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?