In a modern 3D workflow, it’s common to paint materials onto a model from a library. The artist could, for instance, place apply an iron base to their geometry before painting a rust material atop certain sections of it. There can also be stencils of paint and so forth. The software package that they use then bakes those materials into PBR textures that a game engine can combine to recreate the look of the material.
In my experience, there are two popular applications for this: Substance Suite from Allegorithmic and Quixel Suite from Quixel.
The former, Allegorithmic, was just purchased by Adobe for an undisclosed amount. Adobe plans to “incorporate Allegorithmic’s Substance tools into Creative Cloud over the coming months” but the subscriptions are (at least as far as I can tell) unchanged for now. The logo changed, but that’s about it.
As a bit of an aside, Allegorithmic just announced RTX support for light baking in their Substance Suite. I haven't used it myself, but I've heard that it works well.
Image Credit: Allegorithmic. Model by Glauco Longhi.
The reaction to this announcement is a bit all over the map. Naturally GIMP responded by tweeting out that people should donate to Blender – which is a good idea, but using proprietary tools is okay, too. It’s not like the tools are required to use the products going forward, as is the case with an operating system. There was also some non-specific complaints on Twitter about the software being absorbed into Adobe. At the same time, there’s been some excitement from those who have at least one subscription to Adobe and/or Allegorithmic already. (I am in this group.)
I am curious what will happen to their Linux support when being absorbed by Adobe, however. Mac and Windows should not change any time soon, but Allegorithmic serves Linux and Adobe is historically flippant about the penguin. Hopefully that will continue.
So it looks like the 3D painting suite is coming to Creative Cloud with a time frame of “over the coming months”. What are your thoughts?
Anyone using Adobe (or
Anyone using Adobe (or needing to) needs to read this too: https://www.the-pro-creator.com/2019/01/I-hate-adobe-and-so-should-you.html
No the Adobe blob has
No the Adobe blob has consumed another and those costly subscriptions will be needed. This is going to be a little bit similar to when Oracle bought Sun and started the monetization process for all of the acquired Sun assets. Linux support is going to be Nada for anything that Adobe gets its hands on! What the Adobe blob eats the Adobe blob monetizes and then charges handsomly to make use of.
On the subject of RTX, will Blender 3D get CUDA 10 support anytime soon to be able to access RTX/Turing’s new hardware features?
I guess more folks should donate to the Blender Foundation, and GIMP/Krita/InkScape/Other open soure projects because the costs of those proprietary solutions/services will be an ongoing expense that only those with sufficient revenue streams can afford.
Blender 2.80 Beta is already
Blender 2.80 Beta is already built with CUDA 10. It does not use RTX cores; the upgrade to CUDA 10 was just to support 20-series cards in the same way that 10-series (and earlier) are used.
That said, Ton Roosendaal has tweeted positively about it, and NVIDIA's RTX page mentioned Blender, although only for typical CUDA reasons. It's common for NVIDIA to parachute engineers and seed hardware to software devs, though, so it would surprise me if NVIDIA wasn't in the process of helping Blender get RTX support. Nothing concrete has been announced, though.
So until then it’s just
So until then it’s just everything done the regular way on the GPU’s shader cores until that RTX/Turing support is baked fully into Blender 3D(OpenCL for AMD/CUDA for Nvidia). The Blender foundation will have to Refactor even Blender 2.80’s code to be able to get at any of RTX/Turing’s new hardware features. With CUDA 10 being already part of the Blender 2.80 build process then it’s just a matter of waiting for the Blender Foundation to begin targeting the CUDA 10 API calls that target Turing’s new Ray Tracing Cores and AI/Tensor cores IP. CUDA 10 is a superset of the eariler CUDA versions so any current Blender 3D versions that target older CUDA API calls will just work on CUDA 10 if there are no regressions getting in the way.
It’s nice to see Blender 2.80 getting closer to release with the latest BETA and I hope that there will be no big regressions for users of the earlier Blender versions once they migrate over.
I’ll want to see how Blender 2.80 works on Pre GCN Graphics as well as how it works with the latest AMD/Nvidia graphics generations.
There are still plenty of laptops that shipped with Pre GCN AMD discrete mobile GPUs what with all the rebranding that went on. So there are plenty of AMD Discrete Mobile GPUs that are labled 7000 series but are Terascale GPUs and not actually GCN.
Most Folks with AMD graphics that is up to even GCN 1.0 can not make use of any GPU/OpenCL Cycles rendering so their devices will default to Blender CPU Cycles rendering. Folks with AMD’s GCN 1.1 and later GCN versions can make use of BLender’s GPU/Cycles rendering via OpenCL.
I’m looking at updatng my laptop to a Ryzen 3000 Mobile based laptop once the new models with Ryzen 3000(Zen+ at 12nm and not Zen-2 based like the desktop parts) APU based laptops begin to be released. HP now has started building Ryzen Pro based Probooks so maybe I’ll take a look and see what features are offered.
I’d rather get the Business grade laptops that use the Ryzen Pro branded parts because of the 3 year warrenties and extended support that Business class laptops/laptop CPU SKUs recieve. If you want to get a laptop that will last 3-5+ years with no problems get the same business class laptops that the enterprise customers purchase in volume.
The Laptop OEMs do not skimp on any of the business class laptops makes/models that they ship in volume to enterprise customers and the OEMs always use the better MB components because the business class laptops come with 3 year standard warrinties. So Business grade laptop usually get all the better grade parts because the OEMs can not afford to anger their big volume enterprise clients.
I Really want to get a Ryzen/Desktop based APU(35+ Watts) in a mini-desktop form factor but the Mini-Desktop OEM’s Ryzen/Raven Ridge adoption rate has been zero so far and hopefully that will change with Ryzen 3000 APUs.