Allegorithmic releases Substance Plugin for 3ds Max

Top image: courtesy of Keerthan Sathya

Designed for visualization experts, but accessible to any 3ds Max user, the plugin will bring Substance's famed material creation abilities to the 3D creation package. New support for Corona and Octane are among the new features. More in the release below.

Substance Plugin for 3ds Max is Now Ready for Production

Material Authoring Tool Adds Support for Corona Renderer and Octane 3.06; Now Compatible with 3ds Max 2019

Following a successful beta, Allegorithmic today announces the official release of Substance Plugin for 3ds Max, now available for free. First announced in November, Substance Plugin for 3ds Max brings the professional material creation toolset to artists and designers, with over 20 new updates and a direct link to Substance Source.

Designed for visualization experts, the new plugin launches with support for V-Ray and Corona, the AEC industry’s leading renderers, as well as the latest versions of Octane and Arnold. The new support comes with automated workflows, which send material data to the user’s renderer of choice at the push of a button. Substance menus have also been added to the design and default layouts of 3ds Max, ensuring a smooth, uninterrupted workflow for artists and designers.

“This plugin was very much a collaborative effort between Allegorithmic and our community of beta testers,” said Sébastien Deguy, founder and CEO of Allegorithmic. “Thanks to their efforts, 3ds Max users can finally participate in the full benefits of the Substance ecosystem, creating and editing photorealistic materials in the most intuitive way possible.”

Featuring a simplified design and tools that just work, Substance Plugin for 3ds Max streamlines the entire process without sacrificing quality. All materials can also now be sent to a user’s 3ds Max library, including anything drawn from Substance Source. With over 1,000 materials to choose from, artists and designers can use this tool to do their work faster, dropping readymade 8K materials into their projects outright, or editing for a little extra flavor.

Issues with interactive rendering have been fixed. You can update your Substance material with interactive/progressive renderers such as Corona and V-Ray and the results will now include the changes without restarting the render.

In the coming year, additional functionality will continue to be added at no cost. Current plans include network/cloud rendering, support for additional third-party renderers and animated Substance support. Additional features will be announced soon.

A complete list of changes:

• Support for Corona Renderer has been added
• Support for Octane 3.06 renderer has been added
• Automated Substance workflows have been added for Corona and Octane
• Many improvements have been added to all of the Substance automatic workflows
• The Substance menu now appears in both the design and default layouts of 3ds Max
• Added initial support for being able to add Substances to 3ds Max material libraries
• Saving and Loading has been greatly improved and is now more stable. With these changes, upgrading to this version will not be compatible with any Substances that were created within the beta release of the plugin
• Fixed an issue where importing Substance presets was only working with Substance preset files (.sbsprs) that were created using the beta 3ds Max plugin
• Substance presets (.sbsprs) created using the plugin are now compatible with all of our other tools and integrations
• Presets are no longer combined into one list for Substances containing more than one graph. Each graph now contains its own list of presets and the list of available presets updates according to which graph is selected
• Workflow improvements have been added to the automated Substance workflows to include additional cases for when required maps are not present but can be created using the available channels
• The available thumbnail preview list now is properly updated when the selected graph instance is changed and new outputs are available
• Substance file paths are no longer being lost when the Substance is saved with the scene. This would prevent the ability to reimport a Substance
• Presets are no longer lost when reloading a Substance
• Asset file tracking is now being handled properly and in the case a file path cannot be found, you will be alerted and have the ability to change the referenced path for a Substance2 node
• Fixed a issue that would prevent inputting floating point values into any Substance float input scroll boxes
• Materials created using the automated Substance workflows now are named more uniquely to prevent duplicate names
• Fixed an issue preventing Substance outputs from working properly using the scanline renderer
• Node naming conventions for nodes created with the automated workflows have been improved
• Bitmaps connections assigned to Substance image inputs are no longer lost after saving and loading a scene
• The installer has been updated to now also include the 2019 version of the plugin
• When all future installers are ran, the installer will now offer the option to uninstall previous versions of the plugin if detected before installing the new version
• Many crashes resulting from the plugin have been resolved

What is to Come:

• We will be continuing to update this plugin and there are still many features we would like to support
• Some of the features you can expect support for in future releases of this plugin:
  • Network/Cloud rendering support
  • Support for additional third-party renderers
  • Animated Substance support

More information on Allegorithmic Site.