How does one substance designer work in a game environment workflow?

hegvbwkeuyrv

Hello, I'm really curious about all these procedural material that's been really popular on artstation nowadays. What do people use those on actually? Sorry if this is a really newbie question cuz i am :v 

Are those material only applicable in a game engine like unreal? If so do they just use tri-planar projection every single time?

What about a hero object? like some kind of cool rock textured in substance painter. Do designer play a role here too?

Chimp

You can do what you like with it. It's just a bit of software that spits out images to your specification, you can tell it to do what you want, and then take those images and use them how you like. Whether that's Unreal, Unity, your own engine etc. You can use whatever kind of shader you like, there's no reason to use triplanar every single time, I'm not sure why you would think that?

hegvbwkeuyrv

yeah im not to sure myself im new to this whole procedural thing haha. For terrain (like snow ground) do people use uv or jsut triplanar?

rexo12

Generally UV. Terrain is normally quite flat, so a simple projection generally suffices. Some people might use a triplanar projection while texturing, and project that onto the UV map, but other than that I don't think it's used often in game engines.

Substance designer is a way to make static textures (or adjustable static textures - think material instances in UE4) in a procedural manner. Really it's just a different way to make textures, as opposed to something like Photoshop. It excels at making tiling textures and base materials, which can be painted onto a hero prop later, or just placed onto your terrain object.

The default layout is PBR for a game engine, but you can customize the outputs however you like. Remember that at its most basic level, all it's doing is giving you a set of tools to adjust colours in a specified texture space in a non-linear/non-destructive manner, export them as textures, and plug them into your engine inputs.

hegvbwkeuyrv

oowh okay thx for clarifying the triplanar thing :v btw how does usually people go from substance designer to ue4? 

rexo12

It depends. Personally I just export my texture outputs as bitmaps, Import them into UE4 and set up a material there, and put it on the objects I want. This is slower, but also allows me to use the textures wherever i need them (marmoset, etc.), and because I don't really use variables in my graphs it works for me.

 Other people will pack their graph into a .sbs file, which is Allegorithmic's custom format that behaves quite similarly to UE4's Material Instance, allowing you to adjust graph parameters (where you've set it up) on the fly. They'll then import the sbs into UE4 using the Substance plugin (can be found on the allegorithmic website).

Depending on the use of the material people will also import their sbs into substance painter and use it as a base material to paint over on something like a hero or detail prop, then export the textures along with the prop you painted and use it in UE4.

hegvbwkeuyrv

oowh okay. 2 question tho
1. do ue4 has other texturing tool other paint the vertex? or i rather just be doing it all in painter?
2. if i do use the plugin from allegorithmic website to ue4, does that mean i can get away withoput making material instances in ue4? cuz i feel like if i already make the tiling in designer, it would feel kinda redudndant adjusting everything again in ue4

rexo12

1. I believe UE4 has vertex painting tools, and if not I'm sure you can find a plugin for free that will do it for you. However, Substance Painter is not a vertex painter, it is a UV painter - the colour data is stored in the UV map's pixels, rather than on the vertices. This means you can have a low poly model (e.g 200 verts) with a comparatively high definition texture (e.g. 2048x2048).
 Generally if you wanted to paint some terrain with a blend material, you would use UE4's vertex painting tools, whereas if you were doing a prop or something you would use UV painting, i.e substance painter (or photoshop or mari or even designer).

2. I can't recall properly, but I believe when the plugin imports the sbs into substance it will generate a base material instance where you can adjust all the sbs parameters to your liking, and apply it to the objects you want.  If you wanted different parameters on a different set of objects you would duplicate that instance, apply it on the desired objects and do your different adjustments. You can set default parameters in your substance graph, so you can get away with not adjusting anything.

If you're just learning the software I'd recommend not even worrying about the function graphs and parametric side of Designer, and just focus on learning it as a base material/tiling texture tool. Once you're proficient there I'd dive into all the instancing stuff. That's just my two cents however.

sharpened

 Generally if you wanted to paint some terrain with a blend material, you would use UE4's vertex painting tools, whereas if you were doing a prop or something you would use UV painting, i.e substance painter (or photoshop or mari or even designer).

Technically, to paint a landscape you would use landscape layers to paint in the landscape tab, which is slightly different than painting by vertex.  You still may often paint models by vertex with a pretty complex material setup.   You can use your vertex colors as a blend in a lerp node between multiple colors, normals, or any channel of the material.  This way, on large props, you can blend multiple seamless textures across the surface of the prop using vertex color channels.

You can import models with vertex color information, or paint them inside of UE4.

Here's an overview of how to set up layer blends based on vertex color information https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/UI/LevelEditor/Modes/MeshPaintMode/VertexColor/MaterialSetup/2Way/

driftprincess_z

Glad you asked about this because I when I learned game art we weren't using PBR so now I am learning designer and painter. 

ActionDawg

If you try to pump substance files themselves into an engine, you need to take care of a few things. Some nodes don't work outside of SD, and you can easily make a substance that is way too expensive to calculate in-engine. Unless you have a specific need for publishing substance files to your engine, definitely export them as textures.

Mink

Definitely export them as textures.

And to elaborate on that last part, export them as packed textures. So aside from your color and normal maps, everything should be packed. I usually pack rougness occlusion and metallic with roughness in the green channel, as the green channel gets the least compression.