Substance 3D Painter 2026 Reviews

Extremely disappointed with ADOBE which honestly isn't surprising to anyone right now. Ever since they rolled out 12.1.0, everything is extremely slow when trying to load other projects. No matter what I do, settings I change it doesn't work. I found a way to roll back to 12.0.3 and with backup projects I made they load INSTANTLY. I do not understand how they can mess this up. But we are gonna have to wait another 3 months before (if) they fix this issue. Adobe this is my lively hood and how I get by. Please for the love of all that is holy fix this.

Overall it's pretty good*. I like the new additions since 10.0 (2024), like the ribbon tool, the new image projection mode and being able to flatten layers to speed up performance. I haven't used the latter yet, but I already know I'll be glad that I have the ability to flatten my layers, once I get better at using SP and am working with more complex textures. There's some other minor additions too like assets properly auto-updating now, if you are editing a texture in Photoshop and save it. Speaking of Photoshop, now you can send your project directly to Photoshop too, all your textures with all your masks. It does take quite a while to prepare it and then load it into Ps, but it's definitely a neat feature I am going to make use of. I'm on CS6 too, and despite it preceding Painter, there's still support for it, probably thru some legacy API or idk, all I know is that it works and that it's nice. No more manual exporting and opening them, now it's all automated, even though, again, it takes a bit. Performance-wise, it runs just like 2024, really. I've seen some negative reviews saying it's less stable or that their GPU isn't properly supported anymore, which does suck, but for me it still works just fine. I am on 560.70 WHQL and while the minimum recommended is 572.60 everything still worked fine and I haven't noticed any issues. Though I do recall there being a major change with the nvidia driver around version 570 from another program I tried using before, so maybe there are some things that aren't properly working with my older driver, but again, haven't noticed anything so far, and if it's really needed I'll just update. Really, the only con here is the price and I guess giving Adobe money. $200 is quite a lot of money, for what in the end is.. one major update per year. The new go-to release schedule for SP seems to be a new release on Steam for each major new version number. Which also means that, while this version just released a few months ago, it's rather unlikely we'll see another major update, at most probably 2-3 minor features, QoL improvements and that's likely it. The best move right now is to probably just skip a couple of years and only buy it once there's enough new features to warrant to price, like for me the new features I've mentioned above are worth it, but those have been added over the course of two years. There really wasn't a reason to buy 2025 unless you were a freelancer who worked with customers' save files, requiring the newest version. Customers, other users, you know. I kinda wish they'd copy what they're doing with Modeler and just extend support, although speaking of Modeler, development for that program seemed to have slowed down a lot. Seems almost EoL at this point. It is hard to recommend SP if you're someone who needs/wants to be on the most up-to-date version at all times, but if you're someone just dabbling with it for fun or you are doing your own thing, where you can justify waiting several years for new features, yeah, it's worth it. One more gripe I have though is the material variety. I really wish they'd include more base materials, because as of right now, and also two years ago, you're only looking at around 220 materials (mat + smart mat) that are included. Obviously there's brushes, noise textures and a bunch of other stuff, but actual materials, yeah it's not a lot. I'd almost say you're required to sub to the Substance Suite on Adobe's website for a single month, to get access to their material library. I have 1500~ materials in my library and even then I sometimes feel like, for patterns and stuff, I could have more. More complex materials like fabric and wood, with specific patterns you cannot really recreate by recoloring. With metal you can do a lot of things by just changing a few values, but with wood and fabric.. it's not as simple to make it look different. It is quite expensive at $60/m, and there are promo codes you can buy to gain access for only 1 or 3 months that are way cheaper, but I don't know if Adobe allows the sale of those codes to begin with. But if you sub to it for $60 and download materials, they're yours to keep and use commercially (in projects) too, as far as I am aware. There's still the option to just download free materials from the community asset library or go to third party sites or shops where people sell/give away their own materials made with Designer, but be aware that in the long run it's likely cheaper to just subscribe to Adobe once still.. Lastly, other software exist too, like MarmoSet, but there you're paying a whopping $400 for perpetual, and you're only getting updates to a certain point too. Other than that.. Blender (lol..) or something like ArmorPaint. Both of those options aren't really good at all, and then you have even more expensive programs like 3D Coat. For just very, very basic texture edits.. ArmorPaint is juuuuust about enough. Putting a decal or something on a model. AP is free on Github, or otherwise you have to pay like $15-20 for the pre-compiled program. Overall I'd still recommend SP, but only if you can wait a couple of years between purchases. I'd say buying every three years probably makes the most sense. I should've probably waited for 2027 (13.0) releasing in April/May next year, but oh well. Do as I say, not as I do. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3747365014

Well they completely broke loading and saving in 12.1.0. Now takes 5 mins instead of 20s for one of my projects. No previous versions to install via the beta menu either.

Great product overall. (FOR WINDOWS USERS) For 260 CAD you get a product that can texture anything and own forever (sort of until my future pcs cant run it in 15+ years). No updates but considering the current toolset I dont think its very important. The main strengths of the program are the generators and texture/brush bank for me, along with tools like polygon/object fill and baking curvature maps. Will be better than any other product for any type of serious 3d modelling texturing. It just takes a while to learn because of how many features it has. Everyone on linux complaining about crashes on linux has a right to complain they should remove it being listed as a linux product, though for me on windows the product seems stable.

They dropped CUDA support so a feature that I was using fine in SP2022 no longer functions in SP2026.

Latest update broke half my projects. Crashes constantly now. Great update as always adobe!

[b]Very thankful that Adobe offers a perpetual license.[/b] I can confidently say it’s [b]definitely worth it[/b]. and fits well into a professional workflow without forcing a subscription model, which is increasingly rare these days.

I'm too deep into Substance Painter to bother learning any other texturing software... but with every update this software gets more and more unstable. Crashes are so incredibly frequent. Sort it out Adobe.

Substance Painter 2026 contains very few substantial improvements over the previous versions. Additionally, the Linux support is incredibly poor. The software likely will not start out-of-the-box without some changes to your system configuration. After managing to get it to run, I am facing very frequent crashes and several other annoyances, such as the color picker turning my entire screen black. If there was a suitable competitor with a similar scope of features, I would use that one instead of Substance Painter. For the price point that it's being sold at, the quality is downright embarrassing.

Continuous price increases for expensive software that gets no updates. I hate adobe.