About this release
Substance 3D Painter is where a bare 3D model gets its surface. You load a mesh and paint materials straight onto it in a real time viewport, seeing metal, paint, dirt and wear exactly as they will render rather than guessing at a flat texture sheet. It is the tool that turns modelling output into something that looks like an object rather than a grey shape.
The engine behind it is what makes the work fast. Smart materials carry their own logic, so a metal edge wear material knows to sit on the edges of the model and a dust material settles into the crevices, all driven by mesh maps the application bakes from the geometry. You paint with brushes, fill with materials, mask by hand or procedurally, and stack it all in a non destructive layer system that stays editable to the end.
Because it works in the physically based model, the maps it produces are portable. When the look is finished, the export presets write out the base colour, roughness, metalness, normal and the rest of the map set in whatever packing and naming a target renderer or game engine expects, so the same paint job feeds a film render, a real time engine or a product visualisation without a rework.
What it does
- Real time viewport painting of physically based materials onto a 3D mesh
- Smart materials that react to the surface using baked mesh maps
- Non destructive layer stack with masks, generators and filters
- Mesh map baking for curvature, ambient occlusion, thickness and more
- Brush, fill, projection and stencil painting tools
- Large starter library of materials, brushes and smart masks
- Export presets for the major renderers and real time engines
- Substance material and parameter support for procedural inputs
- Iray path traced preview for checking a look under final lighting
- Support for high polygon detail through baked normal and displacement maps
Changes in this version
- Faster mesh map baking on high polygon meshes
- Improved viewport quality in the real time display mode
- Reworked export dialog with clearer preset management
- New content added to the starter material and smart mask library
- Better handling of very large texture set counts on one model
What the package contains
- Adobe Substance 3D Painter full offline installer
- Starter material, brush and smart mask library
- Export presets for common renderers and engines
- Selected interface languages, chosen during setup
- Readme with the install order written out step by step
Installation notes
Follow these in order. Most reports of a failed install come from skipping a step rather than from the package itself.
- Disconnect from the network before you start.
- Pause real time protection for the length of the install.
- Extract the archive to a short path such as C:\Setup.
- Run setup as administrator and let it finish.
- Launch once so the library location is created, then close it.
- Reconnect the network.
System requirements
| Operating system | Windows 10 version 22H2 or Windows 11 |
| Processor | Intel or AMD 64-bit multi core processor |
| Memory | 16 GB recommended, 32 GB for high resolution texture sets |
| Graphics | GPU with 4 GB VRAM, 8 GB for large 4K texture work |
| Storage | 12 GB free plus project and library space |
| Display | 1920 by 1080 or larger |
Things worth knowing
- VRAM is the real limit here, large models at 4K per texture set will find the ceiling of a small card.
- Bake your mesh maps before you start painting, the smart materials depend on them to behave.
- Set the project texture resolution to match your delivery, working too high just eats memory.
Questions about this title
Do I model in this application?
Will the maps work in my renderer?
Why is my viewport running out of memory?
Does it run offline?
What people are saying
Baking is quicker on a dense mesh now. Smart materials still do most of the wear for you.
Export preset dropped straight into my engine with the right map packing. No rework.
Ran out of VRAM at 4K on a big prop, split it into more sets and it was fine.
Listing information
This entry is catalogued under CAD & 3D and carries the tags below. Language coverage is Multilingual, 8 interface languages, and the supported platform list is Windows 10, Windows 11. Version 12.1.0.552 is the current catalogued build, last checked 2 days ago, and the entry has been in the index since it was added 2 years ago.