At GDC's expo floor, we caught up with Alexis Khouri allegorithmic, designers of Substance Designer, Substance Painter, and Bitmap2Material. Khouri told us about the new features for this suite of texturing tools as well as their unique pricing plan. "Substance Painter 5 is the only 3D painting application that is natively built from ground up for PBR," states Khouri.

Substance Painter 1.3 new features:

• integrated bakers,
• smart materials,
• new view port rending,
• ray traced shadows

Substance Live Pricing Plan Allegorithmic has a a standard fully-featured trail version good for 30 days as well as special indie pricing and regular pro versions. In addition they have added a new pricing plan called Substance Live, which works like a rent-to-own program. Meaning that you can choose to pay a lower monthly price, but when you've paid the full price for the software, you own it outright. Substance Live is only available if you buy the entire software suite. When new versions of the software are introduced, you can continue paying for the older version or transfer 50% of what you've already paid towards the newer version. Right now you can buy Substance Live Indie, which includes all fully-featured products for $299.00 one-off or $19.90 for 16 months. With so many software companies like Autodesk going to subscription models lately, allegorithmic's approach seems unique in that it's like leasing a car with the option to buy or trade in when a new model comes along. This approach could help consumers who enjoy owning their software license outright and who don't mind staying a few versions behind. For more information, visit allegorithmic's website.