For those who don’t know the tool: Substance 3D Sampler sits in the material digitisation lane of the Substance 3D family. It turns photos, scans and 360 images into materials, HDR lights and 3D assets for Substance and third-party 3D pipelines.
OpenPBR moves into the default workflow
Sampler 6.0 landed- and the main production change is OpenPBR support inside the material creation workflow. The default material creation preset now uses OpenPBR, export channel selection supports OpenPBR channels, and the channel settings panel can switch between OpenPBR and legacy Adobe Standard Material.
OpenPBR is an open surface shading model hosted by the Academy Software Foundation and organised as a MaterialX subproject. It aims to give tools a shared material model instead of another round of “close enough” shader translation. That is useful, but renderer support still decides what survives contact with production.
Presets for common material types
The new material creation templates cover Base Material, Anisotropy, Coating, Fuzz, Subsurface and Transparent setups. They configure the material model, enabled channels and default parameters for the chosen surface type, which is better than hunting for the right OpenPBR channel names at 2 a.m.
The create dialog lets artists set the asset name, resolution, material model and channel list. Custom presets can be saved and reused. The Add base material option creates a compatible base fill layer, while Apply preset thumbnail values starts from the values used for the template preview rather than neutral defaults. For material authoring teams, the practical value is less manual channel setup. Fuzz, coating, subsurface and transmission are now easier to start, though final lookdev still needs proper lighting, scale and renderer checks.
Channel control and export
The “redesigned” Properties panel adds an Applied to section, so a selected layer or filter can affect specific channels instead of the whole stack. Some filters also show the affected channel next to the layer name when they operate on a single channel.
Sampler 6.0 adds dynamic versions of Auto Tiling, Content Aware Fill, Height Blend and Normal Blend, plus a new Fill experience. The default asset size is now 2K, and rendering can go up to 8K.
Export has also grown up a little bit. Sampler can export materials as USD, USDA or USDZ, and OpenPBR channels are available in export channel selection. That makes the update more relevant for pipelines already moving material and scene data through USD rather than loose texture piles with optimistic filenames.
HP Z Captis capture gets cleaner
The HP Z Captis workflow gets a one-click scan mode. In Auto mode, Sampler can define a default name, detect the region of interest and crop zone with the backlight, focus on the full region of interest and adjust light intensity for the material.
For 3D scanning users, Sampler also keeps the previous material category, outputs and capture resolution between successive captures. Captis capture options include preview, high quality and full resolution modes, with Adobe’s documentation describing the high quality setting as equivalent to 4K for a 30 by 30 cm capture and full resolution as equivalent to 8K for the same capture size. And, let’s be honest, if you are a company using a Captis, you want as little interaction between your employees and valuable hardware as possible.
Current build, pricing and caveats
Version 6.0.2 followed on 25 June 2026. It adds an SBSAR engine version warning and restores a Captis photometry saving option in preferences. The rest is mostly fixes, including project, rendering, physical size, layer and crash-related changes. Glamorous? No. Useful? Usually.
Sampler is available through Substance 3D plans. The Substance 3D Collection for individuals is at US$59.99 per month, while the teams plan is listed at US$119.99 per month per license. The Sampler product page also lists education access for students and teachers as free.
The current system requirements list Windows 11 64-bit 23H2 as the minimum Windows version, macOS 13 Ventura as the minimum macOS version, and Linux support for RHEL 8, RHEL 9 and Ubuntu 22.04. The minimum hardware spec starts at 8 GB VRAM, 16 GB RAM on Windows and 24 GB RAM on macOS. Some Nvidia driver versions are flagged as launch-crash risks, so check drivers before blaming the poor material.
https://experienceleague.adobe.com/en/docs/substance-3d-sampler/using/release-notes/version-6-0
https://www.adobe.com/products/substance3d/plans.html
https://academysoftwarefoundation.github.io/OpenPBR/
