EVERYTHING is changing in mid-January.
Adobe Substance Stager is a 3D scene design and rendering application developed by Adobe as part of their Substance Suite. The Substance Suite is a collection of tools focused on 3D texturing, material creation, and scene composition.
Substance Stager is a 3D virtual studio aimed at helping artists, designers, and 3D professionals create realistic and visually stunning scenes by offering powerful tools to compose, light, and render 3D content.
Users can import 3D models and materials created with other Substance tools or third-party applications, and then set up their scenes with various lighting, camera, and environmental settings.
We tested Substance Stager extensively. Overall, we found that the workflow makes it easy to set up multiple Backplates and cameras and render them all at once. Substance Stager does a great job creating light from HDRi Maps , but it could do better at using HDRi Map visuals as a background.
Here's our full review of Adobe Substance Stager, and results from our testing.
Who Uses Adobe Substance Stager?
Substance Stager is primarily aimed at creative directors, artists, and other users who need to create a quick and easy 3D rendering for staging, concepting, and virtual location scouting .
The tool lacks the comprehensive options that you’d find in a full-featured DCC like Maya or Blender . In many ways, that’s the idea! Substance Stager lets 3D novices create a convincing, basic render without fiddling with lots of settings.
Even for advanced 3D designers, Substance Stager is a useful tool. It can let you quickly experiment with different virtual locations or substances, check the lighting in an HDRi Map, or create a rough mockup of a scene for your brand or creative team.
Using Substance Stager with HDRi Maps
HDRI (High Dynamic Range Imaging) maps are a common method used in 3D rendering to create realistic lighting and reflections in a scene.
These maps contain information about the light intensity and color captured from real-world environments or generated digitally, providing a 360-degree image that serves as an environment for the 3D scene.
Adobe Substance Stager supports the use of our RAY.HDRI maps, allowing artists and designers to integrate them into their projects as environment light, to achieve more accurate lighting and reflections.
Substance Stager can’t yet use HDRi Map visuals at a high resolution, though. For our tests, we paired an HDRi Map for IBL with a Backplate for visuals.
That’s something Adobe could improve. We’d love to see them add the option to use high-resolution HDRi Maps for both lighting and visuals.
Our Tests of Substance Stager
We tested substance stager by importing our own premium HDRi Maps , and then placing a virtual chrome ball into various Backplates.
The chrome ball is a helpful tool because it allows us to see how Adobe Substance Stager has chosen to render the Image Based Lighting data from our HDRi Maps. We can see how reflections from the scene, various light sources, etc. might appear on a 3D model placed into the scene.
We were pleasantly surprised by how well Substance Stager rendered scenes and IBL data. In a desert scene, Substance Stager picked up accurate reflections. We found that rotating the HDRi Map helped to orient the sun appropriately.
The ultimate test for us was using Substance Stager to render a scene involving a building. In this shot, there are both nearby and far-away elements. The building’s wall is complex geometrically and close by, whereas the sun and surrounding plaza area are far away.
Again, Substance Stager did a great job rendering these elements accurately. The building’s wall is reflected in the rear surface of the chrome ball, reflections look accurate, and the midground elements are also rendered (and reflected) well.
This is a tricker scene, so we were impressed with the results we saw in our test.
Again, we’d love to see support for the use of visuals from high resolution HDRi Maps as well, so we don’t need to use an HDRi Map and a Backplate.
Results and Conclusions
Overall, we were impressed with Adobe Substance Stager as a tool for 3D design. Substance Stager certainly won’t replace the work of a skilled 3D designer using a professional DCC. It simply doesn’t allow the control that’s required for the most mission-critical renders.
The tool works perfectly for Backplates. Out of the box, you need zero knowledge to get a great looking image/render out of it. You can easily add additional lights to your scene, too.
The biggest downside of the tool is that it doesn't allow for full resolution visuals from an HDRi Map. You get a resolution of perhaps 1K, and event then, only 20% of the full 360 degree image is visible. That results in a lot of blurring, even with Blur set to zero.
In short, the tool is great for pairing Backplates for visuals with HDRi Maps for IBL data, but it could be even better if Adobe added support for high-resolution visuals from HDRi Maps.
From our testing, we could see Substance Stager providing value in several use cases:
A professional 3D designer could use it to quickly test various HDRi Maps & Backplates or models in order to pick the best Backplate for a higher-quality render.
Designers could use Substance Stager to check HDRi Maps for lighting before purchasing a license for a given map.
The tool could be useful in storyboarding, where fast production of 3D scenes is more important than perfect quality.
Substance Stager would be a great fit for video game character look studies. Character designers could use the tool to see how their characters look in various lighting situations (by importing multiple RAY.HDRi & HDRi Maps) before finalizing the character’s textures and geometries.
Event planners could use Substance Stager to visualize various design elements (stage setups, displays, etc.) in a virtual environment or Backplate before committing to an event venue or event design.
Product designers could create quick mockups of their products in appropriate settings. A beverage company, for example, could visualize the new design of a bottle by placing it on a table in a beach environment, showing accurate reflections and lighting on the bottle.
HDRi Maps, Backplates, and Environments for Substance Stager
We tested Substance Stager using CGI.Backgrounds’ premium HDRi Maps and Backplates. If you need HDRi Maps or other IBL/environment data for your Substance Stager renders, we have a variety of options for you.
If you just need a single HDRi Map to try out IBL in Substance Stager, check out our Free plan . You get one premium HDRi Map per month, so you can test the tool out.
If you need lots of maps (such as for visualizing a character or product in various lighting or weather conditions), consider purchasing one of our subscription plans , which allows you to download multiple assets per month for more extensive testing and visualization.
Overall, we were excited to see what Substance Stager can do. We believe the tool is a powerful and useful option both for professional 3D designers, novices, and other creative professionals.
