Questions on using Substance materials in UE4....

[fattkid]

Hey folks,

Kind of new to Painter and UE4 -

I am curious about importing/using substance materials in UE4 - What format is used in UE4? Would it be a graph from Designer I guess?

What is the memory overhead for a fairly simple material - say one that could offer a few different varieties of grunge or rust or dirt - just to create some variety on assets in game? Is it cost effective? Or fairly expensive? What are some of the considerations or caveats to such an idea?

And would a substance material be scriptable in UE4? So I could have some scriptable, random patterns on assets throughout the world? Say a bunch of similar or instances of rocks, and using a substance material, creating a variety of moss growing on them.

Thanks for any input.

[Wes McDermott]

Hey folks,

Kind of new to Painter and UE4 -

I am curious about importing/using substance materials in UE4 - What format is used in UE4? Would it be a graph from Designer I guess?

What is the memory overhead for a fairly simple material - say one that could offer a few different varieties of grunge or rust or dirt - just to create some variety on assets in game? Is it cost effective? Or fairly expensive? What are some of the considerations or caveats to such an idea?

And would a substance material be scriptable in UE4? So I could have some scriptable, random patterns on assets throughout the world? Say a bunch of similar or instances of rocks, and using a substance material, creating a variety of moss growing on them.

Thanks for any input.

Hi,

In UE4 the Substance plugin is used to import Substance materials. The materials are created in Substance Designer. A graph can represent a material and is exported from Designer as an .sbsar file.
https://www.unrealengine.com/marketplace/substance-plugin

Substance is not a shader. A substance generates textures that are fed into a UE4 material. The overhead of the texture is actually more overhead than a standard texture. We are working with Epic to improve this.

A difference is that a substance can be generated procedurally at runtime which means the textures don't exist on disk. This can depend on the generation mode settings as you can set a substance to cache as well. These optimization guidelines will give you an idea on how to best create your materials in Designer. https://support.allegorithmic.com/documentation/display/SDDOC/Performance+Optimization+Guidelines

Substances are scriptable in UE4 using Blueprints. You can see how it is done here. https://support.allegorithmic.com/documentation/display/integrations/Blueprint%3A+Substance+parameters

Cheers,
Wes