Hey I'm Wes substance 3D evangelist
and today I'd like to showcase the Substance 3D add on for Blender 4. Substance 3D materials are high quality
and versatile, allowing you to customize them for any scene directly
in Blender using simple parameters. So now let's jump into Blender
and take a look. So the first thing you're going to need to
do is download this Substance 3D add-on for blender. You can do that by navigating
to the Substance in Blender Web page. The link to the Web page
you can find in the description of this video, and then you will download
the add on for Blender. you'll also need to download
the Substance integration tool, and we have that available
for Windows, Mac and Linux. So choose
which platform you'll be working on. And let's jump back to Blender
and get the Add-on installed. To install the add-on. You do that
just as you would any add-on in Blender. So for example,
I'll click the install button. I'm going to navigate
to where I've downloaded the add-on and I'm going to select the Substance
3D for Blender. And you can see
I have the zip file selected and then I would click install add-on. So I already have this installed. So now let me just come over here
to my Blender, add-on preferences and I'm just going to do a search here
for Substance. And you can see that
the add-on is now enabled. Now here in the preferences,
you will see an option to install the integration tool. Again, you will just
click the Browse button and then choose the other zip file that you downloaded,
which is the integration tool. Since I've already done
that, you can see here that I have an option to uninstall
as well as update the tool. So now we have a lot of preferences here
for the add-on. And there are a few things that are
pretty important that I want to point out. So, for example, if we take a look here,
you can see that well, there are some defaults, like,
for example, the tiling of the materials
can be set to two by default and you can change that
to whatever you want, as well as the default resolution that's
being computed, and you can go up to 4K. So, for example,
every time I import a Substance material with this setting at 1024, it's
going to generate the textures is 1024. You have your normal format as well as the export image format
that you want to choose here. I'm just going to leave it at default. Now, the Substance Remote Engine,
this is where you can choose between the CPU or GPU engine. And there's a few options, especially
depending on the platform that you're on. So, for example, in this case,
I'm running on a mac, so the GPU render is going to be based
on the metal API on Windows. You can select your GPU, such
as if you're using an Nvidia RTX, GPU. Now here is another option for CPU
and the Substance engine comes in two variants. Basically the CPU and the GPU engine. Typically you're going to want to leave it
default at the GPU variant And that's what I have set here
for this Mac version. now another very important option
that you want to check. And you can see I have it here,
which is cycles, auto update textures. So if you're using these cycles renderer,
which with Blender, you most likely are, you're going to want to make sure that you have this enabled
so that as you change the parameters and the Substance engine re computes
the textures, those textures will automatically be updated
inside the cycles render engine. So make sure you have that checked. now another important preference is
your path and your relative path settings. So, for example, the yes library
now defaults here. It's setting to my desktop, but you could
choose this to be anywhere you want. This is going to be where you download
all of your Substance materials, maybe from 3D assets
or if you're using Substance Designer and you're
authoring your own Substance materials. Maybe that's the library that you keep everything
so you can choose that library path that it's automatically going to open
as you start to import in new materials. Now the key here is the relative path. So by default, the Substance material path,
it's going to be an absolute path, and that's fine if you're just
working on your own computer But if you ever want to move your project to a different computer
or more importantly, share your project with another user, you want to make sure
that for your relative path, you select this checkbox here,
which is going to copy the SBSAR file to this SBAR folder that it will create automatically, which is going to be right
next to your blender file. Now you'll be able to work with relative
path to your blender file, and this is great. Again, if you need to switch computers or if you're sharing
your project across teams. So there's a couple other settings
and here we can take a look at. So for example,
this here is your shader preset. This is really just what default
projection mode do you want to use? Do you want to use standard or projection box,
which is going to be like a tri-planner. That's a good one to use. Also, you have here your output. So if we take a look here,
you can configure each individual output. So for example,
our defaults are going to be base color type roughness and normal. And you can see that the color space is
set to non color for these data type maps. And then you can also choose what type of image format as well as bit
depth that you want to work. And you do have a lot of control
over how these outputs are going to work. And then lastly, here at the bottom,
