Substance Painter to Unreal Workflow

This is part of the Quick Tip series that I will be posting regularly here on Medium. This is not really a detailed tutorial, it’s more of a quick reference.

Let’s begin…

Start a new Substance Painter project, and choose Unreal Engine 4 as Template.

Start painting, then once your done…

Export your texture, and make sure your Output template is Unreal Engine 4 (Packed).

This will generate 4 texture files: BaseColor, Normal, Emissive (optional), and the fourth one which is a combination of Occlusion, Roughness and Metallic.

Open up Unreal Editor and make sure your Substance plugin is enabled.

Browse through the following folder: parent_materials, under Substance Content.

Here you will see some material templates.

Right click on Substance_Basic_Template, and duplicate it and name it like My_Substance_Template.

Open up your duplicate, and you will be seeing something like this.

As you can see, the metallic, roughness and ambient Occlusion node uses the RGB output. We don’t want this because the texture exported by Substance Painter packs all these three properties into one texture file, each one corresponding to one of the RGB channels, like so:

Ambient Occlusion -> Red channel

Roughness -> Green channel

Metallic -> Blue channel.

To fix this, we could simply switch the output of these nodes, like this one:

Save the edit and right click on your newly created template and choose Create Material Instance.

Double click your material instance and start filling it with the textures generated by Substance Painter.

Now you can use this material instance for your mesh.

Maybe your asking why we have to copy the Substance_Basic_Template if it as simple as connecting the RGB channels individually.

The answer is this node: tiling.

If you double click on it, you will see this graph which allows you to use tiling.

This gives you extra parameters in your Material instance which can override.

That’s it. Thanks for reading!!!