Substance Painter is a powerful industry-standard tool used for texture painting and material creation, offering a real-time workflow for generating highly realistic and stylized textures. Today, you’ll learn how to bring your UV-unwrapped models from Maya into Substance Painter, texture them using smart materials, custom brushes, and masks, and prepare them for game engines like Unreal Engine.

The session starts with setting up a Substance Painter project. You’ll import your mesh, check the UVs, and bake mesh maps—like ambient occlusion, curvature, world space normals, and more. These baked maps drive the smart materials and procedural texturing features that make Substance so powerful.

You’ll explore different types of layers—fill layers, paint layers, and how to use black-and-white masks for non-destructive workflows. One of the highlights will be using generators, such as dirt accumulation or edge wear, which automatically apply texture effects based on mesh details. This adds realism that would be time-consuming to paint manually.

A key focus is on understanding PBR (Physically-Based Rendering) texturing. You’ll create texture sets that include albedo, metallic, roughness, normal, and height maps. Each map has a specific role: for example, normal maps simulate bumpiness, while roughness controls surface shininess. You’ll see how these maps affect material behavior when used in Unreal Engine.

The day concludes with exporting textures using Unreal-compatible templates. You’ll learn how to structure the exports for seamless integration, ensuring consistency in look between Substance Painter, Maya, and Unreal Engine. This hands-on knowledge bridges artistic skill with technical precision—crucial for professional asset production.