you have just different shortcuts that you can enable for working with the substance
plug in here inside of Blender. Now we can get to finally working
with some materials. So in any of your views,
if you hit the nail on the keyboard, this will open up your panels and the substance
three panel will be available on any view. So again,
I can mouse over any view and hit the end. Key to view the substance 3D panel. So here with the substance
3D panel at the very top, you have some buttons
where you can load substance materials. We'll do that in just a moment. And once you load a material here,
you will have a list of all the materials that are loaded and available
for you to use in your scene here. You can apply materials as well as browse
the Substance Community Asset site. So if I click this button,
it will open up a web browser. The Substance
Community Asset is a free community sharing site,
a great place to get substance materials. If you have the substance collection,
you can access the 3D assets, which is a huge repository of substance
materials. You can duplicate substance materials
as well as reload and delete them. Now there is a substance preference
for applying the material as you load it to the selected object. I have that disabled in the preferences. So now I will click load
and I am going to browse for where I have some substance
materials downloaded here. I have this terracotta glossy SBSAR and I can simply load this substance
material. Now here you can see that in my substance
material list. The terracotta glossy material is now
available for me to use in my scene. With my objects selected, I can just click
apply and this will apply the material. So now that we have a material
applied to the asset here in our shader graph, we can see that we have
the mapping nodes are plugged into the substance
material group in the movie coordinates. And then here we have our channels
connected to the principal BSD material. So for example,
we have base color to base color, metal to metal, roughness to roughness
and so on. Here inside the actual group itself,
You can see the textures that are generated
by the substance engine. So now let's take a look
at these substance graph parameters. So to start, we have presets. You can choose presets if the substance
material has any embedded presets, you can also create your own presets
or you can import presets from other substance applications. You also have settings for tiling. This is a preference
that I had set in the preferences for the add on,
so I set that default to be two. And we also have our resolution. So here you can change the resolution
of the substance, texture to different resolutions depending on the project
that you're going to be working on. So here you can see that I'm re computing
these substance textures to be 2K. In this case, I'm
going to leave it to 1024 so that I can work through the graph parameters
pretty quickly here in just a moment. Now, if we drop down here to outputs,
here's where I can see the outputs that are connected
to the shader by default, which in my case here is going to be base
color, normal roughness and metallic. I have the format, the image format that's
being created as well as the bit depth. Now here under this dropdown,
I can choose the projection for the substance texture. Again, as I set in the substance
3D add on preferences, box projection is what I'm using by default,
which is like triplane or projection. But we can choose other things
like physical size. Now, for physical size to work,
you would have had to have modeled your asset to real world scale then the projection will match the
physical size embedded within the material to match the real world
physical scale of the object. So in my case here, I'm just going
to leave this at box projection. Now, if I want to enable
additional outputs, if I just click this button, you can see
that these are the other outputs that are available to me
that are within this substance material. So here is a case where I may want to work
with some displacement. So here I will enable my height
and by doing that you'll see here that in my shader,
a new node was created for me. So here
I have now a displacement in the node. if we take a look at the group here
for the substance material, I now have a height texture
that was generated and output is being plugged
into this displacement node and then now that is being plugged in here to the material output here for the shader
itself. We'll talk about displacement
a little bit later on. Now we can finally get here to the actual
parameters for the substance material. So here I have some general parameters. And in this particular material
I have some roughness settings. So so for example, if I just change this
parameter, let's set it down pretty low. You can see the result here
provides a very glossy, shiny result for this terracotta
glossy material. I could also go the other way and just increase this slider
and we'll set this to be a bit more rough. So maybe I want to split the difference
and go with something around .32. And this is the overall roughness
that I want to generate, and you can see that in real time. The substance engine is regenerating
the textures at the resolution I have set for the graph and everything's still being plugged back
into the material for me. I also can change some other parameters
here. Let's take a look.
