3Substance 3D Stager 1.0 is a new professional staging tool for scene design and rendering. This initial release focus on key elements to render 3D scenes with realistic lighting and materials.

Release date: 23 June 2021

Major features

New Adobe Mercury Rendering Engine

Adobe's mixed technology rendering engine helps you produce the best quality visuals.

• Make the best design decisions in full context with interactive ray tracing.
• Instantly switch to real time rendering to focus on layout and positioning.
• Switch between CPU and GPU with no change to your scene.
• Setup your scene just once with shared render and material settings for any rendering configuration.
• Save time with powerful machine learning based denoising.

Learn more about the rendering system in Stager.

New advanced physically based material system

Stager's material and rendering systems are based on the Adobe Standard Material - a shared material definition that provides robust settings for physically based rendering and ensures consistency between Adobe apps so your projects flow seamlessly through your workflow.

• Create any dielectric and metallic surface with common PBR material settings.
• Visualize glass, plastic, and skin with translucency, absorption, and subsurface scattering.
• Simulate fabrics, leathers, and soft-touch surfaces with sheen settings.
• Create coated materials with clear and tinted coat settings.
• Control displacement and tessellation per-object for fine tuned control and details.
• Add image layers with custom material properties.

Learn more about materials in Stager.

New layout tools

Stager helps you arrange your scene quickly with a variety of layout and transformation tools designed to provide flexible options to suit your projects needs.

• Arrange your scene with the efficient all-in-one universal transform tool.
• Use classic Move, Rotate, and Scale tools for precision control.
• Have objects interact naturally with collision based transformation.
• Use snapping to align bounding boxes, pivots, and more.
• Align and distribute objects to get consistent spacing for any combination of objects.

New lighting system

Lighting is what ties any 3D scene together and Stager has the tools you need to showcase your ideas in the best light.

• Use physical lights to add localized lighting effects with point, spot, and area lights.
• Combine image lights in the powerful image-based lighting layer editor.
• Use color temperature across physical and image lights to get the right measured tone to your lighting.

New image compositing

Stager helps you show ideas in context with powerful background image compositing features, saving you time so you don't have to build a full 3D scene for a still image.

• Use Match Image, powered by Adobe Sensei, to automatically generate camera and lighting information from any photographic background.
• Explore environment stages - a content package that comes with pre-configured environment lights, high resolution backplate images, and camera data for out-of-the-box compositing realism.

New camera system

Navigate the scene with ease and save and export your favorite views.

• Get moving quickly with shared navigation shortcuts between the Adobe Substance 3D apps.
• Create camera objects with unique aspect ratios to easily render at any size from one scene.
• Use powerful camera systems like focal length, depth of field, and more to get the perfect shot.

New Substance 3D ecosystem

Based on non-destructive systems Stager helps you explore endless varieties of your 3D scene with parametric Substance assets.

• Instantly send your Painter project to Stager and skip tedious import/export flows.
• Add parametric models created in Designer to add variety and flexibility to your scene.
• Explore the infinite styles of parametric materials then add additional material properties on top.
• Use parametric image-based lights from Designer and Sampler for total flexibility in your scene lighting.
• Get more content on Substance 3D assets and Substance 3D community assets.

Learn more about Stager's connections to other Adobe apps.

Release notes

1.0.0

(Released June 23, 2021)

Added:

• Adobe Mercury Rendering Engine
• Advanced physically based material system (ASM)
• Layout tools
• Lighting system
• Image compositing
• Camera system
• Substance 3D software interoperability

Known Issues:

• Stager is not available on Apple Silicone M1 devices.
• GPU rendering is available on Windows only and requires an NVIDIA card. (See system requirements)
• PSD Render layers and denoising are available for CPU rendering only. GPU support is planned.
• Stager may crash when importing some Substance materials. We are investigating this crash.
• The scale handles on the Select tool gizmo occasionally disappear. Restarting the app will fix this.
• The Creative Cloud Libraries panel will sometimes fail to refresh. Use the menu and select Reload to reload the panel.

1.0.1

(Released July 27, 2021)
Summary : General bug fix release.

Fixed:

• Fixed a bug that sometimes caused CAD import to not work correctly for customers with the Substance 3D Collection Enterprise plan.
• Fixed a number of bugs with GLTF import and export.
• Removed two environment stages for content issues.

1.0.2

(Released September 28, 2021)
Summary : M1 support, general enhancements and bug fixes.

Added:

• Apple ARM (M1) support for emulation mode.
• Added planar translation handles to the Select tool.
• Added uniform scale handle to the Scale tool.
• Changed the Windows header bar. It takes less vertical space and properly gets recolored for dark theme UI.
• Improved decimal input: When typing into any input field the value will now be remembered up to 6 decimal places, providing more precision in saving and reading input values.
• Selection changes no longer trigger a raytracing redraw, causing less viewport flashing.
• Transformation guides now only appear after moving, instead of on selection, causing less viewport flashing.
• Updated the Meet Mat model in the Starter Assets. It is now the same model as other Substance 3D apps.
• The "Browse 3D assets" button now opens Creative Cloud Desktop if available. Requires Creative Cloud Desktop version 5.6 or newer.

Fixed:

• Fixed a bug that sometimes caused CAD import to not work correctly for customers with the Substance 3D Collection Enterprise plan.
• Fixed a number of bugs with GLTF import and export.
• Removed two environment stages for content issues.