Setting up a material in UE4 made in Substance Painter

Development Rendering
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Hi,

So the first thing to realise is the difference in lighting between Substance Painter and UE4.

Substance Painter uses Image Based Lighting. This is very high quality lighting and makes the render of your assets look really nice. However UE4 by default does not have IBL enabled. You can match the lighting through use of a skylight in UE4 and add in a HDRI image to get the same effect. This should help match the two for the most part.

More here: https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Rendering/LightingAndShadows/AmbientCubemap/index.html

However if you are not using IBL then you have to see what works best lighting wise. Materials should be the same. There is a chance that sRGB might need to be disabled where the export has not properly flagged it for whatever reason, I have run into this being an issue with the normals so make sure sRBG is disabled on the normal map especially. Also if you are using a packed map for AO, Metallic and Roughness, also make sure sRBG is disabled.

This should be the material set-up:

  • Diffuse/ Albedo = BaseColour
  • Height*/
    Normal = Normal (*In substance
    Painter you paint normals through
    height information, don’t worry about
    exporting height, just the normals.
    The height will then be converted to
    Normal information for use in the
    material)
  • Gloss/ Roughness = Roughness
  • Metallic = Metallic
  • AO = AO

Hope this helps a bit.