Adobe Dimension CC can now render images in the cloud

NelsonG · April 3, 2019

Adobe today announced the latest release of Dimension, the company’s 2D and 3D compositing tool and one of the newest members of its Creative Cloud suite. The two highlights of the new release are cloud rendering, which is now in beta, and the ability to import substance materials from Allegorithmic’s Substance Designer.

Cloud Rendering in Dimension is the feature with the widest implications for both the way Adobe thinks about the cloud and its longterm business. Users can use this new feature to offload the rendering process from their own machine and send it to the cloud. Generating 3D content takes a lot of compute power, after all, especially when you get to the point where you want to create a high-res final product. While most modern laptops and desktops have enough horsepower to render these images, it’ll take a lot of resources and may tie up your computer for a while (and get your fans spinning).

To do this, Adobe needs to pay for the cloud resources, though, and that’s not cheap. So to use this feature, all Creative Cloud users will get 15 free rendering credits. Each render will cost between one to three credits, depending on the quality of the image.For now, those 15 credits is all you’ll get, though. There’s no way to buy more credits during the beta and while Adobe says that it wants to continue giving users free renders after the beta period is over, the company isn’t saying how many credits subscribers will get or sharing its pricing structure for buying credits yet.

During the beta, image sizes are limited to 2000×2000 and Adobe will also denoise the image for free.

It’s easy to see how Adobe could take this technology and apply it to other compute-heavy processes like video renders.

The addition of Allegorithmic support doesn’t come as a surprise. After all, Adobe acquired the company, which builds tools for creating textures and materials for game creators, visual effects artists and designers, in January. Dimension now supports Substance’s native file format and because these materials are based on parameters, it’s easy to adapt them to the specific scene they are in.

Other new features include improvements to high-res graphics on top of 3D models (think a logo you want to place on a 3D bottle). Previously, those often looked a bit pixelated, but now, they’ll remain in a higher resolution. In addition, Dimension now also supports CC Libraries, Adobe’s service for sharing assets across its Creative Cloud tools, which ensures that as you edit an image in Photoshop, for example, that updated image is immediately available in Dimension now, too.