Substance Designer and Quixel Suite are used in different ways.

I used Substance Designer to make procedural tiling textures. There are ways to use the substance files directly in UE4, but I didn’t feel it was necessary for this project. I output the final result into textures, then imported those into the engine to use with my materials. I used Quixel Suite to paint the props.

As far as organization, I just had to make sure I had the correct texture maps for each material. The key to getting nice looking materials is to really understand how your maps affect the material. What I mean by that is, everything you add to your textures should properly affect the material’s color, glossiness, and bump.

If I add dirt or dust to my tiles, I have to think of how (if at all) that would affect the surface bump of the material, how would it affect the glossiness, the color, AO, etc. Once I have the maps working the way I want them to, I bring them into UE4 to use with my materials. I built some functionality into my materials that gives me some control in engine. I can tint the diffuse, control the strength of the normal map, and lighten or darken the roughness.

This eliminates the need to constantly edit the textures, export, then re-import. I also make use of vertex painting to blend between textures, which allows for a lot of variation and hides obvious tiling in the textures.

Lighting The Scene