materials.

More realistic material thumbnail previews based on Substance Designer’s PBR renderer
Workflow improvements include the new thumbnail generation system introduced Substance Designer, Substance Alchemist’s sister application.

It’s based on Designer’s PBR renderer, and generates much more realistic thumbnail previews of materials.

In addition, Substance Alchemist can now retrieve the existing thumbnail from materials imported from Substance Designer in .sbsar format, removing the need to generate a new version.

Pricing and availability
Substance Alchemist 2020.3 runs on 64-bit Windows 8+, CentOS 7.0/Ubuntu 16.04+ and macOS 10.12+.

The software is only available as part of Adobe’s Substance subscriptions, which also provide access to Substance Painter and Substance Designer, plus downloads from online asset library Substance Source.

Indie subscriptions, intended for users with revenue under $100,000/year, cost $19.90/month or $219/year. Pro subscriptions cost $99.90/month or $990/year.


Read a full list of features in Substance Alchemist 2020.3 in the online changelog

Visit the Substance Alchemist product website