Adobe is launching a suite of 3D tools based on recent acquisitions

Two and a half years after acquiring French nugget Allegorithmic, the publisher of Substance software, Adobe is combining its 3D-focused products with a new offering called Adobe Substance 3D.

“This is the beginning of the adventure I signed up for when we joined Adobe. explains L’Usine Digitale Sébastien Deguy, former founder and CEO of Allegorithmic, now VP of 3D & Immersive at Adobe. We had an ambition to do something meaningful: a complete set of tools dedicated to 3D creation with an ecosystem approach.”

The product photography market appears
The new offering includes four pieces of software: Painter, Designer, Sampler and Stager. Painter is the heart of the offering and allows you to apply textures and materials to 3D models. Designer is used to create textures and materials, while Sampler is the new name for Alchemist, which allows you to create materials from real objects or by combining them.

Stager, meanwhile, is a rendering program that is the successor to Adobe Dimension (which continues to be available for free in parallel). It allows you to place a model on a scene and apply realistic lighting to it to create 2D renderings. This is a key part of the value proposition of this software package, as it enables virtual photography.

Substance 3D Modeler, successor to Medium
In the second step, a fifth program will join the package: Modeler, the successor to Adobe Medium, acquired from Facebook at the end of 2019. It’s currently in private beta and should go into public beta by the end of the year. Again, Medium will remain separate and free in the Oculus Store.

“At the moment, nothing is certain about the end of support for Medium and Dimension. We want to maintain continuity without disrupting users. My philosophy is to encourage people to pay, not by forcing them, but by offering them more and better” comment by Sebastien Deguy.

A library of models, materials and lights
The suite comes complete with a library of thousands of customizable 3D models, materials, and lighting environments (some of which are parametric with dozens of variations), which are free to download with a subscription and royalty-free.

Depending on the selected subscription, you can download 30 or 50 of them per month. “For me, this library alone is worth the subscription, Sebastien Deguy says. These shots are made by a company called Decagon and are of great quality. You can set the intensity and angle of every light in the scene.”

The explosion of virtual photography
Adobe’s stated goal is to support the strong growth of 3D creation in markets such as industrial design, fashion, architecture or e-commerce, which have an increasing place in its strategy. “Ikea is a good example, VP 3D & Immersive explains. Today, 75% of their product images are in 3D. “Exponential acceleration has occurred because by using video game techniques we save time and quality while spending less.”

There are many examples. “Porsche, Coca-Cola, Louis Vuitton, Hugo Boss and Ben & Jerry’s have adopted our products for design and packaging images. Sebastien Deguy continues. The pandemic also accelerated the work, because we could no longer do a photo session on the site.” 3D came out as a stock, but now that it has been adopted, customers are realizing its value advantage and continue to use it.

A different proposition from creative cloud
Subscription prices remain the same as those already in place for Substance tools: $19.99 per month for the Substance 3D Texturing offering and $49.99 per month for the Substance 3D Collection ($99.99 per month per team).

Note that Adobe 3D Substance products are not included in Creative Cloud, but they are more widely connected to it than before. For example, it is possible to export a scene from Stager to Aero, and soon it will be possible to do so from Painter as well.

Towards opening up to other 3D creation programs
To go further than Aero, Adobe’s 3D team is working in parallel on other applications to complete the value chain both upstream (with object capture) and downstream in the “experience” part.

“We are also looking at organic and inorganic growthSebastien Deguy says. A 3D professional will always want to use Maya, Nuke or Blender, so we open up these universes, our idea is not to close our ecosystem. However, for some applications, such as virtual photography, we want to be comprehensive enough that we don’t need to look elsewhere.”