New: Adobe Substance 3D Designer 13

The Substance 3D Designer 13 update brings a slew of new nodes for artists. The Substance Engine 9.0 now creates loops! In addition, Adobe added the Portal node to the graph, a new Home Screen, and support for 3 new languages. 

As with version 12, 13 does not support Substance model graphs. To be clear, you can’t open, edit, or export model graphs in Designer. Adobe explains why they made this change in a post on their community forum. 

New Content in Substance 3D Designer 13

The following is paraphrased from the release notes for 3D Substance Designer 13. Visit the Substance 3D product page for the full release notes.

Designer 13.0 adds a lot of new content, mainly in two new collections of nodes: Spline tools and Path tools.

• Spline tools are a collection of nodes for generating and adjusting splines, as well as using them for mapping, scattering, or warping images.
• Path tools are another set of nodes to extract, in the form of a list of segments, and contours from a mask, and then edit and improve them.

The design possibilities with these new nodes will certainly have a lot of creative uses! Check out Adobe Help about working with Paths and Spline tools. The page goes over some important concepts to help you understand how these new tools work. 

Spline node tools

There are 4 categories of new spline nodes: Create, Assemble, Modify, and Render.

Create

Generate splines in the Create category.

Spline Cubic

Create from two points and two tangents.

More

Spline Poly Quadratic

Add splines from a set of points.

More

Spline Circle

Follows a circular shape

More

Spline Bridge

In addition, create a full set of splines between 2 splines or N splines by adding bridges between splines.

Assemble

For managing several splines at once, Adobe introduced new tools.

• Spline Merge List. Merge all your splines into a single spline by connecting the extremities in order.
•  Spline Append. Append a list of splines onto another list.
• Spline Select. Filter and select splines from a list. 

Modify

The following tools allow you to modify your splines.

• 2D transformation. Rotate, Scale, Translate, and more
• Warp. Displace the shape of the spline using an Intensity Map or Vector Map.
• Thickness. Adjust the thickness of the spline.
• Height. Modifies the height of the spline.

Render

Render lets you create the final shape or pattern based on your splines.

• Scatter on Spline node. Repeat a pattern along a spline. This includes parameters for controlling the distribution (rotation, scaling, offset, colors, masks, etc.).
• Spline Fill node. Create a pattern from a closed spline.
• Spline Mapper. Allows you to map any texture onto your splines

Path tools

• Mask to Paths. Extract the border of a grayscale pattern, in the form of a list of segments.
• Path 2D Transform. Scale, rotate, etc., your path
• Paths Warp. Warp your paths.
• Paths to Spline. Convert your Path into a Spline.

Adobe published two new tutorials that cover these new Path tool nodes:

• Introduction to Spline nodes
• Introduction to Path nodes

New Substance Engine v9

Every node mentioned above was built with the new Substance Engine. This lets them take full advantage of a fantastic new feature: loops. Loops let you repeat a function over and over until a condition is met, allowing for smaller, more accurate graphs.

Utilize Loops inside Substance function graphs with Pixel Processor, an Fx-Map, or a Value Processor.

Check out this Loops tutorial to get started.

Also new in Substance Engine v9:

• Gradient Map includes a new solid mode within the node’s gradient editor (i.e no interpolation at all)
• Atomic pow() node in Substance function graphs
• Add border wrapping options (clamp to the edge, repeat) in Sampler nodes
• Nearest sampling in Warp and Directional Warp nodes

Portal node

The Portal node is a new extension of the Dot node that allows you to hide connections in your graph. This makes the graph more readable if you have long connections. Not only that, gain quick access to key nodes from anywhere in the graph.

For more on the Portal node, watch this tutorial.

Home screen

As with other Adobe products, Designer now brings you to a Home Screen when you launch the product. From this screen, you can:

• Create a new Substance Graph
• View the list of recent projects
• Jump to Adobe’s Learn section to find tutorials, tips, and more.
• Direct links to important pages, such as What’s New, About Substance 3D Designer, the Substance 3D website, support forums, and more.

New languages

Adobe added three languages in this update:

• Spanish (Spain);
• Italian (Italy);
• Portuguese (Brazil).

To change the language in Designer, go to Preferences > General. Select your language of choice from the list of all available languages.