Allegorithmic Unleashes Big New Update for Substance Designer

Material Authoring Software Adds 16 New Features and Improvements; First Chance to Author in AxF Format

CLERMONT-FERRAND, France – October 24, 2017 – Today,  Allegorithmic continues its biggest year yet with a new update to  Substance Designer. Seven new noises and filters have been added to ease the creation of complex shapes and patterns, while new support for X-Rite’s  Appearance Exchange Format ( AxF™) offers a professional way to author custom materials for design applications.

AxF is a format that enables the communication of all aspects of a physical material’s appearance – color, texture, refraction, translucency, gloss, special effects and reflection properties – in a single, editable file. Once uploaded into Substance Designer, users will be able to add procedural edits to this data, producing custom materials with high degrees of accuracy and photorealism.

“Opening up creative possibilities is what Substance Designer is all about,” said Dr. Sébastien Deguy, Founder and CEO, Allegorithmic. “With a host of new noises, filters and patterns to choose from, designing to a vision will be that much easier, whether you are creating a new game, house, or car. As the use of AxF grows, designers will also have a superior authoring system on hand that takes full advantage of Substance’s creation abilities.”

Substance Designer’s new slate of noises and filters include:

• Flood Fill node – A black or white mask can now be used to generate height maps, as well as assign random colors to each white zone with a height variation
• Shape Mapper node – A new way to build stunning patterns by duplicating and mapping repetitions onto shapes
• Swirl node – Inputs can now be easily deformed via direct controls in the 2D viewport
• Histogram Select node – Isolating a height range from a height map is easier than ever
• Vector Morph node – Inputs can be deformed according to a normal map
• Cube 3D node – Simulate a 3D cube to use in patterns 
• Arc Pavement node – Design perfectly formed arch pavement shapes 
• Support for non-square workflows – All nodes now include a “non-square expansion” option for visualizing textures and materials in rectangular formats, perfect for tree barks. Users can also now scale noise to any desired level.

Thanks to a new development cycle, Allegorithmic has also been able to build customer requests into the user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) of Substance Designer even faster. New updates include:

• Graph Photos – Users can now produce images of any graph using the Photo icon in the graph toolbar.
• 3D Viewport Preferences – Any environment map can now be set as the default selection.
• Project Preferences – Users can now specify a “default state” file while using the new Project Preference parameter, simplifying synching defaults across multiple users.

Allegorithmic’s Integrations Product Manager, Wes McDermott, is also hosting a YouTube live session on October 19, 2017highlighting the new features in Substance Designer. The webinar will begin at 11 a.m. PST / 2 p.m. EST and can be viewed  here.

A free  30-day trial of Substance Designer is available now.

Pricing/Availability
The new update to Substance Designer is available today at no cost to current subscribers. Following the trial period, individual users will be able to subscribe to the  Indie or Pro plans. Subscriptions to Substance Indie cost $19.90/month; Pro plans cost $99.90/month. Substance Designer is also available for individual-license purchase, which includes 12 months of maintenance. Enterprise and education pricing is available upon request. Students and teachers can request a license at no cost.

About Allegorithmic  

Allegorithmic is the industry leader in 3D texture and material creation technologies. More than 100,000 users in the domains of games and entertainment, film and VFX, architecture, and design rely on Allegorithmic's award-winning Substance texture and material authoring software for developing the next generation of digital content. Clients include: Activision, Sony Computer Entertainment, Electronic Arts, Microsoft, Ubisoft and Gensler. Founded in 2003, Allegorithmic is based in France with offices in Clermont-Ferrand, Lyon and Paris, and has global offices in Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Seoul.