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Adobe Substance Wants To Be Your Go-To Source For 3D Materials And Textures

by Bill McCool on 01/09/2020 | 5 Minute Read

You know what it takes to make great CGI or 3D design?

Detail and lighting (it also helps not to look like Photoshop Rock from Mummy Returns). But if there’s one abundantly clear thing, designers and motion graphics artists are getting really, really good at these things, and it’s in no small part to some of the tools they now have on hand.

Last March, Adobe acquired Allegorithmic, and with their Substance portfolio of programs, designers can create digital materials and textures with precise detail, making them look like the genuine article. Think seeing fur or scales on a hideous creature in a movie that seems so realistic, you could reach across the screen and feel how soft or flaky they might be.

Within the Substance ecosystem, you’ll find four different tools: Painter allows you to texture your 3D assets, Designer lets you create your own materials, Alchemist will help you combine or modify real-world substances or those from your own resources, and Source is a library featuring thousands of customizable elements.

Adobe is leveling up when it comes to 3D, it’s part of an organizational push to revolutionize the tools creatives have at their disposal, democratizing these processes so that users with zero knowledge can create materials and textures from the ground-up—or even adapt an element from Substance’s lengthy offerings of over 2,000 base-biometric materials.

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The beneficiaries of this software up to this point have been the gaming and film industry—it’s those textures that Substance can bring to life that make CGI as breathtaking and photorealistic as it is. But it will also start to have an incredible impact on the packaging design community, e-commerce, and augmented reality (AR).

For designers, 3D content creation will likely become an essential skill in the coming years, and if you look at a lot of the programs Adobe already has in their creative suite, like Dimension and Aero, you can see that they’re engineering an entire workflow. Ultimately, Substance and these other programs this will incorporate Fantastic Fold into the mix, a tool will take your 2D dieline and artwork, automatically fold it up, and provide you with a 3D preview. Using a smart unwrapping feature, you can even see how the packaging will unfold.  

“With this full pipeline, users can go from Illustrator to Dimension via Fantastic Fold,” Allegorithmic and Substance founder Sébastien Deguy says. “It’s a novel and super-efficient way to visualize your packaging before actually building it, iterating and having variations and everything that comes with digital prototyping.”

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So why do designers need this?

Digital materials are the new color,” said Sébastien from the main stage at Adobe Max last fall.

“If we go from 2D design to 3D design and vice versa, what kind of equivalence can we find to make people understand better and quicker so they can immerse themselves more easily into this new world?” Sébastien asks.

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“When it comes to 3D, there is lighting involved,” Sébastien adds. “You need to light a scene before actually seeing the object and seeing the things that you're creating. Color is not sufficient in the world of 3D to correctly represent surface properties. The surface properties—we call that materials—and digital materials should encompass not only color but also whether or not something is reflective or greasy. What is the kind of relief you have? You need to add that on top of the color and the fact that it's reflective or not.” 

With 3D design, you need to account for the interaction between light and the materials you’re using. In 2D, you only need the color. So, when you’re trying to design something immersive in 3D, you will need the 2D equivalent of color, and those properties of any given surface you’re working with is a material.

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So if you’re designing say, a soda can that needs to look and feel like a football for a Superbowl promotion, you can play with visual elements that resemble leather, painting the texture of the object to you or your client’s liking, and offering a preview of a piece of packaging that looks like it cost several thousand dollars to shoot.

This is something that could also be enormously valuable to the fashion industry. If you think of any major brand, they release hundreds of SKUs every year, and with that comes countless samples and materials they need for these products in every color under the rainbow—digitization of these materials for e-commerce is going to be essential for any brand (and not just the Nike’s or H&M’s of the world). 

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60% of a millennial’s purchases happen online, and that means that your product has to look like you could reach out and touch it when you’re customers are shopping or scrolling through images on Amazon. It’s no surprise that some of Allegorithmic’s most significant clients are Louis Vuitton and Ikea. The item you want to purchase shouldn't look like something you cut out of a catalog and tried gluing to a picture of your living room, and if you're trying to place a piece of furniture in a customer's house using something like AR, it has to look as real as possible.

More importantly, visualizing how your product looks before it gets manufactured helps a client see the finished product before, you know, it’s an actual finished product, and with 3D content creation now more accessible than ever, tools like Substance become an extra feather in a designer’s cap.

Because if you can conceive an entirely new surface or texture—in real-time—or refer to a wide-ranging catalog of stock elements, not only will you drastically reduce the time it takes to produce your work so you can get back to creating, but you could have a finished product that’s almost indiscernible from reality.