Allegorithmic ships Substance Designer 5.4
Allegorithmic has released Substance Designer 5.4, the latest update to its texture-creation software, adding new baking options, support for callbacks in external Python scripts, and support for 4K monitors.
New texture baking options
The biggest changes are to the baking options, shown in the video above.
New options include Transferred Texture to Mesh: a rather neat option to reproject textures – including normal maps – to a new mesh with different UVs, shown at the start of the video.
There is also a new Position Map from Mesh option which, unlike the existing Position baker, enables users to bake position information from the high-res mesh rather than just the low-res; and new Tangent and Binormal settings for World Space Normals – all shown in the second half of the video.
New options to call Python scripts, HiDPI monitor support, export to ArtStation
The update also adds the option to use callbacks in external Python scripts, executed on the point of saving a file in Substance Designer, after the save, and on opening the export options.
This video shows the functionality in use to write a list of dependencies for a Substance .sbs file to the Substance Designer console when saving the file.
Subtance Designer can now automatically export renders generated with the integrated Iray render engine to an artist’s ArtStation online portfolio, as shown in this video.
Other changes include improvements to the way the UI scales on HiDPI monitors – the software now properly supports 4K monitors – plus a number of smaller changes and bugfixes, listed in the changelog for the update.
Pricing and availability
Substance Designer 5.4 is available for Windows and Mac OS X. The update is free to registered users; new seats cost $149 for the Indie licence, available to anyone earning under $100K/year, or $590 for the Pro licence.