There is this vertical line. If I were to maybe increase this
a bit more, you can see that this is going to create
some additional vertical lines here. Here, let's decrease it
so we can really see what we're doing. We'll just set it here.
Let's just set it all the way to zero. And here you can see those lines are gone. Now we'll set it,
you know, all the way to one. And now we'll see the lines come back. Now I'm noticing that maybe
I want to change the rotation of this. And here's
where I can jump over to my shader. And in the rotation,
I'm going to set the Z value to 90. And you can see that
just simply rotates my textures. Now, again, depending on the substance material,
you could have more general properties. However, there is a group
with every substance material that you get from substance
3D assets called technical parameters, and these allow you to do some image
kind of adjustment settings. So for example, if I wanted to maybe
increase the normal intensity, I can do so by just simply changing the slider and that's going to increase
the normal intensity. Now I'm seeing a bit more bump
here in the detail or if I wanted to maybe increase contrast
here, I can do so. So we'll just slightly increase
the contrast. We get something like that. it looks a little too saturated. Now let's just knock that down by just changing the saturation value
and you get something like that. So again, these technical parameters can
help to do some quick image adjustments. Now of course, you can also jump over
to your shader editor and you could use any blender nodes
in between The Substance Group and the material itself to further augment
the substance textures. So with that you can see that
it's pretty simple. I can come over here,
I can load a substance material, I can apply it,
I can set resolution settings and then I can jump over here to my
general parameters for that substance and then make some tweaks and changes to the parameters
to make a variation of that material. Something else that's kind of fun is
maybe if I'm duplicating this material. So for example, I could come over here
and click this duplicate button and maybe assign
this to a different material, but there is this option here
or this button, which is kind of like, Roll
the dice is what it is. And if we do that, what it's going to do
is just randomize all the settings and it's just a really nice
and quick way for me to if I'm using this material across
different assets, I can just set up my parameters and then just click
this quick randomize button. You can see what it does is just changes
the random seed value here. So the last thing I want to cover
is how displacement is going to work. So for my outputs,
I already have a height output enabled and it gives me this displacement node. So here's what we're going to do. We are going to jump over here
to our object. And the first thing
is I'm going to add a modifier and let's add a subdivision surface here. And so we'll come back to this
in just a moment. And now we're going to switch
to the cycles rendering engine. And you can see here that I have
my feature set is set to experimental. And for the device here, I could set this
to my GPU compute as well. And for the actual subdivision,
I have some subdivision settings here. So now with the objects selected,
I want to revisit that subdivision modifier And you'll notice here
that adaptive subdivision is enabled because I have those experimental features
enabled for these cycles. Renderer. So now I can set some values here
and I can see that my final scale render is set to one pixel and my viewport
is set to one pixel as well. We'll see how that does for my scale
here on the displacement, this is where I can start to change
values here. So let's try something like .25. And we can see here that that is starting
to displace the surface. It's a little bit too much. So I think what I'll do
is just go back to this one point. Let's try 1.35. Let's see what that does. Okay. I think that's going to work
for what I want. And now, as I start to refine this,
I could jump back here to my cycles renderer, and this is where
I need to jump down to my subdivision and maybe set the dicing rate
depending on the quality versus the trade off of rendering speed
I'm looking for. One other thing that I could look at here
with this material. So again, the objects selected and if I
jump over here to my material settings, you want to make sure that displacement
is set to displacement and bump or just displacement. Now, the substance material,
as soon as I enable height and it creates displaced node, for me,
it is going to take care of this setting for me automatically. However, you can see the difference. If I set this just to displacement
here, you're getting just that displacement information. And maybe in this case,
this is what I want because I have
the displacement is driving the detail and I don't want to over intensify
that by trying to add bump on top of it. and that's going to close out
this tutorial. I'm working with the substance
3D add on in blender substance materials
provide a very powerful and rich workflow for texturing your assets
inside of Blender. Thanks a lot for watching
and I'll see you next time.
