Material Definition Language (MDL) authoring now possible in a design industry first; Linux support increases compatibility with VFX pipelines.
VENICE, CA -- Allegorithmic has released Substance Designer 5.5, a free update that brings MDL authoring to the 3D community. An exclusive feature, MDL authoring allows designers to create and share consistent 3D materials across teams without conversion. This builds upon last year’s integration of NVIDIA’s DesignWorks, which introduced MDL and Iray to the popular texturing engine.
“Combining MDL authoring with Substances opens the door to a universe of materials that were impossible to create before,” said Sébastien Deguy, founder and CEO of Allegorithmic. “With unlimited possibilities, artists and designers can now make materials they have only dreamed of, while achieving remarkable consistency in how these materials look and feel across supporting 3D applications.”
With Substance Designer 5.5, users can make an MDL material from scratch, without coding, using a non-destructive workflow. With this ability, designers can now create tweakable, multi-layered, homogenous materials with volume, with or without the use of Substances. Whether used for car designs featuring high-gloss paint or intricate skin effects that require realistic transparencies, MDL authoring ensures that materials created in Substance Designer are easy to customize and shareable. As libraries are developed, materials can be shared with any MDL-ready software program, helping artists make key decisions much earlier in the design process.
“Substance Designer has the deep, robust set of features we are looking for when we are trying to achieve awesome custom paint, and paint effects,” said Matthew Gueller, senior surface designer at Harley Davidson. “I don’t think we can do better without using real paint.”
“Substance Designer is the first application to provide an end-to-end MDL workflow, enabling its user base to take their materials to a wide variety of applications for physically-based rendering,” says Phillip Miller, senior director of product management, Advanced Rendering for NVIDIA. “The combination of Substance Designer’s intuitive workflow and MDL’s flexibility is amazingly powerful and should prove to be an invaluable tool for anyone using an MDL-compliant renderer such as Iray, mental ray and soon V-Ray.”
Several features have also been developed for the film and games industries including support for Linux, the ability to import custom camera views in the .fbx format and new UI improvements. More additions are expected in the coming months.
Substance Designer 5.5 is available today for Linux, Mac OS and Windows, and is free for current license holders and Substance Live subscribers. For new users, indie licenses are priced at $149, while Pro licenses are available for $590. Licenses can be purchased directly through the Allegorithmic website or an authorized retailer. For a free 30-day trial of Substance Designer 5.5, click here.
Source: Allegorithmic
Formerly Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network, Jennifer Wolfe has worked in the Media & Entertainment industry as a writer and PR professional since 2003.
