Adobe Substance Improvements
We've added support for a Substance PBR Metallic Roughness - Coated workflow, optimized memory consumption, as well as an option to save Substance materials without textures.
Video captions: For those working with Substance materials, I am happy to show you that you can now work with metallic roughness and coated workflows. Like here, where I'm using the coat layer nodes within Substance Designer. And, I now have the ability to control this coat layer, separately, within VRED. This gives you so much more freedom in creating your materials and improves your visual quality. And, additionally, you have the option to tell if the Substance textures should be inlined or not. This can make the scene file smaller.
Metallic Roughness - Coated Workflow
With VRED 2025.2, it is now possible to use Adobe Substance SBSAR materials that are using the Metallic Roughness - Coated workflow. This means that the following additional output channels are now supported and can be combined with the already supported channels.
- Coat Opacity
- Coat Roughness
- Coat Color
- Coat Normal
- Coat Specular Level
- Coat IOR (numerical output only, no texture)
With VRED 2025.2, the following Substance workflows are supported:
- Metallic Roughness
- Metallic Roughness - Anisotropy
- Metallic Roughness - Coated
Substance Preferences
We added the Inline Textures Substance preference, which reduces the VPB file size on disk when this option is disabled because only the parameters are stored in the file and not the generated textures.
Optimized Memory Consumption
For newly generated Substance textures, which contain a uniform color, we have optimized memory consumption.
Saving Substance Materials Without Textures
Substance materials, depending on the quantity of texture outputs and pixel resolution, can significantly increase the VPB file size on disk. To address this, we've introduced a new option, Inline Textures, under Preferences > Scene > Materials > Substance. Disabling it allows only parameters to be stored in the VPB file, not the generated textures, resulting in a smaller VPB file size on disk and quicker saving. However, this means all textures will need to be re-created when the file is loaded, which could significantly increase loading times compared to inlined textures.
To keep you informed during this process, the File Project Loading Bar will display the message, Creating Substance Textures..., when new textures are being created for Substance materials, if they are not stored within the VPB file.