Substance Designer
Material Authoring Tool
Create, iterate
Substance Designer is the Ultimate 3D Material Authoring and Scan Processing Tool.
It has become the standard in the entertainment industry for PBR material authoring.
Material authoring
Create materials with full control and infinite variations.
Edit complete texture sets instantly and produce Substance textures and MDL materials that will be directly handled in your renderer or game engine.
Substance Files (.sbsar)
Create Substance files tweakable in-context
Tileable textures
Produce tileable textures up to 8K size with 32 bits floating
Materials
Produce MDL materials for Iray, V-Ray and Adobe Felix
Scan Processing
Process scans thanks to filters and tools in an adapted to photogrammetry workflow.
Substance Designer features a complete set of tools and filters including: Crop Tool, Color Equalizer Tool, Extract Channels filters (Multi-angle to Albedo, Multi-angle to Normal, Normal to Height), Smart Patch Clone Tool, Smart Auto Tile Tool.
Import a wide variety of content
Import procedural sbs and sbsar files, hand-painted images, photographs, scans and geometry (.fbx & .obj). No need to worry about tiling, either – Substance Designer handles it automatically.
Real-Time Physically Based Viewport with Iray Path Tracing
Use the real-time PBR viewport to preview your work exactly as it appears in Unity and Unreal. Match any other game engine via custom shaders.
Create photo-realistic renders with Iray path-trace technology while working, embellish your work with Yebis post-production effects, and share portfolio-ready materials directly on ArtStation.
Node-Based Non-Destructive Workflow
Substance Designer features 4 graphs types: Tiling textures, MDL materials, Math Functions and Noise Editor. Edit complete texture sets instantly with the procedural node-based non-linear workflow. Want to change something while you’re working? Make changes to any previous step while keeping your current work intact.
Node-based Graphs
MDL materials
Math Function
Noise Editor
Powerful generators, tools and filters
Combine a large number of pre-set filters and tools for Procedural and Hybrid Workflows.
Access and modify the sources of all filters.
Integrated Full-Featured Bakers
Bake quickly and easily with a complete set of bakers. Create non-uniform (non-square) bakes up to 8K resolution with Substance Designer.
The bakers include: AO, normal, ID, height, curvature, position, polypaint, Bent Normals, Color Map, UV to SVG, Opacity Mask, Thickness, Transfered Texture, World Space Direction, World Space Normals.
Praise for Substance Designer
Few Applications have transformed my workflow and creativity as much as Substance Designer. It’s design gives artists full control over their own tool-sets and automation opportunities, which only leads to deeper technical understanding and greater creative expression. In today’s production environment, it’s simply hard to imagine a workflow without Substance."
- Bradford Smith, Senior Texture / Material Artist, Epic Games
"Substance Designer changed my approach to creating materials for high-end VFX shots."
– Marc Austin, Lead TD Generalist at Double Negative
"Iteration in the early concept phase is something our designers want and Substance provides the flexibility to do it."
– David Nikel, Digital Model Manager at Hyundai California Design Studio
"Substance Designer is at the heart of my material workflow."
– Scott de Woody, Firmwide Creative Media Manager, Gensler