Browse your fonts in the Assets window
Fonts are now listed in the Assets window under their own filter. They are gathered from different locations on the operating system (and also from the Libraries).

Drag and drop fonts like any other resources
Fonts can be used as text resources like any other kind of resource. Drag and drop them to automatically create fill projection. They can also be used in brushes or as input in Substance filters.

Text resource parameters
When creating a text resource, you can tweak a few parameters to adjust the look of your text: vertical and horizontal alignment, automatic or manual size, line and character spacing, color, etc.

Wide range of characters and feature supported
The Text resource supports right to left writing as well as ligatures. (To be able to write non latin characters a compatible font is required.)

Import custom fonts like regular resource
You can import your own fonts files directly into your Library or project like any other resources. Some types of fonts are not supported however, for more information see this documentation page.

Illustrator (.Ai) file support
In this new version .ai files can now be imported and rendered in Painter to be used as resource in brushes, fill projections or as Substance image inputs.

.svg and .ai files share common settings
SVG and Illustrator documents share similar settings, notably the resolution, crop area and scope selection parameters. This means that vectorial resource can be managed in a similar way.

Artboard selection
Illustrator documents support artboard, when using an .ai file you can also choose between different artboards available via the dedicated setting.

Improved scope selection
The scope selection window has been improved with the support of thumbnails, making it easier to browse and select only specific elements.
For performance reasons thumbnails are off by default and can be enabled with the Show thumbnails checkbox.

New Substance 3D Assets window
A new dock is available in the interface to browse Substance 3D Assets. If the dock is not visible and closed it can be found again in the dock toolbar on the right of the interface.

Download manager
You can see the assets currently being downloaded via the dedicated manager using the bottom left button of the window. Assets that may fail to download can be started again from this list.

Find your downloaded assets easily
The button in the bottom right of the window opens a menu with a few actions to help navigate the website but also to shows were assets have been donwloaded.

New Layer stack API
The new layerstack module allows to control the layer stack of a project in many ways. You can:

• Query and set the selection of layers and effects.
• Create new layers, folders and effects (including filters, anchor points, etc.).
• Instantiate layers.
  
• Get and set parameters of layers and effects, load resources into them.
• Get and set Substance parameters.

Scoped modifications and pause of the engine
Manipulating the layer stack could lead to long computations, this is why we also exposed the possibility to pause and unpause the engine from the API (like in the UI). We also made it possible to group modifications together, for both performance reasons but also to undo a single time multiple operations.

Basic color management
With the exposition of the layer stack we needed to introduce the notion of color management in our API. A new colormanagement module has been added to create, tweak colors and choose the color space of bitmaps. (This part of the API isn't complete yet and will be expanded in future versions.)

Query export preset information
Export presets are now exposed in our API, allowing to query the list of presets (both predefined and custom). Their content can also be retrieved in a similar format to our existing export textures API.

New possibilities ahead!
This new part of the API allows to do a lot of new things, like saving and restoring a selection of layers or changing the random seed of all the resources in a project for example:

Fixed accumulation issue
Painting over and over an area in the normal channel will no longer saturate or clamp and create holes or artifacts. Switching the normal channel to RGB32F is also no longer needed.

Fixed undo breaking painted strokes
Undoing a brush stroke no longer breaks other already painted strokes.

Transparency on zero alpha
Brush stamps made with a texture with an alpha at zero will now draw as transparent. The example below shows a brush stamp (left) versus a planar projection (right).

Precision mode with CTRL
Pressing control while dragging on a manipulator will now enter into a new precision mode which allows more meticulous operations. This change applies to the translate, rotate and scale manipulators.
Here is an example before and after pressing CTRL while dragging:

New scale behavior
The scale intensity is now based on the current scale value itself and not on the scene size anymore. This makes relative changes easier to do, especially at small values. Combined with the precise mode it makes scaling a lot more pleasant.
Another change is scaling down until 0 will no longer go into negative values. This avoid the issue of wanting to scale down a projection and flipping it by accident.

Improved surface manipulator rotation
The surface decal manipulator is now a lot more stable when dragging around a surface. It doesn't increase its rotation when just doing back and forth translations.
Here is the old behavior compared to the new one:

Camera aligned projection on drag and drop
Drag and dropping a resource into the viewport allows to create a warp projection directly on the surface of the mesh. This projection was previously incorrectly rotated, it is now aligned to the camera.

Updated Tile Generator
The Tile Generator blending mode parameter can now be changed and will modify the result as expected. The resource has also been updated to the latest version available in Substance 3D Designer.

Fixed banding/quality issues on some filters
Several filters were stuck on 8 bit precision instead of 16 bit, leading to banding/artifacts when using them (like the histogram scan or directional blur). This is now fixed.

Color space in SBSAR output
When the Legacy or OCIO color management workflow is enabled, the SBSAR export will now reference the color space names used in the project on the respective outputs.

Faster resource discovery
With the introduction of the Text resource we added a new cache to make crawling of resources on the disk faster on next startup. This is quite notable when resources are installed on a HDD or when a library has gigabytes of resources. This new cache can be disabled with a command line, see the dedicated documentation page for more information.