Substance Painter release Beta 3 to Steam

 

I suck at texturing.

 

There, I said it.  I love 3D modeling, I even enjoy rigging and animating.  While not my favorite activity, I am even OK with UV unwrapping…

 

But texturing, I suck at texture mapping.

 

Over the years I have tried a number of solutions that make texturing easier going back to the early days of 3D Studio Max plugins that allow you to paint directly on your models.  Since then, those tools have become progressively more built in to the base package but at the end of the day, the vast majority of texturing still takes place in Photoshop and I still suck at it.

 

Enter Substance Painter.  It appeared on Steam about a month back and I’ve been playing around with it ever since.  I intend to cover it in more detail soon, in fact I would have already if it weren’t for the massive influx of goodies that came with GDC this year.  Anyways, stay tuned for more details shortly…image

 

For now, a spot a of news.  Beta 3 was just released.  Oh, and if you buy during the beta it’s 50% off.

 

Enough talking, so what exactly is Substance Painter?

 

Short version; it’s the program that makes me not completely suck at texturing.  That’s about the biggest endorsement I can give.

 

Long version, well, I’ll use their wording for that:

 

Substance Painter is a brand new 3D Painting app featuring never before seen features and workflow improvements to make the creation of textures for modern games easier than ever.

At Allegorithmic, we have a long history of working very closely with our customers, from the small independents to the largest AAA studios. Today we want you to help us design the ultimate painting tool and bring innovation and state of the art technology to every artist out there at a fair price.

 

Today, as the title suggests, they released Beta 3.  As to what’s new in BETA 3:

Testing focus

  • 2D View

Change list

  • Added: Seamless 2D View!
  • Added: Bitmap layer masks
  • Added: Environment exposure control
  • Updated: Fill Layers now use the Tools windows to set their properties
  • Updated: Materials can be applied to Fill Layers
  • Updated: Added more stencils in the stencil library
  • Updated: Particles presets updated for faster computation
  • Updated: PBR shader optimization and quality improvement for lower quality settings
  • Fixed: Layers thumbnails are linked to the currently selected channel
  • Fixed: Lots of crashes

 

Sound interesting?  Here is a video of Substance Painter in action:

There is also a free trial available.  It’s a stand alone program, although some of the import options are disabled right now ( I used OBJ personally, from Blender ).  Keep in mind it is a beta, and feels Beta-like at times.  Some features are currently missing and performance can occasionally suffer.  On the other hand, outside of some missing features, it feels production ready.  I hope to have a more detailed preview available soon.

 

If you try it out, let me know what you think.

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