Allegorithmic continues its biggest year yet with a new update to Substance Designer. Seven new noises and filters have been added to ease the creation of complex shapes and patterns, while new support for X-Rite’s Appearance Exchange Format (AxF™) offers a professional way to author custom materials for design applications.
AxF is a format that enables the communication of all aspects of a physical material’s appearance – color, texture, refraction, translucency, gloss, special effects and reflection properties – in a single, editable file. Once uploaded into Substance Designer, users will be able to add procedural edits to this data, producing custom materials with high degrees of accuracy and photorealism.
“Opening up creative possibilities is what Substance Designer is all about,” said Dr. Sébastien Deguy, Founder and CEO, Allegorithmic. “With a host of new noises, filters and patterns to choose from, designing to a vision will be that much easier, whether you are creating a new game, house, or car. As the use of AxF grows, designers will also have a superior authoring system on hand that takes full advantage of Substance’s creation abilities.”
Substance Designer’s new slate of noises and filters include:
- Flood Fill node – A black or white mask can now be used to generate height maps, as well as assign random colors to each white zone with a height variation
- Shape Mapper node – A new way to build stunning patterns by duplicating and mapping repetitions onto shapes
- Swirl node – Inputs can now be easily deformed via direct controls in the 2D viewport
- Histogram Select node – Isolating a height range from a height map is easier than ever
- Vector Morph node – Inputs can be deformed according to a normal map
- Cube 3D node – Simulate a 3D cube to use in patterns
- Arc Pavement node – Design perfectly formed arch pavement shapes
- Support for non-square workflows – All nodes now include a “non-square expansion” option for visualizing textures and materials in rectangular formats, perfect for tree barks. Users can also now scale noise to any desired level.
New interface updates include:
- Graph Photos – Users can now produce images of any graph using the Photo icon in the graph toolbar.
- 3D Viewport Preferences – Any environment map can now be set as the default selection.
- Project Preferences – Users can now specify a “default state” file while using the new Project Preference parameter, simplifying synching defaults across multiple users.
A free 30-day trial of Substance Designer is available now.
Pricing/Availability
The new update to Substance Designer is available today at no cost to current subscribers. Following the trial period, individual users will be able to subscribe to the Indie or Pro plans. Subscriptions to Substance Indie cost $19.90/month; Pro plans cost $99.90/month. Substance Designer is also available for individual-license purchase, which includes 12 months of maintenance.
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