Adobe has recently released Stager, a new part of the Substance 3D Collection. Substance 3D is a family of augmented reality apps including Painter, Designer, Sampler and now Stager. Stager enables you to spatially arrange 2D and 3D Adobe visual assets (and items from other sources) to create and stage virtual and augmented reality scenes for real time hardware accelerated rendering. The Substance 3D Collection apps together are used by game creators, 3D artists, product visual creators and animators to build, arrange, color, light, texture and render/photograph 3D scenes for anything from games worlds and characters to product context visuals. Output can be in the form of 2D images, video animations, 3D virtual worlds or web content.
Painter is described in some of their marketing materials as being “Photoshop in 3D”. Designer allows you to create your own materials. Sampler enables you to use photographs to apply textures and patterns to materials. The Substance 3D ecosystem includes access to in-house created 2D and 3D assets for use as props, materials, textures, backgrounds, lighting studios, environments, models, furniture, and so on.
Substance was originally a product created by French company Allegorithmic, which Adobe acquired over two years ago. The group of tools has become part of Adobe’s cloud-based Creative Suite, available as online apps through monthly subscription.
Stager represents Adobe’s efforts to build the virtual photography segment to do all of those things you wish you could do with physical objects and cameras, but find that it is easier, faster and cheaper to do virtually, while also allowing greater creative freedom.
Although Adobe is trying to position this differently, you can think of the Substance 3D Collection as a competitor to Autodesk products like 3ds Max or Maya. While Autodesk targets the entertainment industry with games, characters and movies, Adobe seems to be more focused on the product development virtual photography, and mixed or augmented reality segment. The creative output and workflow is similar, but Adobe is already dominant in photography and marketing creative asset development space with titles like Photoshop and Illustrator, getting in on the creation of 3D data helps them own more of this vertical.
Physical photo shoots can get expensive, when you include a photographer’s time, sets, props, and especially when you want to depict many variations of a product in color, texture, size, and shape and in multiple contexts or settings. Add in the pandemic protocols, and things like this can become nearly impossible to achieve in the real world. In the end, you have to process the digital images from a physical camera anyway. Digitizing the entire process saves time and money and increases your flexibility in producing creative marketing output.
Another tool in the Substance 3D Collection appears to be in the works, named Modeler. This one does seem to be aimed more at the sculpting market, and they are accepting applications for private beta testing now. It appears to make use of goggles and 3D controllers to give you an almost tactile virtual sculpting experience – like a virtual Sensable 3D stylus sculpting virtual clay in virtual reality.
Adobe appears to be going all out to produce next-gen tools to compete with the long-time industry standards from Autodesk for 3D visuals creation for games, architecture visualization, product marketing, and virtual photography.