Substance, the 3D suite from Adobe

In the context of 3D modeling for cinema, video games or architecture, the final step is to create a rendering of objects, buildings, characters and environments either for integration into a global project or to present a final aspect to a client for example. But once your objects or characters have been modeled, it is necessary to apply textures and materials so that the modeled elements not only have a shape but also a realistic visual aspect.

You will certainly agree that a tree may be beautifully modeled in terms of its shape, but it would not really give an impression of striking realism with a smooth, shiny yellow trunk and blue leaves. That’s why the texturing phase, which will lead, as its name suggests, to the application of textures on the 3D models, is an extremely important preliminary phase to their final rendering. We will thus evoke here the Substance tools range which provides you precisely the means to succeed in this phase.

Substance is a software suite for the creation of materials and textures developed by the French company Allegorithmic owned by Adobe since early 2019 and whose various software were launched in early 2010. It is one of the leading tools in the world today for 3D texturing. Substance has been used many times in film productions and is now also used by some major brands to develop visuals of their products.

The Adobe Substance 3D suite consists of four major applications : Substance Painter, Substance Alchemist, Substance Designer, and Substance Source. These different applications allow, among other things, to apply textures to your models, which were obtained from a library, to design new ones from scratch or based on existing textures or to create collections of materials and textures. We invite you to click on the links below to be redirected to a more detailed presentation of the functionalities of each of these softwares.

This set of applications allows you to create 3D contents with great detail for cinema, video games, architecture or design. Substance is optimized for Windows, macOS as well as Linux and allows you to extract materials from 3D objects on demand thanks to the integration of a GPU acceleration (Graphic Process Unit). You can go to the Graphic Processor section of our article Technical characteristics of computers and tablets to learn more about GPUs. Substance software is integrated in the main 3D applications and its format is an industry standard. It is therefore possible to import files from Substance directly into 3D modeling and animation software such as Autodesk Maya or 3DS MAX.