Allegorthmic just released Substance Designer 5.6. Substance Designer is a tool for making PBR (Physically Based Rendering) based materials, often used with sister application Substance Painter. This release brings seven new tools and filters to Substance Designer, including:
- Height Blend: Blend multiple materials or scans using their height maps for added realism. Output includes blended height and a mask to easily blend other channels of your materials.
- Horizon Based Ambient Occlusion: Artists can now generate an accurate ambient occlusion with real-world scale and depth of surface, simulating a raytraced bake in milliseconds.
- Color Match: Fine-tune the overall tint of your scans without destroying the color of small elements.
- Real-World Height to Normal: Set the width, length and/or maximum height of a surface to generate a world space accurate normal map, perfect for precise displacement or parallax effects.
- Snow Cover: Add a snow cover to any pre-existing material and create realistic effects like a windy blizzard or snowmelt. All snow piles realistically and can be adjusted via multiple parameters including thickness.
- Water Level: Adds an artificial water plane to a material. Tweak the water’s height, dirtiness, fogginess and freeze.
- Material Blend Height: Use the Height Blend method to blend two full materials using their height map, as well as making sure the albedos match properly, all in a single node.
- Non-Uniform Histogram Scan: The Histogram Scan node is a favorite of artists wanting to create nice animated masks and weathering. This new version adds custom inputs to drive the contrast and level of the mask on a per pixel basis, allowing for the generation of much more complex and rich masks
A 30 day free trial is available here. You can read more about the 5.6 release here. Below is a video demonstrating the new filters available in 5.6.