New: Adobe Substance 3D Painter 9.0

Yesterday Adobe released Substance 3D Painter 9.0 with a new method of painting strokes with a re-editable path in the 3D viewport. In addition, they added new base materials and cleaned out some of the older materials.

The following comes from the release notes for Substance 3D Painter 9.0.

New paint along the path in the 3D viewport

The Paint Along Path tool is a new way to paint strokes in the 3D viewport. Similar to other applications, you can create bezier-based curves driven by points on the surface of your 3D object to draw patterns. Combined with Substance materials this new tool can open a lot of new possibilities. 

New tool to create paint strokes driven by a path with points

Inside the tool’s toolbar is a new icon dedicated to the Path tool. This new tool allows you to draw curves on the surface of the 3D model to create paint strokes. These strokes can always be re-edited. When the tool is active, simply click on the mesh surface to add a point. Click on an existing point and press delete to remove it.

Drag and move points on the mesh surface
To edit the shape of a path, simply click and drag a point to move along the 3D model surface.

Close path to creating seamless patterns

Use the path to create loops, useful for both creating repeating patterns around specific areas, for example.

Re-edit paths (and their properties) with the Path panel

When the Path tool is selected, the path made within the current paint layer is listed in the dedicated Path panel at the top of the 3D viewport. This panel allows selecting, deleting, or renaming paths.

Compatible with other paint features like symmetry, geometry mask, dynamic strokes, etc.

Many settings from regular paint strokes can be used with the path tool:

• Enabling symmetry allows one to draw a path multiple times while only managing one.
• Paths that are on a layer with a geometry mask enabled can paint under hidden geometry

Paint with other tools like Eraser or Smudge

The path tool is also compatible with the eraser and the smudge tool, unlocking more advanced ways of painting and combining strokes with the easy and re-editable way of manipulating path points.

Save and re-use path properties with presets

When using the Path tool, you can also save the brush properties as presets. This allows to save tool presets which will automatically switch to the Path tool when selected from the Assets window.

Note: For more information, see the dedicated documentation.

New content to use with paint along path feature

A few new tool presets have been included in this version to take advantage of the new paint along path feature:

• Pipe Rack Sci-Fi
• Puckering
• Seam
• Topstitching
• Welding metal
• Zipper Tape

Improved dynamic strokes for paint along path feature

We took to the opportunity of the new path tool to add new properties to the dynamic stroke system. These new properties unlock new kinds of strokes which weren’t possible before, like the arrow on the image above which features a different start and end visual.

• New Start/Middle/End property. A new property can be defined to specify to the Substance graph if a stamp inside a stroke is the first one, the last one, or any in the middle. This allows the creation of start and end points, which can be very useful for example to create zippers. (Note: the end state is only available with the path tool.)
• New Size and Spacing property. The size and spacing property allows for the adjustment of the output of a Substance graph based on the current stamp state.
• New stroke length properties. Having the distance along the path and the maximum distance of a path allows better control when some effects repeat, instead of providing a normalized value directly.
  It makes it possible to build both a growing stroke for example but also a stroke with a repeating pattern based on the distance drawn (and not the total number of stamps drawn).

Note: For more information, see the dedicated documentation.

Refreshed default materials

With this release, we decided to do a bit of cleanup in our library and therefore changed our default base materials to make them more useful to everybody. These materials have been crafted by the same team delivering content on Substance 3D Assets.

Note: The content which was removed is available on Substance 3D community assets