Substance Painter Plugin For Unity3D

What are Substance Materials?

Substance materials are procedurally generated assets, from technology developed by Allegorithmic. A ‘substance’  is basically a set of maps, defining a whole material with all channels: Diffuse, Normal, Specular, Bump, etc. 3DS Max and  Maya have substance support for rendering, but now with Unity implementation we can make use of them in real-time applications.

Why use Substance materials?

There are a number of reasons to use of procedural materials:

• Dynamically updateable in game
• Resolution independent
• Animation supported
• Tiny file size
• Really fast to create textures, especially bricks, tiles and other tileable surfaces, that are otherwise time consuming to generate from photographic source
• Fast to duplicate and create library of unique material
• They are cool

Where do I get Substance Materials?

The Asset Store in unity (Window > Asset Store) includes free and paid substance packages available to browse.

How do I use them?

To customise a substance material and apply in Unity follow these steps:

• Import or create a mesh onto which you want to apply materials;
• Make sure it is UV’d evenly, or as desired – use a checkerboard or dummy material (Currently unity cannot import subtance materials assigned in external packages)
• Create a fairly even topology, polygons spread to rule out kinks etc.
• Apply relevant smoothing as required

• Check FBX import settings for the Mesh, Select  Materials Generation ‘Per Material’  esp if using multiple materials per object
• Drag object into hierarchy or viewport and save scene
• Find Substance material asset you want to use (the square substance icons)

• Select + to ‘Add substance from prototype’ or to create a substance material (spherical icon)
• Name the new material

• Apply to object by dragging directly onto the mesh in the viewport or with multi material meshes to the element (shown below)

• Edit the parameters for your material instances;
• Randomise seed to create variations on the patterns
• Adjust sliders for other parameters such as colour, dirt amount, normal strength or whatever your substance has exposed in the inspector
• Change shader if required to add reflections and other fx
• View the results in the viewport – can be useful to create shader spheres in your scene for representative lighting