Thursday, December 19th, 2019 Posted by Jim Thacker

Adobe unveils Substance Designer 2019.3


Adobe has unveiled updates to Substance Designer and Substance Alchemist, its material-authoring tools.

Substance Designer 2019.3 adds a new colour-management feature and a new curvature baker.

Substance Alchemist 2019.1.2 adds an Atlas Scatter filter designed to work with the new hybrid scan-based materials on Substance Source and a new oil paint effect filter.

The announcements were made alongside that of Substance Painter 2019.3, the major ‘Winter 2019’ update to Adobe’s 3D texture painting software.

Substance Designer: new colour management feature and curvature baker
At the time of posting, the online documentation for Substance Designer hasn’t been updated, so we aren’t sure of the version number for the update, or whether it’s actually shipping.

The only info we have is from an email from Adobe’s PR company, which summarises the changes as follows:

  • Color management feature
  • UX improvements to Preview mode and Presets management improvements
  • Atlas tool: Atlas splatter – shape splatter with only one atlas as input
  • New curvature baker

Updated 19 December: The update, Substance Designer 2019.3, is available now.

The colour-management system in OpenColorIO-based, and makes it possible to set up separate colour spaces for bitmap resources, displays and exported bitmaps.

It comes with two start-up configurations, including one for the ACES system used in movie work.

As well as the features listed above, the update extends the existing ambient occlusion baker, adding support for the ground plane within a scene. You can find more details on Adobe’s blog.


Substance Alchemist 2019.1.2: support for the new Atlas materials on Substance Source
The update to Substance Alchemist definitely is shipping, with Substance Alchemist 2019.1.2 adding support for Atlases, the new “hybrid scanned materials” added to Adobe’s Substance Source online library last week.

The new Atlas Scatter filter distributes elements from the scanned materials – primarily debris elements like leaves, twigs and stones – across a 3D ground surface.

Other new features include a Channels Generation filter, intended to generate height, ambient occlusion and roughness maps from base colour and normal maps.

As with Substance Painter 2019.3, the release also adds a new Oil Paint Effect filter, designed to mimic the look of traditional media. You can find a full list of changes via the link below.

Pricing and system requirements
Both applications are available for Windows 7+, CentOS 6.6/Ubuntu 16.04 Linux and Mac OS X 10.11+.

Following Adobe’s recent licensing changes in November, perpetual licences for Substance Designer are now only available via Steam, and only for users earning under $100,000/year.

The new Steam edition, Substance Designer 2020, includes all of the updates that Adobe makes to the software in 2020, and is due to unlock tomorrow, 19 December 2019.

Substance Alchemist is rental-only, being only available via subscriptions to all of the Substance tools.

Subscriptions cost $19.90/month or $219/year for artists and studios earning under $100,000/year; and $99.90/month or $990/year for other users.


Read a full list of new features in Substance Designer 2019.3 in the online changelog

Read a full list of changes in Substance Alchemist 2019.1.2 in the online changelog