🟢In this tutorial, the instructor explains the process of exporting textures from Substance Painter for use in Unreal Engine.
🟢They rename and export these textures, applying them to 3D models in Unreal to create materials for the body and legs.
🟢They also address texture issues to match Substance Painter. The tutorial briefly covers importing scalable Mixamo characters and animations into Unreal and organizing assets into folders.
- Workflow
To export textures from Substance Painter, use the shortcut Ctrl + Shift + E.
Set the Output directory and the Output template to Unreal Engine 4.
In the Output Templates, we can see what texture maps are going to be exported.
There are mainly 3 maps that will be used but sometimes there may be more depending if there are any extra texture maps added.
The main 3 are the Base Color, Ambient Occlusion Roughness Mettalic, and the Normal Map.
In this tutorial, there is one extra map which is the Emmissive map.
Before exporting the textures, make sure you rename the shaders with a T_ before the name of the shader so that each texture is named with a T_.
This is done so that it is easier to locate Texture maps inside an engine.
Back in the Export Texture window, select a File type and a Size.
After that, click on the Export button.
Create a Blank project in Unreal Engine.
Make a new Basic Level using the Ctrl + N shortcut.
Click Ctrl + S to save the scene and the Level.
Name the Level whatever you want then click Save.
To export a mesh from Substance Painter, click the File tab, and Export Mesh.
Keep the Apply Triangulation since Unreal will Triangulate it anyway, then press Export.
Inside the Unreal Project, open the content drawer and make a New Folder by right-clicking in the empty space.
Name the folder Assets, inside the new folder, right-click and press the Import to /Game/Assets.
You can also drag and drop the OBJ or FBX file in the empty space inside the Assets folder.
In the FBX Import Options, open the Advanced settings, turn off Remove Degenerates, and tick Combine Meshes.
In Materials, change the Material Import Method to Do Not Create Material, and untick the Import Textures.
After everything has been set up, click Import All.
From the Assets folder, drag and drop the spider bot inside the scene, scaling it to a bit bigger.
In the Content folder in the content drawer make a new Materials folder.
In the Materials folder, make two new foldries named Textures and Instances.
In the Textures folder drag and drop all the texture maps exported from Substance Painter.
In the Materials folder, right-click and add a Material.
Rename the material Spiderbot_Body.
Double-click the material to open the material graph.
Here, drag and drop the texture maps from the body of the Spiderbot.
Connect the Base Color map to the base color, the Normal map to the normal, and the AORM map needs to be connected in three different places.
The red needs to be connected to the Ambient Occlusion, the blue needs to be connected to the Mettalic, and the green needs to be connected to the roughness.
After everything is connected, click the save icon in the upper left corner and close the material graph.
Drag and drop the material to the spiderbot to apply the textures.
If the roughness is too shiny, that is because the sRGB of the AORM map hasn’t been turned off.
Double-click the AORM map, in the new window, untick the sRGB, and click the save icon.
The material won’t appear on the model and that is because we need to change something in the material itself.
Double-click the material and select the AORM map that has an error on it.
Change the Sampler Type to Linear Color, and save the changes.
Make a separate material for the legs, disable the sRGB on the AORM map for the legs, import the textures inside the new material graph, connect the texture maps to the main node, save the changes, and drag and drop the material on the legs.
If we add another spiderbot in the scene we’ll have to drag and drop the materials on it again.
To prevent this, double-click on the Spiderbot inside the Assets folder, in the Material Slots drag and drop the materials in Element 0 and 1, and then press on the save icon on the upper left corner.
Now every time a new spiderbot is added to the scene, it will have the materials on it.
If the scale or rotation of the Spiderbot is not correct, double-click on the asset, and inside the Transform options, rotate it by 90 degrees on the X-axis.
After the changes have been made, click on the Reimport Base Mesh button.
We can import animations and characters downloaded from Mixamo into our Unreal Project.
Pick a character with an animation from Mixamo and press the Download button on the right side.
Download the FBX file of the character in a T pose, and then after that download the animations.
Inside of Unreal, make a new folder inside the Content folder named Mixamo.
In the Mixamo folder drag and drop the character FBX.
Drag and drop the character in the scene.
In the Mixamo folder, make a new folder and name it Animations.
In the Animations folder drag and drop the animations.
In the Mesh options, add the character’s skeleton, then press Import All.
Double-click on any of the animations to view them.
In the content drawer, click the save all icon to save the new files added to the project.