Adobe Substance 3D updates, looks to the metaverse

Adobe has announced major updates to its Substance 3D suite of tools and services, including a 3D Materials SDK for developers and native Apple M-series chips support for Painter, Designer, and Sampler, while also taking further steps into the metaverse.

Adobe Creative Cloud chief product officer and executive vice president Scott Belsky says 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," he says.

"These innovations provide new superpowers to the rapidly growing number of creative people using Substance 3D."

Adobe says Substance SD tools have seen a strong 100% year-over-year growth, with hundreds of thousands of monthly active users.

Substance 3D Updates

Native Apple M-series chips support for Substance Painter, Designer and Sampler: Adobe says this enables 3D content creators to work faster than ever.

Substance 3D Materials SDK: Adobe says this 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.

Substance Materials Plugin in Photoshop: This joins an existing plugin for Illustrator, which Adobe says is already used by hundreds of thousands of Illustrator users. It helps save users time and eliminates numerous steps needed to create texture and design variations and 3D effects. In addition, 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.

Substance 3D Modeler: Adobe says Modeler introduces an intuitive approach to 3D modelling 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.

HUGO BOSS AG head of digital excellence Sebastian Berg says incorporating Adobe Substance 3D into the company's product design and development processes has unlocked a new level of creative freedom for the HUGO BOSS team.

"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 our plan to develop 80% of our collections on a digital basis by the end of this year," he says.

Into the metaverse

Adobe Research and Adobe Commerce have also released new AR and 3D shopping tools. The company says customers can now 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.
 
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 typically require by prioritising AR content that is most likely to be relevant to the viewer based on their movements within the physical space.

The company says this will help brands alleviate the common challenges of slow load times on large AR scenes. This technology will be integrated into Adobe Aero later this year.

Native Apple M-series chips support for Substance Painter, Designer and Sampler and the Substance Materials Plugin for Photoshop are now available. 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.

Adobe is also expanding 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.