After inking a partnership pairing its hyper-realistic design assets with Browzwear’s VStitcher and Lotta 3D design software in May, Substance by Adobe released more than 100 new assets in its ’20/’21 “Ready-to-Texture” collection.
Calling remote design a “necessity” in the age of the coronavirus pandemic, Adobe’s Substance team said the addition of more than 100 new photorealistic assets will save time, allow for stronger decision making, and increase capacity for creativity among designers without the need for physical meetings or samples.
Among the new additions is a selection of woven, knitted and printed textiles that behave in similar ways to their real-life counterparts, including twill, oxford and tweed.
“These procedural textiles are modeled after commonly-used fabrics in the industry and behave like a specialized loom, enabling designers to adjust parameters of fabrics to match their vision exactly,” the company said.
Additionally, Adobe’s 3D texturing software will include new assets for creating procedural decals used in printing and embroidery jobs. Designers can use Substance’s decal functionality to convert images, log0s and even text into their designs, with fully simulated and customizable thread and material details.
These assets have been added on top of the 400 digital fabrics already available through Substance, including 90 procedural fabrics and 20 print-execution decals, the company said, multiplying the creative potential of the program “tenfold.” Designers can simply drag and drop images and other assets on top of their designs for high-quality previews in either VStitcher or CLO, another 3D fashion design platform.
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More options mean more time saved during the design process, according to Adobe. Procedurally generated knitted textiles, such as those used in jerseys, can be matched instantly with image collections for e-commerce, allowing for an “unlimited number” of variations in a single click—enabling users to generate all possible color variants for a product at once.
Basic print textile patterns have also been added in the new update.
“In addition to the structural attributes of the fabric, there are specific parameters for the print technique, that will allow you to control the thickness, proportions, and distribution of the motives as well as the printed color associations,” the company said.
This process won’t ever replace physical samples entirely, Adobe said, but the technology has the potential to heavily impact decision-making in design with no need to wait for printed samples to arrive. Considering the added challenges of distributing physicals samples to a factory, being able to simply drop digital designs into their inboxes for reference in production helps users save time.
Using Substance by Adobe’s new assets, designers can skip the process of modeling specific 3D details, instead applying them directly to a design by embedding the details into the pre-generated texture.
“These materials act magic-like but are parametric stamps,” the company said. “Drag and drop a decal on your model in Substance Painter, scale, rotate, and place a pattern—or simply paint a line of dots or a zipper.”
This feature can be used for print executions, digitally mimicking silk print, rubber print, plastic injection, flocking, embossing and glitter print. Designers can also control the color, material thickness, metallic effect and gloss of these prints. The same process used for embroidery enables immediate matching of thread orientation and contour stitching.
The ease of creating new, digital products enables brands to quickly build up their digital IP, generating thousands of designs from the base assets offered by Substance, the company said.