Adobe Substance Collection
PRICE £200 Per Year subscription COMPANY Adobe WEBSITE substance3d.com
Check out our verdict on this software collection from Adobe
Ever since Allegorithmic was purchased by Adobe in early 2019, the writing has been on the wall that the industrystandard texturing Substance suite for 3D artists would become part of the Adobe Creative Cloud. Well, that time has come… kind of!
The new Adobe Substance 3D Collection ‘Adobifies’ the existing core creation apps into Substance 3D Painter and Substance 3D Designer, while reinventing Alchemist as the new Substance 3D Sampler and adding the new Substance 3D Stager into the mix.
There are new feature additions to Substance 3D Painter. The new Adobe Standard Material that allows creating more complex materials within a Texture Set adds some new Channels for Sheen and Coat, among others. Most of the changes in Painter are cosmetic and allow more significant interaction between other Substance apps and the broader Adobe creative ecosystem.
Substance 3D Designer also gets these ease-oflife (if you’re an Adobe user) enhancements. More importantly, Designer receives a whole new graph type with the Substance Model graph, which allows the creation of procedural models directly within Substance 3D Designer. While it’s still an initial release, direct asset creation was the missing piece of the Substance offering, and it is great to see the capability to create bespoke geometry within the Substance 3D Collection.
While the addition of complex procedural models in Substance 3D Designer will make many experienced 3D artists happy, what about new artists combing from Adobe’s 2D core apps such as Photoshop and Illustrator?
These artists are covered by the new Substance 3D Stager application, which allows the creation of complex 3D scenes using a simple drag and drop interface. Using either a model from the wide variety of assets, either within the Substance 3D Stager application or sourced from the Substance
“THE TOOLS AND APPLICATIONS CREATE INTRIGUING POSSIBILITIES FOR EXISTING SUBSTANCE ARTISTS AND NEW USERS”
3D Assets online collections (a crucial part of the Substance 3D experience), an artist unfamiliar with 3D can now easily create product shots. There’s support for a logo designed in illustrator that can be easily ‘plonked’ onto a model and resized and iterated until the right look is achieved. The render engine within Substance 3D stager supports ray-tracing, and it can work with custom backplates. Substance 3D Sampler can recreate camera angles and lighting from these images with a single mouse click. The render quality is excellent, with the ability to preview still renders quickly and easily. In fact, many 2D design agencies could mobilise Substance 3D Stager to be the only 3D solution they need.
Substance 3D Sampler allows the creation of tileable textures from photos. Like quite a few of the new features that have appeared recently in Adobe apps, Substance 3D Sampler makes the most of Adobe’s investment in AI and Machine Learning technology. But only (at the moment) when Substance 3D Sampler is being run on a PC. The tutorials that come with Substance 3D Sampler are easy enough for any artist, 2D or 3D, to make a convincing tileable material that can be used as an asset in the rest of the Substance 3D Collection or a 3D content creation application.
There is a lot to like in the Substance 3D Collection. The new tools and applications have created intriguing new possibilities for existing Substance artists and those coming from other Adobe applications.
While the software developers have done wonders to integrate the Substance applications into the Adobe family, those at Adobe who are in charge of product marketing and pricing have let the side down. Any artist who thinks that when
they click on the ‘Creative Cloud All Apps’ plan to buy all that Adobe offers will be disappointed. The Substance 3D Collection is not included in this package. It has to be paid for separately via a notinconsequential monthly or annual subscription.
By all means, the Creative Cloud suite could do with more pricing structures that allow users to focus on set disciplines. But have the ‘All Apps’ pricing option actually mean that.
The sticker shock of buying ‘another’ Creative Cloud subscription could alienate 2D artists who could benefit from applications like the new Substance 3D Stager as a gateway into 3D content creation. This is a crying shame.
The Substance 3D Collection integrates and develops existing Substance Applications into an exciting new bedrock for 3D content creation, leveraging Adobe’s AI smarts with Substance’s ease of use. The only thing letting these applications down is a confusing pricing structure for new and existing Adobe subscribers.