Adobe 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.
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 creative artists with expertise in 3D have a wealth of opportunities,” said Scott Belsky, chief product officer and executive vice president of Adobe Creative Cloud, speaking at a customer event in Paris. “These innovations provide new superpowers to the rapidly growing number of creative people using Substance 3D.”
Substance 3D Collection for 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% YoY growth, with hundreds of thousands of monthly active users.
Adobe announced multiple updates across the Substance 3D Collection, including:
- Native Apple M-series chips support 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.
- To make the power of Substance materials as accessible as possible, a new Substance 3D Materials SDK allows developers to write their 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.
- A Substance Materials Plugin in Photoshop joins an existing plugin for Illustrator – 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.
- Expanding capabilities into 3D sculpting workflows, Adobe will 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 enables a vast range of creative possibilities, including creating concept art, sketching and prototyping, crafting 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 Sebastian Berg, Head of Digital Excellence at HUGO BOSS AG. “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% of our collections on a digital basis by the end of this year.”
“Visualization 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 Guillaume Meyzenq, SVP Consumer Category Running, Outdoor & Sportstyle at Salomon. “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.”
“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,” said Bay Raitt, a 3D graphic novelist and principal UX designer at Unity. “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.”
New Adobe Research Innovations for Future Metaverse Experiences
Adobe Research, a world-class organization 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 personalized 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 optimize warehouses.
- Adobe today previewed a new intelligent method for optimizing 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 prioritizing 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.
