Adobe has 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. 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. “These innovations provide new superpowers to the rapidly growing number of creative people using Substance 3D.”

Updates across the Substance 3D Collection

– The new Substance 3D Materials SDK allows developers to write their plugins to make it more accessible. Moreover, an Automation Toolkit provides features for automating Substance files-based tasks

– A Substance Materials Plugin in Photoshop is an existing plugin for Illustrator that eliminates numerous steps

– 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. Unity is a development platform for creating 2D and 3D multiplatform games and interactive experiences

– In 3D sculpting workflows, Adobe will also release Substance 3D Modeller to customers later this year

– Adobe previewed a new method for optimising load time while maintaining visual fidelity for optimal AR customer experiences. This will be integrated into Adobe Aero later this year

– The company also provided access to Substance 3D to students and teachers worldwide free of charge