Get Xolotl Studio’s Substance Painter Live Link
Originally posted on 13 October 2017. Scroll down for news of the commercial release.
Hedgehog Labs – aka tools developer Ymmanuel Flores – has released Substance Painter Live Link: a neat free live-linking tool for Substance Painter and Blender, Maya or Modo.
Transfer 3D assets from Substance Painter to other 3D apps with a single click
Substance Painter Live Link does pretty much what the name implies, creating a near-live link between Allegorithmic’s texture-painting software and another DCC application.
Once the two are linked, changes made to an asset in Substance Painter can be sent to the other application with a click of a button, making it much quicker to generate test renders.
At the minute, it works with Modo; Maya, including both the Arnold and Redshift renderers; and Blender, including both Cycles and the new Eevee real-time render engine due in Blender 2.8.
The software is currently officially in beta, but it sounds like it will always remain free.
On the Gumroad page, Hedgehog Labs writes: “I think this should be a default functionality of Substance Painter and that is why I’m giving it up for free, so everyone can have it.”
Any donations will go towards development of linking plugins for other 3D applications: the wish list includes 3ds Max, Cinema 4D, Houdini and Marmoset Toolbag, plus the Corona, OctaneRender and V-Ray renderers.
Updated 25 October 2017: Hedgehog Labs’ latest update to Substance Painter Live Link adds support for 3ds Max and the V-Ray renderer, along with support for textures in UDIM format in Modo and Maya.
Updated 26 March 2018: Ymmanuel Flores has changed the name of his company to Xolotl Studio, and released Substance Painter Live Link as a commercial product.
According to Flores: “Sadly, even with over 4,000 downloads of the beta [donations only amounted to] $200, which is not enough for me to dedicate the time to keep development as continuous as I would like.”
“I think that is kind of unfair for the people that supported development, so hopefully this move will keep this and other projects I have in process [more regularly updated].”
Even as a commercial product, the live link costs just $10, and Flores says that anyone in dire financial straits can contact him directly. Anyone who previously supported the project financially gets the full version free.
Availability and system requirements
Substance Painter Live Link is available through Gumroad via the link below. It costs $10. At the time of posting, the legacy free beta edition is also still available on Gumroad.
The plugin works with Substance Painter 2017+ and 3ds Max 2017+, Houdini 16.5, Modo 10+, Maya and Maya LT 2017+, and Blender 2.79+ running on Windows and Mac OS X. Linux support is planned for the future.
Renderers supported include Arnold, Corona, Redshift, RenderMan and V-Ray: the full list is on Gumroad.