This version takes texture creation into the big leagues with MDL material authoring – opening up a whole new world of materials – plus Linux support, fbx camera import and support for VCA.
It’s now possible to create beautiful, multi-layered MDL materials with Substance Designer! NVIDIA’s universal Material Definition Language has been supported since version 5.3, but the authoring capabilities in 5.5 make Substance Designer an industry first – a texture creation tool that can be used for authoring MDL materials. Even better, the MDL materials you create with Substance Designer will later be shareable with many 3D applications giving great material consistency across different software’s renderers. Today this includes Iray (which is available as a plugin for Maya, 3DS Max and Cinema4D) and will later extend to V-Ray, Octane, Redshift and Adobe software.
More info: https://www.allegorithmic.com/blog/substance-designer-55-here