KUALA LUMPUR: Adobe today announced major updates to Adobe Substance 3D – a suite of tools and services that support 3D content creation from the beginning to the end of your project - expanding on the tools' extensibility and performance.
The updates include a 3D Materials SDK for developers, powerful new plugins, and native Apple M-series chips support for Painter, Designer, and Sampler.
The company also previewed innovations from Adobe Research focused on new ways to design, create, and deliver engaging and realistic immersive experiences, and showcased how leading brands are using Substance 3D tools to build unique customer experiences. Additionally, Adobe announced that Substance 3D applications will be free to teachers and students worldwide.
"Smart brands are getting "metaverse-ready" by growing their 3D and immersive content creation capabilities. That means that creative artists with expertise in 3D have a wealth of opportunities," said Adobe Creative Cloud's chief product officer and executive vice president, Scott Belsky.
"These innovations provide new superpowers to the rapidly growing number of creative people using Substance 3D," he said.
Powering 3D and immersive experiences
The growing importance of 3D and immersive content has contributed to strong demand for Substance 3D tools across gaming, entertainment, and e-commerce industries. 3D content creation also continues to grow into a core skill for creative professionals as more brands prepare for the metaverse and other immersive experiences. Substance tools have seen a strong 100 per cent year-over-year growth, with now hundreds of thousands of monthly active users.
Adobe's updates across the Substance 3D Collection:
1. Native Apple M-series chips support for Substance Painter, Designer and Sampler, enabling 3D content creators to work faster than ever before. All three tools are part of the Substance 3D Collection, the only end-to-end solution for 3D visuals and experiences.
2. To make the power of Substance materials as accessible as possible, a new Substance 3D Materials SDK allows developers to write their own plugins and use the Substance 3D Material and Model engines inside other applications. A new Substance 3D Automation Toolkit provides features for automating Substance files-based tasks.
3. A Substance Materials Plugin in Photoshop joins an existing plugin for Illustrator – which is already used by hundreds of thousands of Illustrator users – and helps save users time and eliminates numerous steps needed to create texture and design variations and 3D effects. The latest update to the Substance 3D Plugin for Unity enables artists to load, apply and modify Substance parametric materials directly inside the Unity engine, a development platform for creating 2D and 3D multiplatform games and interactive experiences.
4. Expanding capabilities into 3D sculpting workflows, Adobe will also release Substance 3D Modeler to customers later this year. Modeler introduces an intuitive approach to 3D modeling that frees users from previously complex and technical constraints. The desktop and VR tool enable a vast range of creative possibilities, including the creation of concept art, sketching and prototyping, the crafting of detailed characters or props, or even sculpting an entire scene.
"Incorporating Adobe Substance 3D into our product design and development processes has unlocked a new level of creative freedom for the HUGO BOSS team," said Hugo Boss AG Head of Digital Excellence, Sebastian Berg.
"The emergence of the Metaverse presents exciting opportunities for the fashion world, and Adobe Substance 3D tools are an integral part of our approach, as we execute on our plan to develop 80 per cent of our collections on a digital basis by the end of this year," he said.
"Visualisation is one of the keys to success in accelerating decision making, strengthening the link with creative direction and reducing our time-to-market by validating the product in the marketing touchpoints," said Salomon's SVP Consumer Category Running, Outdoor & Sportstyle, Guillaume Meyzenq.
"The Adobe Substance tools allow us to reinforce the user experience, offer us a lot of flexibility and a reduced adoption time for the designers by importing digital assets from other tools," he said.
Meanwhile, Unity's 3D graphic novelist and principal UX designer, Bay Raitt, said the mix of simplicity and raw power of what I can do in Adobe Substance 3D Modeler is staggering. It's the gold standard for two handed sculpting.
"With a set of perfectly chosen controls, Modeler is deceptively simple to use, but as your skills improve it is worthy of deep mastery for even the most dedicated sculpting and world building tasks," he said.
Adobe Research for Metaverse
Adobe Research, a world-class organisation with research scientists, engineers, artists, and designers who shape experimental ideas into innovative technologies, today previewed research projects designed to power future Metaverse experiences:
New AR and 3D shopping tools from Adobe Research and Adobe Commerce bring rich online information to the in-store shopping experience. Customers can scan products on their mobile devices to access personalised shopping insights, product price comparisons, reviews, and product details. This helps customers make better in-store purchasing decisions and gives retailers the tools to adapt to customers' needs in real-time. B2B companies can also use this technology to optimise warehouses.
Besides that, Adobe also previewed a new intelligent method for optimising load time while maintaining visual fidelity for optimal AR customer experiences. The new AI-powered approach allows brands to deliver a high-quality AR experience in a fraction of the time it would normally require by prioritising AR content that is most likely to be relevant to the viewer first based on their movements within the physical space. This will help brands alleviate the common challenges stemming from slow load times on large AR scenes. This technology will be integrated into Adobe Aero later this year.
Pricing and availability
Native Apple M-series chips support for Substance Painter, Designer and Sampler and the Substance Materials Plugin for Photoshop are available today. The Substance 3D Plugin for Unity will be available later this month, and Substance 3D Modeler, currently in beta, will be available later this year.
Starting this summer, Adobe will expand free access to Substance 3D applications to teachers and students worldwide. Universities subscribing to the Creative Cloud All Apps plan already have free access to Adobe Substance 3D applications.