Regarding Substance Atlantis - How does it work?

Stirls

http://www.allegorithmic.com/demo/atlantis

Here, Allegorithmic claims that the UE4 plugin reduces the overall texture file size by 97%. I was wondering how that worked. Hopefully this is the best place to ask.

NicolasW

This demo makes a great use of procedural textures, consequently, instead of storing heavy bitmap data in the package, only the procedural substances are stored (sbsar files from Substance Designer). Then when the demo is loaded, the textures are generated by the CPU and stored in memory.

Nicolas

Froyok

In the case of the Atlantis demo the textures are also cached on the disk.
So next time you load the project, the texture are read from the disk directly, otherwise the missing textures are generated on the fly (like what Nicolas said).