Wednesday, August 26th, 2015 Posted by Jim Thacker

Substance Painter 1.5 and Substance Designer 5.2 ship

Allegorithmic has released Substance Painter 1.5 and Substance Designer 5.2, the latest updates to its 3D texture painting and node-based texture creation software for games artists and other CG professionals.

Both updates improve workflow with the V-Ray, Corona, Redshift and Arnold renderers, and improve the quality of viewport display, in addition to other new features and performance boosts.

Substance Painter 1.5: new export options, background and wireframe display settings, and UI tweaks
Of the two, Substance Painter 1.5 (above) has marginally the longer feature list, including export presets for the render engines listed, with a range of new accompanying map types, including IOR and F0.

Other new export features include the option to export textured models directly to online model-viewing service Sketchfab, and to export any selected mask as a bitmap.

The viewport now comes with the option to blur the environment background – it’s for preview purposes only, so it doesn’t affect reflections – and to display the wireframe of a model, with customisable wire colours.

There are also new keyboard shortcuts when painting, which you can see from 01:58 in the video, and a few UI changes, including the option to generate thumbnails for new smart materials and generators automatically.

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Substance Designer 5.2: new export options, viewport shader updates and performance boosts
Substance Designer 5.2 features the same option to export maps for V-Ray, Corona, Redshift and Arnold via the PBR converter filter; plus viewport updates in the form of tesselation and opacity support in PBR shaders.

The Pixel Processor node introduced in Substance Designer 5 gets a performance boost, with Allegorithmic noting that it runs “about 50 times faster” under DirectX 10.

There are also improvements to the node graph, including the option to render comments at a constant size and disable display of new nodes in the 2D view; and a preferences option to hide or display PSD layers.

Pricing and availability
Substance Painter 1.5 and Substance Designer 5.2 are available now for Windows and Mac OS X. Both apps cost $149 for the Indie editions, for anyone with annual earnings of under $100K, and $590 for the Pro editions.

Read a full list of new features in Substance Painter 1.5

Read a full list of new features in Substance Designer 5.2

Read more about both applications on Allegorithmic’s website