Other updates include tint fine-tuning, snow cover, and more.

New features in the most recent update of Allegorithmic Substance Designer include solutions for both scanned and photogrammetric workflows.

Using Substance Designer 5.6, artists can now blend scanned materials with Substances and bitmaps, as well as achieve additional accuracy through the extraction of ambient occlusion and normal maps. Allegorithmic says this will be the first of many additions and innovations dedicated to scan-based material authoring in the next few updates.

Other additions to Substance Designer include:

Height Blend: Blend multiple materials or scans using their height maps for added realism. Output includes blended height and a mask to easily blend other channels of your materials.

Horizon-based Ambient Occlusion: Artists can now generate an accurate ambient occlusion with real-world scale and depth of surface, simulating a raytraced bake in milliseconds.

Color Match: Fine-tune the overall tint of scans without destroying the color of small elements.

Real-world Height to Normal: Set the width, length and/or maximum height of a surface to generate a world space accurate normal map, perfect for precise displacement or parallax effects.

Snow Cover: Add a snow cover to any pre-existing material and create effects like a windy blizzard or snowmelt. All snow piles realistically and can be adjusted via multiple parameters including thickness.

Water Level: Adds an artificial water plane to a material. Tweak the water’s height, dirtiness, fogginess and freeze.

Material Blend Height: Use the Height Blend method to blend two full materials using their height map, as well as making sure the albedos match properly, all in a single node.

Non-uniform Histogram Scan: The Histogram Scan node is a favorite of artists wanting to create nice animated masks and weathering. This new version adds custom inputs to drive the contrast and level of the mask on a per pixel basis, allowing for the generation of much more complex and rich masks

The update is free to current licence holders. A 30-day free trial of Substance Designer 5.6 is available for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS versions.