Friday, August 10th, 2018 Posted by Jim Thacker

Allegorithmic ships Substance for 3ds Max 2.0


Allegorithmic has released Substance for 3ds Max 2.0, the latest version of its free plugin for importing and editing materials in Substance Designer’s .sbsar format inside 3ds Max.

The update makes it possible to animate Substance material parameters within Max, and adds support for network rendering via Backburner, and preliminary support for V-Ray RT and Redshift.

A more powerful replacement for the old Substance integration shipped with 3ds Max
First released in beta last year, the new Substance for 3ds Max plugin supersedes the old Substance integration that used to ship with 3ds Max.

At the time, Allegorithmic described the existing edition as “an outdated version that didn’t reflect how far our technology had come in recent years”.

Accordingly the 1.0 release of the plugin overhauled the user interface, made it possible to export 8K textures via a new GPU engine, and introduced “one-click material creation” for Arnold and V-Ray.

New in Substance for 3ds Max 2.0: support for material animation and Backburner
To that, Substance for 3ds Max 2.0 exposes the $time varible from Substance Engine, making it possible to animate Substance materials inside 3ds Max.

Substance parameters can now be keyframed “just like any other parameter … and edited using the animation editor”.

The update also adds “preliminary support” for V-Ray RT, V-Ray’s interactive render engine, and Redshift. Both are currently limited to rendering static images, and there is no viewport support for Redshift.

(Allegorithmic’s blog post doesn’t mention V-Ray GPU, which superseded V-Ray RT in V-Ray Next, the most recent edition of V-Ray for 3ds Max. We’ve contacted the company to check whether it is also supported.)

Users of other, incompatible render engines are now “prompted to automatically apply a pre- and post-render script, which will allow the Substance material outputs to be used [when rendering]”.

The plugin also now supports network rendering via 3ds Max’s Backburner system.

In addition, the maximum resolution for texture maps exported via the old CPU engine has been raised from 2K to 4K, and there are a number of smaller features and bugfixes, which you can find via the link below.

Pricing and availability
Substance for 3ds Max 2.0 is available free via the link below. You will need to create an account on Allegorithmic’s website to download it. The plugin is compatible with 3ds Max 2018+.

As well as the render engines listed above, the plugin is compatible with Corona and OctaneRender.


Read an overview of Substance for 3ds Max 2.0 on Allegorithmic’s blog
(Includes a download link for the plugin)

Read a full list of new features in Substance for 3ds Max 2.0 on Allegorithmic’s blog