June 2021 is a big month for the Adobe Substance 3D apps. This latest release of Painter provides a new and improved asset panel, a new default shader, an overall refresh of the UI, some much-requested performance improvements, expanded language support, and more!
But first let's address the elephant in the room. There is a new icon, a new branding, a -slightly- updated app name, all this because the Substance tools have finalized their transition into the Adobe ecosystem and are now more connected to Creative Cloud.
So what changes for you, as Substance users on Steam?
Not much more than cosmetics actually. You will keep receiving updates at the same time as the Adobe releases, the Linux version is still going strong, Steam sales are still a thing and there is no plan to change any of that. We hope this alleviates some of the fears expressed when Allegorithmic joined Adobe, a bit more than 2 years ago now.
Now about this release, we have some great stuff for you all:
- We have a new Asset panel making the shelf easier and faster to use with asset filters, responsive layout, faster thumbnail loading and more.
- A new default shader with built-in support for advanced material effects such as sheen, clear-coat, anisotropy, advanced subsurface scattering and more.
- Performance and quality updates with a new height-to-normal mode to generate sharper normals and much faster painting for projects with many paint strokes.
- New features for the automatic UVs with the ability to constrain UVs rotation and added support for generating UDIM UVs automatically.
- Many more improvements!
As always, for the full list of new features and improvements, head over to our dedicated article.
Finally, we want to emphasize that this is a first step in a new chapter for the Substance tools and the Substance team, and that we're working hard on the next step, with many, many things we're super excited about coming your way in the next year. Thank you all and happy texturing!