So I’m a bit confused on how to combine designer and painter to make a dynamic textured object used in ue4.
As a simple example, I want to make a barrel that would be used often so I want them to look different.
Painter allows me to texture in high detail and allows me to expose parameters to add dirt, rust, wear…
Can those exposed parameters be exported as a substance from painter to ue4?
If so than what’s the point of designer in my end goal?
Or am I missing something and painter CANNOT export substances to ue4, so I have to do all my texturing in designer.
Than what’s the point in painter?
OK, so make paint the barrel in painter and have these awesome exposed parameters and want to use them in ue4 as a slider.
How to I import all these parameters in my layers to designer so I don’t have to recreate everything?
Well yea indeed, Im looking at the exact same thing right now.
So far as I understand the connection between the two things, Designer is for procedural textures, even complete model texturing though via a bit complex ways of doing it (using color masks to tell the substance which other substance goes where etc).
And with Painter you can paint those Substances onto models. And whatnot else you can paint, spray and leak onto your models. And that results in normal textures, *not *substances.
So to me looks like they extended Designer with a Painter module towards regular texturing needs thats sold seperatly
Designer lets you generate parametric textures at both runtime and design-time. There is some capability crossover with the built-in UE4 Material Editor - but , in general, the built-in UE4 material editor lets you generate shaders that are applied at runtime. Substance Designer can create much larger and more complex textures that can then be baked and then applied at runtime via a UE4 Material. Substances can also be created at runtime - this is useful to keep the binary small or to create effects that might change over time.
In the end, Designer always outputs textures that have to be applied via some kind of material shader. UE4 Material applies shading using textures as inputs.
Painter is designed to help you create the PBR materials for a specific mesh. You can paint multiple substances on the mesh, and they are all combined into a single set of PBR outputs.
For performance reasons it is typically best to have a single set of PBR materials for a given model. Rather than several different materials applied to different parts of the model. Creating the PBR outputs (Diffuse, Normal, Metallic, Roughness,etc…) is a pain to do by hand - painter lets you focus on PAINTING and not all the other stuff…
One last thing to mention is Bitmap2Material that will generate all the PBR outputs from a single input image…
For your barrel example, you probably want to use Painter to create the PBR outputs and apply them in UE4 using a the standard PBR material.
Substance Painter and Designer are two different things, created textures in painter are basically “simple” textures, you can’t change any parameters after importing them into UE4.
On the other side you have Substance Designer where you can also texture your mesh but make this textures also procedural, that means after exporting your substance file into UE4 you can still chnage all “exposed” parameters like
dirt values, scratch values, colos, roughness etc… or whatever.
You can also combine both apps, creating your basics in Substnace Painter, than exporting your SP textures into SD, where you can add the procedural effects to make your texture changeable nin UE4.
Take a look at the Ue4 tutoruials for SD and SP… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9_E1kBP9S8
IMO the biggest problem with using the substance parameters in UE4 is that any change in parameters will duplicate the textures, which is not ideal for performance. For example say you have a substance for a car with a parameter controlling dirt and you import that into UE4, the default material will be created with the various outputs. Opening the substance instance graph and tweaking the dirt parameter will duplicate your outputs (with the new parameter modifications) and create a new material.
It’s a shame that the substance plugin can’t enforce a parameter change as a material instance.
