From the course: Unreal Engine: Materials for Architectural Visualization

Using downloaded .sbs files in Designer - Unreal Engine Tutorial

From the course: Unreal Engine: Materials for Architectural Visualization

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Using downloaded .sbs files in Designer

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- [Instructor] Now that we have a .sbs file downloaded from the Substance Source site, we do have the option of bringing it into Substance Designer, although, you may wonder, why we would want to do that. Well, with Substance Designer open, let's click the open document option from the welcome screen, and then, browse to the downloaded .sbs file that we grabbed from Substance Source, and load it up. Remembering that we can of course do the same with .sbs files coming from the Substance Share site as well. Bringing this into Designer now means that we can deconstruct how the Substance was made. Something that can really help if we are wanting to move onto creating Substance materials for ourselves. If we are not quite confident enough yet, to take ideas from the file and create variations of our own, then something else that we can do is make slight changes to the material, or even add functionality that might be lacking in the provided .sbs. And keep in mind these don't need to be complicated. For example, let's select the last node in the flow that controls the color of the material. Press the Space Bar key, and search for and add a HSL node which will allow us to make simple color corrections to the base color map. And as we will want to have access to these controls in Unreal so as to have the ability to change the parameters there, we can click the function drop-down for the entire Specific Parameters rollout, and choose the expose option. From here we can select which options in the rollout get exposed, and so let's click the all option. And then, give them the group name of color, which will place all of the options inside a rollout of that name. After which we can click okay and if prompted remove any unused parameters. If we click on our graph name inside the explorer pane now, and scroll to the Input Parameters section, we can click the preview button. And right down at the bottom we see our newly exposed parameters that will also show up inside our game engine. Now this is just a quick example of how we might go about augmenting an already created Substance file. But I'm sure you can see the advantages to being able to do this. With the changes or additions being as simple or as complex as we like. Okay, let's right-click on our package name in the explorer section, and publish our newly modified .sbs file. Again, we will send it to the exercise files folder on our desktop, and accept the defaults for the Substance archive publish option. Meaning, we are now ready to use our published Substance in the Unreal Engine which we will take a look at doing in the next exercise.

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