3D texture creator Substance Designer 2 debuts on Mac
updated 07:15 pm EDT, Wed August 17, 2011
'Lite' version also available
Allegorithmc's texture and material processing 3D software Substance Designer has arrived on the Mac platform with the new version 2, along with a "lite" version, both of which enable 3D artists to create and improve texturing pipelines, creating huge quantities of dynamic textures and filters. The new version adds vector painting, a material layering system and a cache system that improves overall performance by 25 percent.
Artists can take almost any kind of image resource and turn them into textures. The new vector paint allows for dynamic masks on all channels, while the material layering system incorporates intricate node graphs, helping users create and manage complex materials visually. The program works with the company's own Substance Player, Unity 3.4 and later and Autodesk products like 3dsmax 2012, Maya 2012 and Flame 2012.
The new Substance Designer now sports a cross-platform license, allowing it to be used on up to two machines of either platform (commercial license). Despite being a major new version, Substance Designer 2 is a free upgrade to existing customers. Substance Designer 2 requires an Intel Mac and OS X 10.6 or later, and sells for $990.
Substance Designer 2 Lite features most of the same feature set as the full Substance Designer, such as node-based interfaces and parametric texturing -- but omits multi-project managment, complex mathematical functions definition and FXMaps creation and editing. It sells for $350. Free trials of both products for Mac or Windows (XP or later, DX9 or DX10 GPU required) are available.
