In this tutorial you will learn how to use the Substance 3D plugin to import and work with Substance materials directly in Unreal Engine.
We will discuss how to install the Substance plugin for the Epic Games Marketplace, downloading materials from Substance 3D Assets, importing materials, and changing material parameters.
To begin, you will need to install the Substance plugin to Unreal Engine.
Open the Epic Games Launcher and go to the Marketplace and do a search for Substance plugin.
You can then click on the Substance 3D for Unreal Engine plugin by Adobe Substance 3D product to access the product page.
From the product page, click on the option to install to engine.
Next, we need to active the plugin from within Unreal Engine.
To do this, open your Unreal project and go to Edit > Plugins.
In the plugins panel, search for Substance to filter to the Substance in UE5 plugin.
Click the checkbox to activate the plugin.
This will require a restart of the engine to take effect.
With the Substance plugin installed, you can now import a Substance material using the sbsar file format just as you would any file type in Unreal Engine.
You can use Substance 3D assets to browse thousands of materials for using in your UE5 project.
From the tool bar at the top of the UI, click the Substance 3D Assets button and choose Substance 3D Assets.
This will open a browser to access Substance 3D assets.
Once you have logged in, you can search for materials to download.
I will search for Car Paint and then click on the Car Solid Paint material to open a preview.
I will then click on the Download SBSAR button to download this file.
Back inside our Unreal Project, click on the Import button in the Content Browser and select the SBSAR file we just download from Substance 3D Assets.
This will open the Substance Import Options dialog where you can setup the material template and a custom name for the material.
Since I am using a car paint material, I will choose the Car paint template from the material drop down and then click import.
The import will add the Substance generated texture map and a material instance.
To apply the material, you can drag and drop the material instance to a 3D object in the scene.
You can double click the material instance to change some basic parameters, such as Tiling, just as you would any material instance in Unreal.
In this example, we used the Car Paint template, so we have some additional parameters, such as Clear Coat Roughness and Fresnel Power we can adjust as well.
To create a duplicate of the material, you can right click on the Substance Instance Factory in the Content Browswer.
This will bring up a context menu with the option to create a Graph Instance as a new instance of the Car Solid Paint SBSAR.
To change the Substance material parameters, you will need to adjust values on the Substance Graph Instance.
This item will be created for each imported SBSAR file and can be found in the Content Browser.
In this example, I will double click on Car_Solid_Paint_INST to open the Substance Graph Panel.
From this panel, I can adjust parameters to change aspects of the material.
To begin, I will set the resolution to 2048 for a higher quality result.
The substance plugin will recompute the textures to this new resolution and automatically update the texture maps connected to the material.
Each Substance material will have its own set of parameters.
In this example, I will change the Color and adjust the Orange Peel as well as Scratch Intensity and Density to customize the material.
In the Project Settings under Plugins > Substance, you can change settings for how the plugin will function within your project.
For example, you can set a Memory Budget for textures or a default resolution to be set for Substance materials at import.
The Substance integration in Unreal Engine will speed up your workflow, by allowing you to import, tweak and adjust your materials directly in our Unreal projects.
