EXPORTING TEXTURES FROM SUBSTANCE PAINTER FOR UNREAL ENGINE 4
I recommend exporting these in either PNG 16-Bit or BMP 8-Bit:
- BaseColor
- Metallic
- Normal
- Specular
- Glossiness
UNREAL ENGINE 4 IMPORTED TEXTURE SETUP
Setup Textures in Texture Editor After Importing Into Unreal Engine 4 (Recommended: Do This First!):
Note: To Access the Texture Editor in Unreal Engine 4, simply double click on an imported texture in the Content Browser.
- Uncheck sRGB for all textures but the BaseColor texture in Texture Editor.
- If not using Alpha in any textures then put checkmark in Compression/Compress Without Alpha in Texture Editor.
Other Texture Editor Settings:
Normal Map
- Normal Map Texture Group: WorldNormalMap
- Normal Map Compression: TC Normalmap
Specular Map
- Specular Map Texture Group: WorldSpecular
Example:
SUBSTANCE PAINTER MATERIAL SETUP IN UNREAL ENGINE 4
Substance Painter Texture to Material Input Pins:
- SP Texture BaseColor to BaseColor
- SP Texture Metallic to Metallic
- SP Texture Specular to Specular (Optional)
- SP Texture Glossiness to Roughness
- SP Texture Normal to Normal
FINAL NOTES
You will probably note the file size and quality difference between using BMP 8-Bit or PNG 16-Bit.
PNG will produce smaller images while retaining color data, but when zoomed into Unreal Engine 4 will appear slightly dithered or filtered smoothly.
BMP version will be much larger in file size, retains color data, but when zoomed in will appear a bit sharper and match more closely Substance Painter’s render window even though the bits are lower due to the CODEC design, as [Jim Morris][4] would probably say.
In Substance Painter, your texture resolution in document settings and SPP value can impact the exported and imported image quality based on the texture/image dimensions and the pixel compression (CODEC/Compressor/Decompressor) used.
In your particular case Specular may not be needed, and it does require some more computational operations to fully compute/calculate.
If you need other channels such as Emissive you can add those in Substance Painter, and also Reload whatever you’ve already exported from Substance Painter and view in Solo Mode Additional/Other then select an Imported Texture Map to load it into channel view so you can see just that texture only, you can use this for comparison and works same as Unreal Engine 4’s Buffer Visualization.
The colored tint appearence of lighting will vary a bit, Substance Painter uses IBL to display the mesh using an HDR environmental image for pre-calculated lighting, so if you find the original version in Substance Painter to be a bit different color wise, it’s simply the light color in your scene in Unreal Engine needs to match the lighting or you’d use the same HDR IBL image and you can produce for outdoor scenes the same color grade on the object.
Also, IBL lighting is mainly for outdoors, even though there’s indoor illumination in some captures.
An example of the difference in lighting, take Unreal Engine’s default light once you add it, the light will be brighter, and so the coloring on the object will have the color of the light applied to it, and that depends on the chosen color.
DISCLAIMER
You may find a better method, if you do or find any issues with this method and have a better solution, by all means feel free to share it, the information may not be perfect and doesn’t feature anything fancy, but you should be able to plug this stuff right in and get it going. I hope this has helped!