Since the launch of Lumberyard, we’ve received numerous requests from our community regarding the integration of Allegorithmic’s Substance suite of texture-editing tools. We listened to your feedback and are excited to announce our collaboration with the Allegorithmic team to make this integration a reality. In this post, we will delve into how Substance can be utilized to enhance the visual quality of your Lumberyard projects.
Enhancing Visual Quality with Substance
Substance enables the procedural generation of textures directly within the engine, eliminating the need for extensive custom coding or time-consuming art file creation. This capability facilitates dynamic environments that can alter textures based on various factors such as time of day or player interactions. Traditionally, crafting the textures required for such responsive environments would necessitate a dedicated team of artists; however, with procedurally generated textures, this can be achieved more efficiently.
By establishing a variety of textures for the same object via Lumberyard Flow Graph, in-game appearances can change seamlessly without the need for re-rendering. This means that players can witness plants withering or turning black due to fire, while metals can tarnish and rust—all thanks to the procedural generation provided by Substance. Moreover, materials like wood and vegetation can achieve a level of realism and variety that surpasses traditional hand-painted textures.
Streamlined Workflow
As Alex Ramirez, a character artist on our team, shares: “Substance Painter has significantly streamlined our workflow. We now treat our character assets in Substance Painter as their ‘final destination’ before exporting them to Lumberyard. This allows us to iterate on materials easily and export the textures directly into a Lumberyard-compatible format.”
The authoring tools in Substance also assist Alex’s team in various processes. “Another workflow enhancement is that we’ve almost completely moved away from Photoshop,” he explains. “The painting and material tools in Substance Painter are incredibly powerful, enabling us to create almost all textures within that environment.”
Because Substance modifies files dynamically, the size of texture files can be reduced significantly compared to conventional texture formats, resulting in decreased load times and a lighter distributable payload. Additionally, textures produced with Substance are fully compatible with Lumberyard’s physically based shading model.
“The similarity between the Substance environment and the physically based rendering engine we use in Lumberyard allows for quick and easy adjustments to character appearances without uncertainty regarding how they will appear in the engine,” Alex states. “What you see is what you get—a feature that character artists have long desired. This gives artists the freedom to create without the hassle of managing the various texture channels that modern game engines require.”
Importing and Utilizing Substance Files
Lumberyard users can import .sbsar files created with Substance Designer, utilize and modify procedural Substance materials, and visualize their work in real time. Users can generate and export textures derived from Substance materials for use in other assets of the same type.
To activate the Lumberyard Substance Editor, navigate to your Project Settings within the Project Configurator and select “Enable Packages” in the top right corner. This will allow you to enable the Substance extension for your project.
Utilizing .sbsar files in the Lumberyard Substance Editor offers numerous benefits over standard workflows. For instance, ceramic tile textures can feature adjustable sliders for tile size, arrangement, and alignment. By importing your .sbsar file into the editor, you will generate a .smtl (Lumberyard Substance material format) and .sub files (Substance textures). When selecting your .sbsar file, you can view the exposed settings of your Substance file and all the textures that can be generated from it.
From the Lumberyard Substance Editor, you can also modify parameters at runtime using Lumberyard’s Flow Graph. As you configure a texture for an object in your game, Lumberyard will provide real-time previews of the final result, both in the editor and on the actual object. Substance functions as a project extension within Lumberyard, encompassing the Substance API, the Lumberyard Substance Editor plugin, and Flow Graph nodes.
Looking Ahead
We would like to extend our gratitude to the Allegorithmic team for their enthusiasm, technical know-how, and responsiveness, which have made collaboration a delight. We are actively working to integrate additional third-party tools into Lumberyard, and we will have updates on that front soon.
You can download Lumberyard and enable the Substance Editor today. We eagerly anticipate seeing what you will create with it! For related insights, feel free to check out this informative blog post and learn from experts in the field. Additionally, this article serves as an excellent resource for further exploration.
About the Author
Melissa is a Field Technical Artist for Amazon Lumberyard, dedicated to assisting both internal game teams and external customers in enhancing workflow solutions. With five years of industry experience, she specializes in character and animation pipelines, collaborating closely with artists, designers, and engineers.
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