Let’s continue our end-of-year retrospective at some of the exceptional articles we’ve been fortunate enough to work on in 2020. This time around, we’re looking at Substance in Design, but don’t forget to take a look at the other articles in this series:

Substance Designer Substance Designer is a Material Authoring and Scan Processing software. It generates textures from procedural patterns or by manipulating bitmaps inside a node graph. This documentation is designed to help you learn how to use Substance Designer, from basic to advanced techniques. In this Substance Academy Course we take a look at exporting textures from Substance Designer for rendering with Cycles in Blender 2.8.The Substance Designer project file (.sbs) included in the Attachments.

– A Year of Substance: Archviz
– A Year of Substance: Fashion
– A Year of Substance: Features
– A Year of Substance: Film
– A Year of Substance: Game
– A Year of Substance: Livestreams

Cem Tezcan continues to astound us. In this article from November, he masterfully demonstrates how he used Substance Designer to procedurally create 70s-era assets, that resemble modelled assets – while retaining all the flexibility of procedural generation. Anydesk app uses. Helpfully, he also modelled those same assets using CAD software, to provide a comparison of the advantages and disadvantages of the two workflows. Phenomenal.

Cem also hosted a livestream discussing this project.

Substance Designer Logo

Also in November, Tomas Ivaskevicius and our own Justin Patton discussed the process of designing airplane seats, from initial concept sketches right through to augmented reality viewing in Adobe Dimension, and methods of effectively showcasing the work to potential clients. The result: an invaluable guide to industrial designers.

Substance Designer How To Make Glass

Applying a texture to a 3D asset is one thing; applying it to a physical, 3D-printed object is another matter entirely. Substance by Adobe teamed up with 4D_Additive to explore a digital-to-physical workflow for creating accurate textures on 3D prints; this article discusses their approach, the challenges they faced, and the results of their trials.

In March 2020, Daniel Liden discussed the importance of considering fibers at the structural level when designing with textiles; he also examined materials composed of fibers in resin, and the considerations and opportunities offered by designs with such materials. Mix in his views on using rendering engines as creative tools unto themselves, and you have a must-read article.

A while back, the Substance team were fortunate enough to welcome on board Swarnim Verma, whose internship with us formed part of her studies in 3D Digital Design. Here, Swarnim details her workflow in designing a Bluetooth speaker, her experience with the range of tools she used along the way.

In 2020 the Substance Source team has collaborated with 3D artist Ronan Mahon to create two short films around material and CMF (color, material, finish) design. Procedural Colorways examines the possibilities presented by procedural texturing when applied to designs for a range of commercial products; Crossroads highlights materials drawn from three separate Substance Source collections: Afrofuturism, Play with Lines, and Southern Structures.