by Jonathan McGaha | August 10, 2015 12:00 am
Photorealistic rendering is coming to Substance Designer with the integration of NVIDIA DesignWorks tools[1], a library of graphics technologies and enhancements that can be easily integrated by software application developers. For the first time, Allegorithmic[2]‘s flagship product – and the game industry’s favorite texture creation tool – is accessible to product designers and architects by providing the detailed requirements needed for 3-D marketing experiences.
Among the DesignWorks technologies being used to enhance the Substance Designer workflow are NVIDIA Iray SDK, a physically based rendering (PBR) engine in many popular 3-D content applications; Materials Definition Language (MDL), which provides a common way to describe materials so they can be shared between applications; and vMaterials, a suite of verified materials as well as a set of “essential” materials that can be used as a starting point or as reference materials for designers.
“The combined creative power of Substance Designer and Iray SDK offers 3-D artists unprecedented ways to create both realistic and fantasized materials that could simply not be visualized with real-time renderers,” said Sébastien Deguy, Founder and CEO of Allegorithmic. “With this integration, we are now at the convergences of the texturing, material definition and rendering worlds.”
Developed with NVIDIA teams in the US and Germany, the Iray integration is already being beta tested by companies like Harley-Davidson[3]. With Iray’s full feature set at their fingertips, artists will be able to create path-traced beauty shots without having to export their textures into other software programs. Future applications that support MDL materials will allow new users to add Substances to previously developed assets.
“Substance Designer is the industry standard for PBR texturing,” said Phil Miller, Director of Advanced Rendering, NVIDIA. “With the integration of our DesignWorks tools, designers and architects can finally take advantage of Substance Designer in their own workflows to accurately predict what their final designs will look like.”
Pricing/Availability
Iray will be integrated into Substance Designer 5.3, which will be released in September. All users with a Substance Designer 5 license, or who are currently on subscription with Substance Live[4], will receive a free upgrade then.
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