After Spring and the burgeoning trees, Summer brings ripened fruit. In our case, it means you can texture even faster, with massive bakers improvement, and a batch of 40 new smart materials and 20 new smart masks.

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Baking allows you to record surface details from your model and transfer them into your texture. With the introduction of procedural texturing, baking has become an essential part of any texturing pipeline, and truth be told, the bakers in Substance Painter have been dormant for a while. This new release breaks that trend and it’s a game-changer!

Bakers: up to 200 times faster!

The new bakers in Substance Painter take full advantage of high-end GPUs to deliver up to 200x the speed of our former bakers, with the same high quality you’ve come to expect from the Substance bakers.

If you are the lucky owner of an NVIDIA GTX 10xx or any RTX GPU, the new bakers fully leverage the DXR raytracing API, allowing you to bake high-resolution maps in a couple of seconds instead of minutes!

Ambient Occlusion maps bake up to 193 times faster:
1 bake on 2019.1 = 60 bakes on 2019.2!

And Thickness maps bake up to 100 times faster!

1 bake on 2019.1 = 60 bakes on 2019.2!

For those of you with an older Nvidia GPU, Substance Painter now uses the Optix API to accelerate raytracing and still deliver much higher baking speed than previously possible. And if you’re using CPU, you will also benefit from a very noticeable baking speed improvement!

The speedup is so impressive, we thought it would be cool to be able to visualize the baking process in real-time. Not only seeing the bake materialize in front of your eyes is utterly satisfying, it also allowed us to revamp the progress dialog and add an additional speed boost to the overall baking process.

And what better way to explore just how far these bakers will take you than to play with smart materials? That’s what we thought, too.

40 new Smart Materials

Today, your shelf content doubles its number of smart materials, bringing the total to over 80 assets to explore.

You may have seen some of those on Substance Share or as part of the now discontinued Mood Packs before; we updated them with the latest mask generators and added support for both Metal/Roughness and Specular/Gloss workflows.

Other smart materials were created by artists in the Substance team, who spent a few days focusing only on content creation for Substance Painter. Notable participants were members of the QA team, and demo artists from all over the world. We raise our hats to each of them!

Here is an overview of these new smart materials:

Plastic – Rubber

Fabric

Metal

Leather

Wood

Organic

And More

Also, 20 new smart masks are joining your shelf — including damages, splashes, leaks, dust and edges.

And that’s not all!

The team improved the scripting API with features like the ability to change your texture resolution. And to improve the experience even further, we added this really cool plugin which allows you to launch the scripting API function directly within Substance Painter. Download it for free right here – and let us know what you think!

There’s a lot more in this new Substance Painter release. All the details are in the documentation, check it out right here.

Today’s release concludes with a big thanks to our users, beta testers, and studios. Your input always helps us make Substance better. Please keep telling us how we can improve!