The sculpt-and-texture wave
A dense week for the people who make surfaces look good, as Maxon and Adobe both shipped and OpenPBR kept spreading.
A dense week for the people who make surfaces look good. Maxon and Adobe both shipped, the OpenPBR standard kept spreading, and the AI-world and AI-tooling crowd had a busy few days too.
ZBrush and Substance, moving in step
ZBrush 2026.2 added Windows-on-ARM support and a direct export to Substance 3D Painter, tightening the sculpt-to-texture handoff. On the Adobe side, Substance 3D Designer 16.0 brought a 3D Shape Splatter, new SDF nodes, and a move to OpenPBR, while Substance 3D Painter 2026 entered beta with Skew Baking, Auto-Rebaking, and OpenPBR compatibility.
The throughline is OpenPBR. As more tools speak the same material standard, moving a texture set between apps stops being a guessing game.
AI worlds and AI tooling
HY-World 2.0
Tencent's Hunyuan line shipped HY-World 2.0, which generates editable 3D worlds, not just video, from text or images. Editable is the key word: you get a scene you can actually go into and change.
Reallusion's iClone 9 roadmap
Reallusion laid out its 2026 plan for iClone 9, including the ability to rig and animate any model plus an AI actor creator.
Glade MCP
A new MCP server that lets you operate the Unity or Godot editor from an AI client. Part of a clear trend this spring of engines and DCC tools opening up to AI agents.
That is the week in surfaces and scenes.
Tools covered in this issue
ZBrush
Best for high-detail character and creature art destined for game engines.
Substance 3D Designer
Best for building reusable procedural materials at scale.
Substance 3D Painter
Best for teams who want AAA-grade texturing with one-click export to any engine.
Hunyuan 3D
Best for fast text/image-to-3D asset generation with a generous free daily quota.
iClone
Best for directing character animation and cutscenes in real time.
Glade MCP
Best for devs who want an AI assistant that can directly drive the Unity or Godot editor.
Don't miss the next issue
New gamedev tools, tech, and deals, straight to your inbox.
Join 3,200+ indie devs · unsubscribe anytime.
More newsletters
AI lands in every tool
From CAD to character creation to the browser, AI quietly showed up inside the tools you already use.
The week your coding agent learned to make games
A game-building service, an art workspace, and a character platform all became operable from the coding agent you already use.
Phaser's Game Agent, Box3D, and EVE's engine goes open source
Prompt-to-playable went mainstream and production-grade engine code went open source, in the same week.