Smart materials

A smart material is a saved stack of layers, masks and effects that rebuilds itself on whatever mesh you drop it onto. Drag a worn painted-metal smart material onto a crate and you get paint, chipped edges and dirt in the crevices, all placed by reading that crate's baked maps. Adobe calls them "advanced layer presets" that share "a similar texturing process while keeping the results different, adapted to the mesh topology" (Substance 3D Painter documentation: Smart materials and masks).

Smart materials are a feature of Substance 3D Painter, the most common tool for unique texturing. The same idea exists as saved layer presets in other painting tools. A smart mask is the same thing for a mask only: a preset effect stack you drop onto a layer's mask (Substance 3D Painter documentation: Smart materials and masks).

#What is inside one

A smart material is a set of layers whose masks read the mesh's baked maps. A typical one contains:

• Base material layers: plain, uniform materials (metal, paint, plastic) with correct physically based rendering values.
• Generator-driven masks: procedural masks that read baked maps. Painter's Metal Edge Wear generator, for example, needs baked position, curvature, AO and world-space normal maps (Substance 3D Painter documentation: Metal Edge Wear). See edge wear.
• Grunge and detail: tiling noise textures that break up the masks.
• Anchor points, which let one layer reuse another's data; Hugh Chew says they "help reference Material and Mask data" (ArtStation: Concord - Smart Material Pipeline).

Because the masks come from baked maps, the result is only as good as the bake. A smart material on an unbaked mesh shows the base materials and little else.

#Creating, sharing and updating

To make one, you group layers into a folder, right-click it and choose "Create smart material"; it lands on the shelf under the folder's name (Substance 3D Painter documentation: Smart materials and masks). Presets are saved to disk, and anyone can import the file into their own shelf (Substance 3D Painter documentation: Smart materials and masks).

Two limits matter for teams. "Once added in the layer stack, there is no way to retrieve which smart material was used", and updating a smart material "will have to be done manually" in every file that used it (Substance 3D Painter documentation: Smart materials and masks). A smart material is copied into your file as a starting point and keeps no link to the original preset.

The same thinking appears in engine-side material systems. The Coalition built a shared material library for Gears of War 4 so artists could stack proven materials instead of rebuilding them, which cut the cost of making materials (Penty & Coalition) 2017). See material layers and Substrate.

#Related terms

unique texturing · edge wear · procedural materials · material layers and Substrate · baking · ambient occlusion · ways to texture an environment

#Further reading and watching