On July 23, Abstract rolled out a substantial InstaMAT update that adds a full 2D painting toolset alongside expanded generative materials and scalable texturing — and frames the whole thing around giving artists complete creative control. InstaMAT is a material-authoring and texturing platform aimed at the pipelines where surfaces get made: games, film, VFX, enterprise, and XR/metaverse work. The pitch of this release is a specific stance on AI in creative tools — generation as an accelerator the artist directs, not an automatic output they inherit.
Why texturing is the right place for this
Materials and texturing are among the most time-consuming, least glamorous stages of 3D production: making a surface look convincingly like worn metal, damp stone, or scuffed leather, and doing it so it holds up at any resolution and tiles cleanly. Generative materials attack that grind by producing plausible, editable surfaces from prompts or references, while scalable texturing keeps them sharp whatever the output size. Pairing that with a complete 2D painting toolset is the important combination: you can generate a base, then paint on top of it directly, hand-adjusting every detail. That loop — generate, then paint over — is exactly the kind of human-in-the-loop workflow that separates a usable production tool from a novelty.
”Complete creative control” as the selling point
Like NVIDIA’s push to embed agents inside DCC tools and BandLab’s bet on licensed AI music, InstaMAT’s update reflects where the market is settling: the winning AI creative tools are the ones that keep the artist authoring, not spectating. By combining generative materials with hands-on painting inside one texturing environment, Abstract is betting that professionals want AI to remove the tedium while leaving the judgment calls — art direction, fine detail, final look — firmly with them. It’s a pragmatic read of what studios will actually adopt, where a tool that produces unusable-as-is output is worse than no tool at all.
Where it fits
For the 3D, game, and XR artists this site follows, InstaMAT sits in the increasingly crowded material-authoring space (alongside the established Substance ecosystem and a wave of AI-assisted challengers), and this update sharpens its position as a texturing tool with real generative help and real manual control. As always, the proof is in production use — how good the generated materials actually look, how cleanly they scale, and how fluid the paint-over workflow feels at deadline. But the direction is the now-familiar and healthy one: AI collapsing the slow parts of content creation while the artist keeps the brush.