What Substance Painter texture sets can you bake in Blender?
I was watching a video where the artist baked channels I am familiar with like ambient occlusion and normal maps, but also channels I am unfamiliar with like cavity and curvature (if they’re not the same)?
I know Substance Painter is a specialist tool in its field but I am exploring game asset production in Blender and would like to know how much I can do here.
Thanks.
Well, you can bake all the maps necessary for a PBR material (to be used in a game engine like Unity or Unreal) in Blender. Stuff like the curvature and AO maps that you bake in Substance Painter are mostly used for working in SP, not for the final output, because that’s the way Substance’s materials and “smart masks” work. Instead of having the materials react to the actual 3D shape of the imported model, they actually react to the greyscale values of those baked maps. Sure, the baked AO can be used as an output as well, but most of the time I found that the settings needed for it to work well with the Substance materials are different from the settings you need for an actual ambient occlusion map.
Anyway, as a bonus SP combines all of this with a proper high-to-low baking workflow, which makes working with it quite a time-saver.
Thanks @Laserschwert.
So some of the way Substance Painter works and some of the maps or masks SP generates are filters and tools that SP has that bring out detail in SP?
I didn’t think to look at the channels in a Unity material, and when I do I understand that some of the channels SP generates internally are probably tools for you to work with then export in a form a game engine can read.
Exactly… some of the maps SP bakes are just for the workflow inside of SP. Once you bake out the final maps for the game engine, those aren’t used anymore.
The curvature map is a good example: it’s basically a greyscale map that is grey on flat areas, white on covex edges and black on concave edges. Now there are so called “smart materials” and “smart masks” inside of SP that use the curvature map to chip away the paint on convex edges or add dirt in the crevices. The curvature map itself won’t be exported in the end, but the effect it has on all the other textures will be visible on the end result.
I watched someone generate and bake Dirty Vertex Colours to an Image Texture in Blender and use this as a kind of cavity map to darken crevices, which was cool.
I think this talking has helped me decide I’d like to learn Substance Painter, learn some industry workflows, then apply it to Blender later on.
Thanks for all your help @Laserschwert