Adobe’s latest update adds brush-based cage repairs, expands Polygon Fill selection modes and improves transparency in the real-time viewport.
Adobe has released Substance 3D Painter 12.2, adding a new way to repair baking cages and extending one of the software’s main selection tools. The update is aimed at texture artists working in games, animation, motion graphics and visual effects, where small projection errors can quickly become time-consuming to correct.
The most significant change is cage painting for baked texture maps. According to Adobe’s release notes, artists can now adjust the baking cage directly on the mesh with the Paint, Eraser and Polygon Fill tools, rather than relying only on a global distance offset. That matters when parts of a high-poly model fall outside the automatically generated cage and produce artefacts in the resulting maps. It is the second brush-led baking fix Adobe has added this year, following the normal-direction painting workflow introduced in Substance 3D Painter 12.1.
Adobe has also reworked Polygon Fill. The tool now includes two loop-oriented selection modes: one that fills a complete quad loop with a single click, and another that lets users drag out a partial rectangular patch. It now works with every blending mode available in the layer stack, and the interface has been updated to reduce mistakes. By default, non-visible polygons are ignored, which should prevent users from accidentally filling geometry on the far side of a mesh. The release notes also point to workflow refinements, including the ability to hover over an entry in the Texture Set list and automatically highlight the matching geometry in the 3D viewport.
The viewport itself has been improved as well. Adobe says the real-time preview now supports order-independent transparency, which is designed to remove flickering where transparent or translucent surfaces overlap. The software is available on Windows 11, RHEL 8.6 or 9.2 and later, Ubuntu 22.04 and later, and macOS 15.0 and later. Perpetual licences are sold through Steam for $199.99, while Adobe continues to offer Substance 3D through its Creative Cloud-based subscriptions, with Substance 3D Texturing priced at $24.99 a month or $249.99 a year, and Substance 3D Collection at $59.99 a month or $599.99 a year.
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