Allegorithmic has released Substance Painter 2018.3 with viewport upgrades, new UI helpers, an enhanced symmetry tool, proper 2D view export and a boost in performance.

Sparse Virtual Textures in the real-time viewport allow managing a large number of textures. This technology permits streaming in and out textures that are only necessary from a given point of view in order to maintain a specific footprint on the GPU memory. It improves performances on projects with a large number of Texture Sets (or UDIMs).

The symmetry axis can be moved freely with a 3D manipulator or through the new symmetry panel. Several other improvements include the display of the symmetry plane as an intersection with the mesh or a preview of your brush’s symmetrical clone.

A new color swatch in the layer’s contextual menu allows the addition of color accents to folders and layers. Moreover, it is possible to activate or deactivate multiple layers at once by clicking and dragging vertically.

The new anisotropic shader allows displaying nicely shaded hair, satin or brushed metals with the help of the Anisotropy Level and Anisotropy Angle channels.

You can check other shaders, 2d viewport export, dithering, Texturing.XYZ, Baked Lighting filter and some other features in the Allegorithmic blog here.