Advanced R&D Leads to New Tools for Artists, Including Displacement Maps, Tessellation, Layer Blending and More

CLERMONT-FERRAND, France – April 23, 2019 – Today, the Substance team unveils the first Substance Painter update of 2019, reconfirming its commitment to artists of all skill levels through a host of new features requested by users. Leveraging Substance’s unmatched R&D, today’s new features will help speed up the creation process by utilizing dynamic painting, material blending, real-time sculpting and more, all without sacrificing quality.

After debuting a prototype at Substance Days at GDC, displacement mapping and tessellation are now both available directly through the Substance Painter realtime viewport and in Iray. With the addition of tessellation and displacement, artists now sculpt their mesh and textures at an infinitesimal level, chiseling art in real-time.

Today’s update also introduces “Dynamic Strokes,” a new way to paint complex materials and environments. With Dynamic Strokes, brushes evolve over time to increase the uniqueness of a 3D asset, using an artist’s own parametric directions to guide it. Rather than painting each individual leaf and branch of an ivy vine, placing a single ivy asset will see the vegetation expand into lush overgrowth. A footprint in the sand can quickly become a trail walking off into the distance, and that’s just the start. Dynamic Strokes can help to create manicured patterns or randomly placed expansion, all within set parameters. Time cues can also be factored in, helping brushes to fade out, change color and morph depending on how long an artist has been painting. The new feature ships with 20 preset assets and artists are encouraged to create their own. Read more…