Substance Painter: Spring Has Come!
An Improved Look and Feel
New Visual Style
Over the years we’ve frequently received feedback that, while our tools share the Substance name, they are quite different visually. As the Substance ecosystem continues to grow, we felt it was important to develop a common look and feel across all our software. This is the first step in this direction and you will see the other tools follow suit later this year.
Revamped Toolbars, Shortcuts and Layout
When working on a project, Substance Painter’s UI can quickly become cluttered with windows and settings, and navigating through it all can be cumbersome. We’ve added several new elements to help in this regard:
A new Dock Toolbar: Closing a window automatically docks it to the Dock Toolbar. It can then be summoned back temporarily by clicking on its icon. Each window can also be torn away from the toolbar to become persistent again.
New Painting Experience
Even though we’re talking about Substance Painter here, painting has never been, by our own admission, the tool’s forte. Well, this is about to change, starting now! Improvements in the handling of pen tablets and new performance optimizations mean that you should experience smoother painting and stroke curves in 4k, even on lower-end laptops.
Improved Seam Padding
Seams are now almost invisible even when painting accross badly distorted UVs or very different texel ratios.
Improved Performance
Several areas went through a much needed cleanup, and performance has been improved across the board. Project loading, saving, viewport performance, shelf loading and thumbnail generation all benefit from this spring cleaning resulting in an improved user experience overall.
Improved Stability
We’ve been cutting through bugs to deliver a more stable tool, but as always if you see something, say something! Let us know about any issue you might encounter through the Feedback and Bug Report tools in the Help menu.
New and Updated Content
New 3D noises have been added to the Procedurals section of the shelf while a new 3D Gradient generator allows you to create linear gradients and masks in 3D space easily: switch to the Position map view, pick colors on the start and end points of your gradient on the mesh and voila!
Don’t have either of these? No problem; you can also try Substance Painter free for 30 days.
Also, be sure not to miss the “Substance Painter Spring release: new features and updates” stream presented by superstar Wes McDermott. He will be live at 2 pm EST / 11 am PST tomorrow.