Forecasting what colors and materials will be hot in the coming months is tough enough. Imagining those trends in 3D can be even harder. To help designers overcome that problem, Peclers Paris— leading creative strategy and prospective trends agency — recently partnered with the Adobe Substance 3D Assets team to create a collection of 3D digital materials that reflect current and emerging aesthetic trends.
This collection reflects Peclers Paris’s deep expertise in trend forecasting and prospective, combined with Adobe’s cutting-edge digital capabilities.
A data-driven, designer-centric approach
The goal of this partnership was to offer product designers content that is not only inspirational but relevant to their industry. After identifying color palettes and material harmonies aligned with current and future design directions, the teams developed more than 40 fully parametric materials – all of which are now available in the Substance 3D Assets library.
Peclers Paris was the perfect partner: a leading creative strategy and trend forecasting agency with over 50 years of expertise, and part of the WPP network. Through strategic consulting and seasonal trend books, the agency helps global brands transform emerging cultural signals into actionable insights across industries including fashion, beauty, design, lifestyle, food, and hospitality, with a strong focus on color, aesthetics, and design innovation.
The parametric materials come with presets that integrate the trend-informed palettes defined by Peclers Paris. The Substance 3D Assets team brought the collection to life by applying them to a range of 3D models, demonstrating how these materials might be applied in real-world product design workflows. Each model follows a comprehensive color, material and finish (CMF) strategy, helping designers produce photorealistic visualizations with consistency across every detail.
In this collection, we have more than 40 materials and we added some models just to allow users to apply these materials and see them on real objects. It’s really important when we are creating the material to have a photorealistic result, to have the digital twin between what you see in real life and what you have on the screen – Anaïs Lamellière, product manager & CMF designer, Adobe Substance 3D.
Crucially, the design work here goes beyond a single object. The collection supports color and material exploration across an entire product line—or even an entire portfolio—enabling designers to work at scale with aesthetic cohesion.
Decisions that drive design
Color and material decisions carry more than just visual weight. They influence a product’s perceived quality, emotional resonance, and alignment with consumers’ tastes, aspirations, and cultural context. In short, CMF choices can deeply impact how a product is experienced and valued.
I have to constantly nourish myself with really inspirational content and all different types of arts, whether it’s movies or music or new collections of design. And for me as a designer, it’s really important to touch materials, to touch the products – Charlotte Cazals, Trend Forecaster and Designer, Peclers Paris.
Designers are incorporating 3D tools earlier and earlier in their concept development workflows. Yet CMF design often lags behind—treated as a late-stage concern. This disconnect can slow down the development cycle.
By integrating color and material data into the early phases of design, teams can iterate in real time, make confident decisions, and generate photorealistic previews using digital twins, accurate virtual replicas of real-world objects. This streamlines the design-to-manufacture process, reduces the need for physical samples and prototypes, and even allows brands to preview products before they’re manufactured to help in presales and marketing.
The output is just unbelievable. The precision, the details, everything about the materials that we provide come out in this 3D material. This is just magic – Valérie Niang, Head of Consulting, Peclers Paris.
Photorealistic assets help teams quickly transform early concepts into clear, shareable visuals – aligning creatives, suppliers, and stakeholders around a unified vision. Assets created during the design phase remain accessible downstream, supporting marketing, sales, and engineering needs without rework.
A toolbox for faster, smarter design
The collection was designed as a flexible toolbox for product designers. Peclers Paris proposed eight thematic material groupings, each accompanied by moodboards of surface finishes and curated color palettes.
The Substance 3D Assets team’s technical artists then recreated more than 40 of these materials digitally, each with a specific finish—such as brushed metal, matte gloss, or grained surfaces. These materials include parameters that allow designers to easily modify aspects like color, surface effect, or pattern, providing full creative control.
It’s essential for an artist to have a very strong, powerful set of apps that are able to communicate with each other. It makes you work faster, and it makes you work better – Jean-Bastien Juneau-Rouleau, 3D material artist, Adobe Substance 3D.
Thanks to the Substance 3D parametric technology, these materials reproduce the same kinds of CMF explorations designers might conduct in a fab lab or physical workshop—only now this can be done virtually, instantly, and without the cost of samples. This collaboration effectively digitizes the traditional trend book format into an actionable, real-time design resource, empowering designers to experiment freely and make better-informed choices earlier in the process.
A strategic partnership for future-ready materials
This collaboration between Adobe Substance 3D Assets and Peclers Paris shows how trend insight and digital innovation can work hand-in-hand to empower designers. With a suite of parametric materials rooted in expert color and material forecasting, the collection gives creatives the tools to design faster, iterate earlier, and align products with evolving consumer tastes. By integrating trend-aware digital materials from the start, it opens new possibilities for seamless, confident 3D creation.
You can find the Peclers Paris material collection on Substance 3D Assets right now.