I think it’s a bit longer to make a Designer material which works with all the engines the same way, instead of a material for just one in particular, but it’s possible. If you are using Substance Plugin with a fully procedural material, the process will be easier. The plugin will allow you to handle every single aspect of the material and the procedural texture directly in the engine (Normal map format, colors, output maps…) , but if you export bitmaps the story can be different. For example a normal map has different formats, and not all the engines use DirectX like UE4, Unity has OpenGL, so as a first operation if you want to use the same texture on UE4 and Unity you have to switch the normal map format. The other factor could be PBR method used, Unreal has Roughness/Metallic, but you can find Specular/Glossiness too, which means you need other textures to make your materials work with all the engines.

The power of Substance Designer is that you can handle all of the things I said until now in your graph. You can set tons of output based on your needs, your graphs can be ready for engine switching or not, it depends on you.

Substance doesn’t work well just for games, it works well for every average digital production, you have tons of settings which help you to manage projects and templates for each of them, libraries, custom export settings (this is one of my favorite functions in Painter, it seriously saves hours of production), custom materials: for example you can give to your studio art a total homogeneity making a library of materials for your project, which will be used by studio artists to make textures, so them will feel in the same way along the experience. Substance is so good for games for several reasons, one of them, in my opinion, could be the possibility on painting a low poly asset in Painter, with an awesome material manager based on layers (like Photoshop), or a nodes based software, which is Designer, which allows you to change everything withouth losing hours. Nodes based software are really useful for productions, they allows you to make fast tests and changes, and graphs are obviously reusable, and this is a big pro for a production and one of the reasons who made me choose Substance for my work pipeline.

Iacopo Antonelli, Senior 3D Artist

INTERESTING LINKS