GameDaily Connect Asia 2019: Speeding Up Material Creation Process with Project Substance Alchemist

3D content forms the backbone of much of gaming, but it can be a long, arduous process to create your materials, textures, models, and worlds. This is especially true when tinkering with materials to get the visuals just right. The ground beneath the player’s feet, the look of the steel on a piece of armor, or the grain of the wood in a house can take a great deal of time to get exactly as you want it.

Adobe’s Substance has been designed to speed this process up significantly. Offering a library of varied materials to pull from, substance materials that you can fiddle with using many different variables, and the ability to paint onto your model in real time, it’s designed to allow developers to work faster and more precisely, getting down that exact texture they’re seeking.

Substance was just the beginning, though. Meizi Yan, Adobe’s Country Manager for China, is looking to demonstrate the new developments that are coming with their next tool,Project Substance Alchemist, and how you can work it into the programs you’re already familiar with, at a talk at GameDaily Connect Asia in Shenzen, November 10-12.

Substance Alchemist will let you manage libraries of materials, and these materials can be created with something as simple as a photograph. The tool will then turn the picture’s contents into a material that you can freely manipulate. 

If you’re looking to build a cobblestone path, snap a picture of one, and you’re in business in no time. That cobblestone path can take on a number of different material properties, as well. You can blend two materials together to create a whole new look, bringing in other materials to add a touch of realism and visual storytelling to it. Dragging and dropping materials can let you add touches of dirt, water, sticks, and more the original object. This allows developers to create that look they’re going for without having to painstakingly go over every element. A few ingenious sliders give developers the freedom to carefully create what they’re looking to make. 

Maybe you don’t quite have the right photograph for your material, or you want to make something that is an amalgamation of several different material shots. You can take several images and shape them together, again using Substance Alchemist’s intuitive systems to mold them into what you’re looking for. Even if that doesn’t end up quite right, the tool has many, many filters you can use to refine your image. You can even pull up an image to use its general color scheme to tweak your material to a color that matches your creative vision.

What Yan is most excited to talk about is how Substance Alchemist is looking to integrate well with different technologies, apps, and creation methods. You won’t have to learn something all-new in your 3D creation process, but rather putting Substance Alchemist to work within your existing programs. The program jives with Unity, Redshift, Arnold, Vray Next, making for a welcome addition that should easily fit into your existing program knowledge.

At her talk, Yan will be offering up insight into how Substance’s tools can substantially speed up 3D productions, how to integrate Substance with different software, how it can help you manage material libraries and export them to other applications, and all of the other various ways the tool can make your 3D design a little easier. 

Interested in attending GameDaily Connect Asia 2019? You can register right here, and don’t wait too long, as discounts on tickets are available only up until October 11.