Designer tools

cavi-substance-designer-mcp is a stdio server for Substance 3D Designer's headless CLIs (sbscooker, sbsrender, substance3d_baker). No Designer UI or lease.

{"mcpServers": {"substance-designer": {"command": "cavi-substance-designer-mcp"}}}

Binaries: CAVI_DESIGNER_BIN_DIR, else CAVI_DESIGNER_APP (.app path), else the

standard install dir for macOS, Windows or Linux, else sbsrender on PATH. An override is final: a wrong one is reported as not found, not replaced.

Paths are relative to CAVI_SUBSTANCE_WORKSPACE; outputs go to new directories only.

Failed calls remove the directory they created.

Tool	Actions / inputs
`designer_status`	binaries, versions, packages dir, templates, workspace
`material`	`info` sbsar graphs; `cook` `.sbs` or `builtin` (`templates/<name>`, `packages/<name>`); `render` graph + `values`, `resolution`, `seed`, `preset`, `outputs`, `format`, `bit_depth`, optional `pack`; `pack` `sources` + `pack`
`bake`	`low`, optional `high`/`cage`, `maps`, `resolution`, `normal_format`, distances, `udim`, name matching

Bake maps

normal Normal.Raytraced, ambient_occlusion AmbientOcclusion.Raytraced, curvature Curvature.Raytraced, thickness Thickness.Raytraced, position Position.Raytraced, world_normal Normal.TangentToWorld (low mesh only), bent_normal Normal.BentNormals, id Color.Raytraced, height Height.Raytraced, opacity Opacity.Raytraced. One baker run per map; each output file is verified.

material pack uses the shared channel packing spec.

Limitations

Presets are not listed (sbsrender info does not expose them) and an unknown preset

name is ignored by sbsrender.

16-bit RGB/RGBA sources are read at 8-bit precision; 16-bit grayscale is exact.
The evals run against fake CLIs (evals/designer_fake_cli.py); native tests need

Designer and, for baking, Blender. See Testing and evaluation.