Overview
This project is a collection of physically-based materials authored in Substance 3D Painter, exploring the full PBR workflow from mesh preparation through to optimised texture export. Each material was designed to demonstrate production-quality results: realistic surface variation, procedural wear, and outputs suitable for real-time rendering in game engines and AR viewers.
PBR Workflow
The workflow begins with a clean, UV-unwrapped mesh baked in Blender. Normal, curvature, ambient occlusion, and position maps are baked at 4K and imported into Substance 3D Painter as the bake set. These baked maps drive the procedural layer stack, meaning wear, edge damage, and dirt accumulation are calculated relative to the geometry rather than painted by hand.
- Curvature-driven edge damage using smart masks for realistic wear on corners and ridges
- Layered material stack with base material, wear pass, and dirt/grunge overlay
- Procedural grunge using Substance’s noise generators rather than hand-painted detail
- Metalness, roughness, and normal maps exported at 2K for AR-optimised file size
- Seamless tiling materials created from the Substance library for environmental use
Material Library
The materials produced span three categories: worn metals, weathered stone, and synthetic surfaces. Each was authored with art direction in mind, not just technical accuracy. A rusted steel surface, for example, was lit and photographed against a neutral background to evaluate how it reads in context, then adjusted based on real-world reference before export.
AR Optimisation
One set of materials was specifically optimised for augmented reality deployment via WebXR. The AR context imposes strict texture budget constraints: a single 2K set per object versus the 4K sets used in offline rendering. Achieving similar perceptual quality at half the resolution required careful control of roughness variation at the mid-frequency range, where the eye is most sensitive to loss of detail.
What I Learned
PBR authoring rewards understanding the physics behind the maps rather than treating them as visual settings. Once the relationship between curvature, edge damage, and the wear process is internalised, the smart mask system becomes a tool for art-directing realism rather than just a shortcut. The most effective materials in this set are the ones where procedural and painted layers were combined, using the procedural pass as a foundation and the painted layer for intentional art direction.
