Adobe's Substance 3D Designer introduces a new 3D render engine which blends raster and path tracing capabilities into a unified architecture.
All in all, Substance 3D Designer v15 is a fairly significant upgrade that allows artists to visualize how materials will react in various scenarios with greater fidelity and precision.
The new renderer enhances the viewport with features such as shadows in rasterizer mode and improved quality and performance, and it is engineered to support future enhancements such as MaterialX. This improves upon the existing OpenGL and Iray renderers in Designer, and aligns with the renderers available in other Substance 3D applications.
As a result of all this, Designer now includes a suite of post effects to visualise how the procedural materials artists are developing will react under certain real-world and in-game conditions. This includes high-quality bloom, which helps them better visualize emissive surfaces, depth of field, and tone mapping, including popular profiles such as ACES and AgX.
With enhanced format support and improved support for textures and cameras, Designer can now load 3D scenes. That helps artists see materials directly on a mesh and preview their work in full context. In addition, it is now possible to create a graph from a texture already applied to an imported scene and override this texture or material in the USD scene as a new layer.
Designer is also now easier to learn with a set of new, rich tool tips that help artists easily identify and work with nodes. These tooltips, currently available for atomic nodes, include visuals that demonstrate the node's effect and provide a direct link to documentation for detailed information, including the list of parameters, tips, and tricks. It; useful stuff that we wish more manufacturers would take note of.
Elsewhere, there are a whole raft of new nudges and nurdles, including support for additional 3D formats, such as USD, USDA, USDC, USDZ, PLY, STL, GLTF, among others, and performance-based, GPU-accelerated functionality for baking.
More info here.