Substance 3D Painter 12.2 adds cage painting and Order Independent Transparency

Adobe has released Substance 3D Painter 12.2. According to 80 Level, the biggest addition is cage painting, which gives artists more direct control over projection distances when baking.

Painter uses a cage to decide how far to search beyond a low-poly mesh when capturing detail from the high-resolution mesh. A cage that sits too close can miss detail. One that extends too far can pick up information from unintended surfaces. With 12.2, artists can paint the cage distance onto the model with per-pixel brush control, or use Polygon Fill to adjust whole sub-objects. The aim is to fix local projection problems before the next bake, rather than changing the whole cage each time.

Polygon Fill now has three selection modes: Rectangular Marquee drags across an area, Polygon Loop selects a continuous loop of faces, and Partial Polygon Loop targets a smaller portion when a full loop would take in too much geometry. A new Visible Polygons Only option stops rectangular selections from reaching polygons on the opposite side of the model. That should help on dense meshes and assets with overlapping parts.

Texture Set Highlighting lights up the matching geometry in the viewport when you hover over a texture set. Holding Ctrl/Cmd + Alt while hovering over the model shows which set contains that part. This is aimed at unfamiliar projects and characters or props split across many materials.

Order Independent Transparency improves the real-time viewport look of glass, ice, liquids and other low-opacity materials by sorting overlapping transparent surfaces more accurately. Version 12.1 added automatic rebaking and painting skew corrections onto low-poly geometry, and cage painting continues that interactive baking workflow. 12.2 is available now. Adobe's official release notes carry the full technical breakdown and the list of fixes.