Painter 12.2: Paint the Cage, Fill the Loop

For those who don’t know the tool: Adobe Substance 3D Painter paints materials onto 3D assets and bakes mesh information into textures for subsequent shading and rendering.

Cage painting

Cage painting adjusts projection distance locally using Brush, Eraser or Polygon Fill. It requires a high-poly source and a Distance-based cage; Automatic cages are not supported yet. Painter subdivides the cage automatically, giving even sparse meshes room to manoeuvre. Cage against the machine, briefly, before the next bake. Strength, Flow, Opacity and Spacing control the brush; Polygon Fill adds an interactive Strength slider. Linear Dodge accumulates offsets, Normal replaces them and Lighten retains the maximum.

Normal-map Auto-rebake activates on entry. Green and blue indicate positive and negative offsets; red marks approximate high-poly intersections. Set global cage distances first: changing them afterwards can require repainting. Long, thin polygons can make the intersection preview inaccurate, so check the actual bake.

Loop control

Polygon Fill now fills complete quad loops or partial loops and patches. Alt extends backwards, Shift restricts partial filling to the primary loop, Shift+A temporarily invokes loop mode, and A combines with the previous result. Staying in the loop finally has a practical application. Triangles and n-gons are excluded from loop modes; mirror symmetry is preferable to the less reliable radial option.

Rectangular filling offers Intersection or Contained Center hit-testing. Visible Polygons Only now defaults to on; disable it to fill through geometry. Layer-stack blending modes, opacity and multiple material channels are supported, but filling remains restricted to the active Texture Set.

Transparency and housekeeping

Texture Sets and UV Tiles highlight from the list or with Ctrl/Cmd+Alt over geometry. Order-independent transparency reduces overlapping-surface sorting artefacts. It is disabled by default; Sort Capacity offers 1x, 2x, 4x, 8x and 16x, with 4x preselected. Higher settings trade memory and speed for quality, so transparent intentions still need a budget.

Additive brush strokes accumulate within one layer. The new mesh_uv_neighbor input supplies RG UV-advection offsets across seams. Display Settings are regrouped; bakers advance to 3.23.0 and the Substance engine to 9.6.1. Fixes address AMD baking device loss, excessive VRAM use, HDPI texture loading, mask blending, network-export temporary folders and USD/ USDz issues. Check Adobe’s warning for NVIDIA drivers 616.56–617.14 before updating a production workstation.

Availability

Adobe’s German Collection pricing lists €56.99/month including VAT for individuals and €95.99/month per licence excluding VAT for teams.