This week Cino Lai, Technical Artist @Adobe shares an in-depth exploration into the future of AI-3D design.

But first here's this week's roundup of updates in tools and technology that are shaping the future of creative work.

NEW TECH UPDATES

Weekly Roundup

1. Adobe Firefly Unlimited Credits

Adobe has temporarily unlocked unlimited generative credits for all paid Creative Cloud Pro, Firefly Standard, Pro, and Premium plans, running until December 1.

AI credit systems often feel like a black box across the industry but fortunately I came across this ​table in Adobe’s Help Center​ that actually adds some rare specificity for Adobe users.

It clearly lays out which features fall under Standard and which are considered Premium, both of which are unlimited right now so you can try everything from Text to 3D in Substance Stager and Viewer to new partner models like Imagen, Veo, and Topaz.

Honestly, I hadn’t paid much attention to Firefly until Wes McDermott’s preview of Project Graph at Adobe Max recently gave me a reason to take a closer look. I am planning to do a dedicated video digging into it once early access drops. But until then if you’ve been waiting or put off by limited credits and unclear feature splits, now is a solid window to experiment.

2. Switchlight Launched Version 3.0

SwitchLight is a tool that converts video footage into PBR (physically based rendering) passes, enabling advanced, production-ready relighting workflows for filmmakers and VFX artists.

The newly released SwitchLight 3.0 brings two major updates:

1) it now uses a true video model that processes multiple frames at once, resulting in smoother and more stable outputs with improved detail, and

2) it has been trained on a dataset ten times larger than before, allowing it to handle a broader range of materials, lighting conditions, and environments.

These changes mean more realistic, flicker-free results and enhanced visual clarity, especially for challenging scenes with motion.

SwitchLight 3.0 rolls out automatically in the Beeble cloud app and is also available in the new Beeble Studio desktop app for local 4K processing and longer videos.

Check out Switchlight.

3. Volinga Launched UE5 Plugin

Volinga Plugin Pro promises to be the most advanced solution for integrating 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) into Unreal Engine.

Notable unlocks from the new plugin include mesh-based relighting for better integration with lighting and materials, cull volumes to help clean up splat data, and scalable multi-GPU rendering for complex pipelines. There are also improvements to ACES color workflow, 16-bit HDR color support, and nDisplay compatibility for LED volume workflows.

These updates are aimed at making 3DGS assets more usable in studio pipelines, especially where photoreal and real-time requirements intersect.

Check out the official release.

FROM THE COMMUNITY
This Week’s Highlight

Cino Lai, Technical Artist @Adobe released an in depth breakdown exploring what a pipeline could look like that incorporates 3D AI + Texturing Automation.

His pipeline spanned Dreamina for 2D Concept Settings, Hunyuan for 3D Model Generation, Substance3D for Texturing, and Unreal Engine 5 for presentation and rendering. Occasionally a bit of Blender and other tools slipped in to pick up the slack where AI tools fell short (e.g. automatic decimation and UV's)

The entire project took 6 days, from 2D design to the final assets imported into UE5.

​His breakdown on Artstation​ is quite thorough and pulls back the curtain on everything from prompts used to current limitations discovered at each step.

I highly recommend checking out the breakdown not only for the insights into the process as it sits today, but as an excellent example of the kind of mindset and approach we need to have as artists testing and pushing the tools of tomorrow -- so we can stay ahead of where things are heading.