LogInAdobe Substance 3D's Francois Cottin and Nicolas Liatti shared their thoughts on the team's most notable accomplishments in 2024, favorite tools, and the community's reaction.
What did 2024 mean for Adobe as a whole and the Substance 3D team in particular? What accomplishments are you proud of the most?
Francois Cottin, Head of Strategy, 3D and Immersive: 2024 was a major year for Substance as we continued to bring innovation for 3D professionals and introduced two products to help democratize 3D. 2024 was also the 10-year anniversary of Painter, and its impact has been recognized with an Emmy award!
We continued to bring new major features to Painter this year: among many more features, users can now use their vector files, place texts on models, and access our large library of over 20,000 3D assets directly from inside Painter. We introduced Project Neo for graphic designers to create easily vector shapes in 3D, which is very useful in many graphic design use cases where designers were previously using alternative ways with 2D tools to create 3D effects. This web-based, natively collaborative design platform can conveniently export vector files directly into Illustrator.
We also introduced Substance 3D Viewer, unlocking instant visualization of almost any 3D file formats (including CAD, PLY, glTF, USD, FBX, about 100 total) for everyone, with high rendering quality. We believe that this will improve the collaboration between 3D experts and graphic designers in all industries, giving more value to the 3D assets produced. We also brought the ability to import these 3D files directly into a Photoshop file and layer stack, unlocking seamless composition into 2D designs.
Amongst all the new features and improvements introduced to Substance 3D tools over the year, which ones are your favorite? Which of them were the most difficult to implement?
Nicolas Liatti, Sr. Director, Product Management, 3D and Immersive: It's hard to pick one, as I love all the improvements we brought! One feature that resonated well with users is how we are using Firefly inside Substance 3D Viewer: 3D is used to guide gen AI, providing a much higher level of control for image creation than prompting. Composition, perspectives, camera placement, light, and shadows are very difficult to describe precisely with words, while they can be very precisely set in 3D. Also, by compositing a 3D model onto the generated environment backgrounds, our users can generate photorealistic or stylized compositions in no time, while perfectly preserving the hero asset.
Dragon Warrior / Ming Dynasty Gunner
- Concept Artist: Ningbo Jiang
- 3D Character Artist: Anastasia Kukosh
What was the community's reaction to new features introduced to Painter, Designer, Modeler, Stager, and Sampler this year?
Nicolas Liatti: The response from the community has been stellar throughout the year regarding the products! Texturing Artists loved the access to 3D assets inside Painter, as well as the text tool and the new nodes in Designer. Modeling Artists loved the new non-destructive way to create with primitives in Modeler. Color and Material Finish Designers loved the Sampler generative features that help them ideate on materials way faster. And finally, Graphic Designers loved both the 3D vector shapes design we introduced with Project Neo, and the new compositing features to integrate a 3D model into a 2D image we brought in Stager and Viewer.