Overview:
For the past few months, most of the UE4 substance plugin releases have been compatibility releases while we have been hard at work with a plugin refactor. The main goal of this was to allow us to get feature updates released much faster! As new features appear in our tools, they will quickly appear here as well.
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Very Important:**
Please take note before upgrading current projects using this new version of the plugin:
This release is not backward compatible. Once a project has been loaded, updated and saved with this version, assets will no longer work with all previous versions of the substance plugin. Much has been changed and with change, often comes issues. We have put in a lot of work to make sure that this is as stable as possible before release but before upgrading a project, we ask that you please backup your projects and work! If any issues are found, we love feedback and will provide bug fixes as soon as we can.
News: **
One of the main issues we have received feedback for is users have had trouble accessing the Substance UE4 plugin due to our Github being a fork of Epic’s source code and issues with the UE4 Marketplace. As a result, we will be providing an alternative method of releasing the plugin. I have included a dropbox link to access the plugin for now and we will soon have a download link from our website where you can download recent versions of the plugin as they are released. For installation instructions, check out the readme within the downloaded plugin folder.
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New and Changed Features:
–Blueprint only projects can now be packaged from within the editor. You no longer need to create source code and build the project from source to package the substance plugin.
–Our texture compression has been updated to the newer BC compression formats, such as BC4 for linear textures and BC5 for normal maps. This greatly improves texture fidelity.
–GraphInstances now store a reference to a material if one was created when the instance was loaded which can be accessed/assigned easily from a blueprint.
–CreateInstanceOutputs Blueprint node has been removed. By default, the graph instance will create its default outputs when created through blueprints.
–Two new blueprint nodes have been added in place of the CreateInstanceOutputs node. These are named EnableInstanceOutputs and DisableInstanceOutputs and they are setup in the same manner that CreateInstanceOutputs was. They allow users to enable and disable different maps at runtime or construction time through blueprints.
–Added a new node which returns a channel enumeration value for which output channel a substance texture should be used for. (Set from Designer)
–SubstanceTexture2D objects now work properly after corresponding SubstanceGraphInstances and/or SubstanceInstanceFactories are deleted or not found. In the case they are not present, SubstanceTextures will default to baked.
–SubstanceTexture2D tooltips have been updated.
–General performance improvements
–A new setting has been added to allow users to limit how many substances can be updated from the async queue each frame.
Bugs Fixed:
–Fixed: Texture artifacts appearing on sharp edges in normal maps that appeared on lower resolution outputs have been fixed as a result of compression updates.
–Fixed: Changing an output size to 4k from blueprint nodes when the GPU engine was set would default to 2k textures. Now properly changes to 4k.
–Fixed: When moving substance assets to different folders in the content explorer, assets are no longer duplicated.
–Fixed: Calling DuplicateGraphInstance or CreateGraphInstance no longer modifies the GraphInstanceFactory requiring it to be resaved.
–Fixed: Packaged builds no longer cause an unusual amount of memory to continuously be used.
–Fixed: Core plugin functionality has been disabled for the dedicated server build configuration.
–Fixed: Reimporting substance assets now properly reimport changes from the source files.
–Fixed: SubstanceInstanceFactories now contain the relative path to the source file along with the absolute path to prevent issues with reimporting after a project has been shared through source control.
–Fixed: There is no longer a crash when canceling the progress of importing a substance.
Download Link:
Marketplace:
An update has been sent to the marketplace and should be available in the upcoming days. An update will be posted here when it does become available.
Github:
Due to the issues surrounding Github, we will be phasing this out of our release process. All current versions will remain but new releases will no longer be added.
Once again, feedback is greatly appreciated and we hope you enjoy the new plugin!
