Trouble getting garment from substance painter to Unreal Engine

Report · Oct 15, 2022

Hello,

I'm new to substance painter, so I'm not sure if this can be done. Basically, I have an outfit for my character inside of substance painter and I want to export the whole thing (mesh and textures) into unreal engine.

To give some context, I have designed this outfit in Marvelous Designer, but when I import the outfit into unreal engine, the textures look very low resolution and plasticy. I can drop a substance material asset onto the outfit, and it looks great, but it applies the same material to the whole outfit and I want seperate cloth materials for each garment.

There is probably some way to import the outfit into unreal engine as seperate meshes for each garment, but I have posted for help in the Unreal and Marvelous Designer forms and haven't found the solution yet.

However, I can import the outfit into substance painter and assign seperate materials to each garment.

My only problem now is, I can't find any explanation on how to get this entire garment out of substance painter and into Unreal Engine. I can export the textures, but there are separate material maps for each piece of the outfit, and I'm still stuck with a single mesh for the whole outfit, so I'm not sure how to make that work.

For now, all I need is to get the finished outfit into Unreal as a static mesh, though in the near future I want to be able to import the garment into unreal with both the high quality substance materials and the Marvelous Designer prebaked cloth simulation.

Report · Oct 15, 2022

I should clarify, I don't mind importing the mesh from Marvelous Designer into Unreal Engine and then applying the texture maps from the design I've done in Substance painter onto the mesh in unreal. However, I've tried doing that and I haven't gotten it to work. I followed some tutorials for a udim workflow in unreal and I ended up with only one cloth texture from Substance painter that was being applied to my whole outfit.

Report · Oct 18, 2022

Hi,

Would you mind showing screenshots of what you have and explaining what you want?
From what I gather you want a single mesh (made in Marvellous) to have different materials.
You could assign in the modeling program of your choice different materials to your mesh.

This would allow you to texture each of those areas separately in Painter.
(https://substance3d.adobe.com/documentation/spdoc/texture-set-list-72941600.html)
You could also create a shader in unreal based on a mask created in painter that separates the different materials that you want on your mesh (material layering).
I hope this helps,
Kind Regards,

Geoffroy SC

Report · Oct 19, 2022

Thanks for your help, Geoffroy. I am able to apply different materials to the outfit just fine.

However, I have trouble getting this design onto the garment mesh in unreal engine. First, I export the textures and import them into a file inside Unreal. Then, inside Unreal Engine, I create a new material for my outfit.

When I exported the textures from Substance Painter, I got seperate textures for each garment in the outfit. I'm not sure if this is because they had different materials or because I laid them out in multiple UV tiles.

Anyway, my understanding from my research was that in order to assign all of these textures to the single material for the single outfit mesh, I had to turn on vertural textures for Unreal Engine. Then, I had to populate the outfit's material with just the first set of texture maps (with file names ending in 1001.) Ostensibly, Unreal was supposed to then automatically pull the needed information from the other texture maps and appply them to the whole outfit. This is my best understanding of the Unreal UDIMs workflow. However, it is not working for me. I end up with one garment looking good, but the rest of the garments populated with the wrong texture.

Perhaps this is a problem I need the Unreal community's help with. I will post for help there.

I'm interested in using material layering to solve this problem since I think it might work, but I don't know how to generate a mask from Painter.