Overview

Substance Air is Allegorithmic's new generation texturing middleware solution. It was designed to help users create and customize a new kind of textures: lightweight, dynamic and infinitely versatile. Replacing ProFX Online, Substance Air includes Substance Editor, a new authoring tool with unique creative possibilities, and a revamped run-time engine designed to create and generate high-quality textures that can fit in only a few kilobytes.

A new generation of textures

The textures created with Substance Air offer much more advantages and possibilities than traditional bitmaps. While the latter are static and heavy by nature, the textures made with Substance Editor are extremely light and dynamic.

Micro File Size. Substance textures are written in a proprietary format equivalent in size to a text file. This allows you to store the equivalent of gigabytes of bitmap textures in only a few kilobytes. The final bitmaps will only be generated by the run-time engine at install or loading time so your client file size is guaranteed to be minimal. Plus, the size of your files does not depend on the resolution of your texture.
Non-linear Process. Creating your textures in the node-based interface of Substance Editor is a completely non-linear process: your textures can be finished but they are never fixed as for bitmaps, and you are free to make any changes you want at any time. You can also easily make multiple variations of a single texture simply by modifying a few parameters or adding a few filters to create new effects.

Ready for user generated content. Substance textures are dynamic: by creating what we call “tweaks” which are simple sliders controlling any parameter in your graphs, your textures can be modified very quickly from the parameters of your graphs and from any other tool or engine. For example, you can create dynamic textures for your MMOs and let users personalize these assets from a simple in-game interface.

Unique authoring possibilities

Substance Editor is the first solution entirely dedicated to professional texturing that offers unique opportunities to mix and manipulate bitmaps, svgs and procedural elements to produce complex maps.


Sets of textures. Substance Editor simplifies the creation of complete sets of texture maps. Normal, specular and other maps can easily be derived from the diffuse using a few filters. You can control each of your textures and, because it is non-linear, any change on your diffuse will automatically propagate to the other maps. Also, all your textures automatically tile by default.

Texturing painkillers. Substance Editor offers a large set of templates and unique filters that are designed as texturing painkillers. With filters such as "bitmap to material", "automatic tiling", "automatic shadows" or "splattering", you will have more possibilities to create great materials than you are used to with traditional solutions. Substance Editor does everything that hand painting is not made for.



Custom tools. Any texture or combination of filters can be used as a new basic resource for your next productions. When imported in a new graph, they appear as a single node, so your new graph is simplified to the maximum. A great application of this is the possibility to create custom filters. If you find a combination of filters that produce a great effect you want to reproduce on other textures, you can simply save it as a new custom filter. This way, you can really accelerate the production of your new assets by benefiting from your previous creations.

Unleash the potential of your online games

Substance Air is a key asset for the development of online games:

• It ensures that the client size is as small as can be while keeping the highest visual quality.
• It can help artists create lots of variations from their assets for less repetitive visuals and larger environments.
• It allows creating unique user generated content features by using dynamic textures.
• The run-time engine can generate the final bitmaps from either the GPU or the CPU, even on low-spec devices.
• While being easy to integrate within any game engine, Substance Air is already integrated within the Unreal Engine 3, Emergent’s Gamebryo, Lightspeed, Unity and more to come.

Training and support

As no powerful tool comes without a learning curve, Substance Air includes a complete package of training and support materials. We provide artists with series of training videos (available in English, Chinese, Korean and Japanese) presenting all the main features and methods you need to get proficient with Substance Editor. We can also provide online training sessions through Webex. Our internal support team is composed of expert artists and developers, so you will never get lost implementing Substance Air in your production pipeline.

Availability and licensing

Substance Air is now available. Go to this page to request an evaluation. For pricing information, check the licensing page or contact form.