Adobe releases Substance 3D Designer 14.0
Adobe has released Substance 3D Designer 14.0, the new version of its material-authoring software for game development, visual effects and visualization work.
The release adds a set of new nodes for manipulating color values in images, which can be used to create stylized effects, and to generate color palettes and ID maps.
Other nodes provide new options for editing concavity and normal maps.
The cost of a perpetual license of the software has risen, with the price of the Steam edition rising to $199.99, up $50 on the previous release.
New nodes for manipulating color create stylized effects, palettes and ID maps
Substance 3D Designer 14.0 includes a range of new nodes for manipulating color and tonal values in images, many geared towards creating stylized effects.
A new Quantize Color node makes it easier to reduce the number of colors in an image, superseding the legacy version of the node.
It can be used in conjunction with a set of new nodes for creating and manipulating color palettes, making it possible to extract a palette of up to 16 colors from a source image, then apply it to a target image via an ID map.
It is also possible to generate ID maps using Quantize Color itself, which can then be converted to grayscale masks via the new ID to Mask Grayscale node.
For more painterly stylized effects, the release adds a pair of related filters: Anisotropic Kuwahara Color and Anisotropic Kuwahara Grayscale.
Both apply a directional blur that conforms to the details of the image, making it appear to flow in the direction of the shapes within, creating a brushstroke-like effect.
Substance 3D Designer 14.0’s new Normal Uncombine node can be used to remove the surface detail encoded in a heightmap from a normal map.
New options for edting normal maps, curvature data, masks and histograms
Complementing the existing Normal Combine node, Substance 3D Designer 14.0 also adds a new Normal Uncombine node to remove surface detail from a normal map.
The existing Curvature Smooth node gets new outputs for generating convexity and concavity maps, and now correctly supports all of the software’s tiling modes.
New Bevel Smooth and Directional Distance nodes can be used to blur the borders of masks to create smoother bevel effects.
There are also new nodes to equalize and output the histogram of a grayscale image.
Workflow, performance and pipeline integration
Worflow improvements include “completely reworked” handling of trackpads on macOS, and better handling of parameters, particularly parameter inheritance.
Performance on big projects has been improved, particularly when removing nodes from graphs or cooking graphs referencing the same bitmap several times.
The software has also been updated to meet the current CY2024 VFX Reference Platform specification.
As a result, CentOS is no longer supported – Linux users now require RHEL 8/9 – and “nearly all plugins” for Designer will need to be updated, due to the swich to Qt 6.5.
Price and system requirements
Substance 3D Designer 14.0 is compatible with Windows 10+, RHEL 8.6/9.2+ Linux and macOS 12.0+.
Perpetual licences cost $199.99 on Steam: an increase of $50 on the previous release.
Substance 3D Designer is also available via Adobe’s Substance 3D subscriptions.
Substance 3D Texturing subscriptions cost $19.99/month or $219.88/year; Substance 3D Collection subscriptions cost $49.99/month or $549.88/year. Subscriptions to the Linux edition require a Creative Cloud Plan for Teams priced at $1,198.88/year.
Read a full list of new features in Substance 3D Designer 14.0 in the online release notes
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