substance painter 2018
| | price $149 standalone / $75 upgrade company Allegorithmic website www.allegorithmic.com
Does Substance Painter still soar above its competitors with this new release?
A llegorithmic has spent the past few releases making Substance Painter probably the most famous texture-painting application on the market. The uptake of Substance Painter can be attributed to many factors, from a huge array of genuinely useful content that ships with the application, which can be augmented from a wide range of sources both first and third party. There is also the integration with the rest of the Substance toolset such as Substance Designer, and the excellent variety of export options which caters for a large variety of application uses.
With its expanding user base from the game development community, to an ever-growing use within the ‘traditional’ digital content creation space, what does the latest release of Painter bring to the community?
To be honest, in terms of features, there are not as many as you would expect in a major version release, but that would be missing the point as the biggest feature of Substance Painter is not in what a user will see, but what they will not.
The team at Allegorithmic freely admits that this version of Substance Painter is a foundation release, which allows the application to stop and take a chance to review its success and set its stall for future versions.
This means a lot of underthe-hood improvements to painting speed and overall performance, especially in
scene loading, saving and general asset handling, as well as a variety of bug fixes.
The easiest way to see how this stock-take has affected Substance Painter is to look at the UI. The developers have simplified the previous UI, which could get unwieldy and unresponsive, and given it a fresh look in keeping with the other applications in the Substance Suite, allowing for a lot more user flexibility.
Palettes can now be collapsed into the dock, as well as dragged around from horizontal to vertical positions wherever on the screen it is needed. A handy contextaware tool palette is always available at the top of screen, making it easy to collapse the UI down to a single full-screen painting view with easy access to a wide range of tools.
All of this means that an artist can create a bespoke texturing environment for their specific workflow backed up by Substance Painter’s outstanding toolset and resources. There is still no quicker way in my opinion to create a convincing texture set for a model, especially using tools such as the smart materials and their masks, which have long been a key part of the Substance Painter workflow.
Substance Painter is now much more aware of pen input with larger hit areas on buttons, and with the aforementioned speed improvements to painting, I was able to use Astropad Studio on an ipad Pro wirelessly connected to a Macbook Pro to paint meshes silently from the comfort of the sofa, easily and quickly, which was a joy.
Naturally there are some new features in this release. There are now new 3D noises which are a great way to add irregularity to paint or bump textures, which scale really well across an entire model. A new 3D linear gradient mask can now use the position of the mesh rather than the mesh object, which means that a gradient can be applied across a complete model rather than its individual parts, leading to more artistic opportunities.
Substance Painter does depend on the imported model having UV maps, but not all UV maps are created equal and the new Substance Painter recognises that most 3D artists hate tidying up UVS, so painting across misaligned or scaled UV islands is much improved.
Overall, this is a great new release of Substance Painter, and it really does set it above its competition. While some of its competitors may have better integration with Photoshop or can handle larger datasets, Substance Painter is such a ‘complete’ and friendly package, especially with its new UI, that it is hard to recommend any other applications unless there is a specific case use.
The only downside is the fact that if you are new to Substance Painter and are still in the process of learning, even Allegorithmic admits that a lot of the training for older versions of Substance Painter is now obsolete, due to the massive overhaul of the UI in this new release. There are new training sets available for Substance Painter 2018, but be wary if you are a new user to make sure that any training you use is for this latest version.
While some of the 3D painting tools still need work, Substance Painter 2018 is by far the easiest and most complete 3D texture-creation application on the market, especially when it’s used as part of the Substance Suite.