Hi. I’ve just recently learnt about Substrate materials. I thought I’d give it a try for my character and his clothing. I made a simple fuzz texture in Substance Painter and converted it into a mask, though I’m not sure if that’s what I’m supposed to do…? I’ve set the Slab to Cloth and I see Fuzz Color and Fuzz Amount. I’m presuming I need to plug the mask into Fuzz Amount…? Though that just shows white spots all over the clothing. Do I just add a Vector 3 colour to Fuzz Color and that’s it…? Because the surface still looks flat. Am I still missing something…?
The fuzz is mostly about adding a fresnel glow at glancing angles, mimicking a real effect you can really strongly see with velvet. It’s also really common with cotton t-shirts and roughed up denim.
Yeah. But what’s the correct approach for setting it up? From making the texture, to exporting, to setting up in Unreal? And specifically with Substrate?
Yeah, I’ve no idea if I’m approaching this correctly. In Substance Painter, I used a Normal map - the Flakes. There’s no Normal channel in Unreal for fuzz, so I had to convert it to a mask. I’ve packed that mask into the Diffuse Alpha channel, hooked things up, but to me, it just looks like a flat colour on top.
It obviously lacks that quality you’d get from a Normal map. Also, I’m not sure if it’s a bug with 5.7, but there’s no Fuzz Roughness. Only Fuzz Colour and Fuzz Amount. Will try the latest version and see if there’s any change.
EDIT: Nope. Even in 5.8 - no Fuzz Roughness. Also, when I created a whole new material in 5.7 and converted it to Substrate, it called it a Substrate UE4 shader. o_O
Okay, so the shader I had was wrong. I replaced it from a Substrate Shading Models to Substrate Slab BSDF - Single. Now I have Fuzz Roughness. However, there’s no Metallic, along with a few other inputs. I’ve read Substrate shaders can be blended together…? So is it possible to connect both of those together? They both won’t connect into Front Material.
You are very close, but may be stumbling on the nodes.
You can setup the Fuzz (Sheen) on Substrate Slab BSDF, and don’t use the shading models node.
The Slab doesn’t take the Metallic directly, so you can take a step back and add the Substrate Metalness-To-DiffuseAlbedo-F0 before the Slab, and plug everything together, THEN you take both outputs from the Metalness node and plug it in the Slab.
If you want two different shading models or materials in the same mesh, you can use the Substrate Horizontal Mixing, and use a mask to define the areas that will be using each shading model.
