Substance Painter and Designer assistants

Substance Painter assistant

This assistant provides an easy way to use the textures generated in Substance Painter to quickly create a matching Maxwell material.

Click on Global Properties and from the Type dropdown choose Substance Painter.

First, you will only have to select one (any) texture of the collection generated by Substance; the assistant will locate the rest and put them in the right slots:

Open

After the textures have been loaded you can replace them if you want or add more, but if you have used the preset to export to Maxwell provided by Substance, all the textures should have been loaded automatically (this is done based on the suffix of the textures).

You can choose between two presets (Metallic or Glossy) which will offer some slightly different options and results:

Open

Metallic

Glossy

Also, using the checkboxes next to Height and Normal options, you can choose if you want to use Displacement (Height), Normal map, both together or none.

Regarding Displacement and emission controls, please, check below.

Finally, you will find the Convert to Advanced button which is common in all the assistants; it will convert the material to a Custom Maxwell material and you will be able to see the material generated under the hood will all the different layers and BSDFs.

Here you will find a video tutorial showing you the workflow:

Substance Designer assistant

The Substance Designer assistant allows you to load the .sbsar material files downloaded from the Substance Source page or generated with Substance Designer, so you have another huge gallery of materials (over 6000 assets) to choose from. Additionally, there’s another free gallery of materials generated by the users (maybe with lower quality and fewer parameters, but also useful) called Substance Share.

You can choose between two presets: Metallic and Glossy, like in the Substance Painter assistant, which will produce slightly different results.

You can also choose the resolution of the textures that will be generated from the .sbsar file when trying to render and will be baked into .png textures of that resolution. When launching a render, the those textures will be generated and kept into memory during the render and only if you request to “Convert to Advanced” the material (so it generates a true Maxwell Render material with all its layers and BSDFs) the textures will be written to disc and stored in a folder with the name of the material next to the .sbsar file.

Also, the embossment method lets you decide if you want to use Normal maps, Displacement (Height) or both maps at the same time. Most probably, if you want to use displacement, you may want to convert the material to advanced, in order to be able to fin-tune the displacement options.

Regarding Displacement and emission controls, please, check below.

The Edit Parameters button opens the particular options exposed in the .sbsar file. The options shown in the panel will be different for each material and will let you change the options available, for example changing the number of bricks of a material, the color or the density of the scratches of a leather.

Displacement and emission controls

Both the Substance Painter and the Substance Designer assistants will include three parameters in order to be able to control the displacement subdivisions, height and emission intensity: