Community Tutorial: Intro to Substrate

Learn how Substrate, Unreal Engine 5’s unified physical shading framework, replaces legacy material modes with composable BSDF nodes. In this tutorial you will enable Substrate in your project, build a Slab BSDF material from scratch, and connect a full PBR texture set including Albedo, Roughness, Metalness, AO, Normal, and Height maps. You will also learn how F0 drives specular reflectance, how to derive it correctly from a Metalness map, and how to enable Nanite tessellation so your Height map produces real surface displacement. The session closes with a practical look at Material Instances for asset variation. Prerequisites: basic familiarity with the UE5 interface and an understanding of standard PBR texture maps.

https://dev.epicgames.com/community/learning/tutorials/XE8Y/unreal-engine-intro-to-substrate