Adobe Substance 3D Painter

About this release

Painter changed how texturing works by putting the brush on the model instead of on a flat texture sheet. You load a mesh, pick a material, and paint it on in the viewport with the lighting and reflections updating as you go, which means the decision about whether a surface looks right is made while looking at the surface rather than at a set of maps.

Everything is layered and non destructive. Fill layers, paint layers, masks, generators and filters stack in a way anyone from an image editing background recognises immediately, and every layer stays editable for the life of the file. Smart materials carry a whole stack of layers and masks with them, so a metal that wears at its edges and collects dirt in its crevices can be dropped onto a new mesh and adapt to that mesh's shape automatically.

Baking is built in rather than being a separate step in another program. Normal, ambient occlusion, curvature, thickness, position and world space normal maps all bake from a high resolution mesh onto the low resolution one inside the application, and those baked maps are what drive the smart masks that make wear and dirt land in geometrically sensible places.

Export is configured per target. Presets cover the common real time engines and offline renderers, packing channels the way each one expects, at whatever resolution and bit depth the target needs. The same project exports for a game engine and a film renderer without rebuilding the material stack, and the resolution of the whole project can be changed at any point because the layers are resolution independent.

What it does

Paint in the viewport

Brush materials straight onto the model with lighting and reflections updating live.

Non destructive layer stack

Fill layers, paint layers, masks, generators and filters that stay editable for the life of the file.

Smart materials

Whole layer stacks that adapt their wear and dirt placement to the shape of a new mesh.

Baking built in

Normal, occlusion, curvature, thickness and position maps bake inside the application.

Resolution independent

Project resolution can be changed at any time because layers are stored procedurally.

Per target export

Channel packing presets for real time engines and offline renderers from the same project.

Changed in this version

• Faster baking on dense high resolution meshes.
• Viewport shading improved for layered coatings and clearcoat surfaces.
• Brush engine gains better stroke stabilisation on curved surfaces.
• Additional export presets for current real time engines.
• Project open time reduced on files with very large layer stacks.

System requirements

Install order

1. Unpack the archive to a short path with no accented characters.
2. Update the graphics driver before installing, since the viewport depends on it.
3. Run the installer and choose where the material library is stored.
4. Launch once and let the shelf index build before loading a heavy mesh.

Worth knowing before you start

File details