SurfaceMentor

Once you’ve finished painting beautiful, realistic materials in Adobe Substance 3D Painter, the next step is to export your textures correctly so they look just as good in Blender, Unreal Engine, or any other 3D environment.

Substance 3D Painter provides export presets tailored for each platform — handling maps like Base Color, Normal, Roughness, and Metallic automatically. In this guide, you’ll learn how to export your textures seamlessly for both Blender and Unreal Engine, step by step.

👉 Don’t have Substance yet? Start a free trial of the Adobe Substance 3D Collection and follow along with this export workflow.

🧱 Step 1: Finalize Your Textures

Before exporting, make sure your texture work is complete:

1. Review your material layers and Smart Masks.
2. Set your texture resolution under Texture Set Settings → Size (px) (usually 2048 or 4096).
3. Check baked maps (Normal, AO, Curvature) for any artifacts.
4. Save your project file before proceeding.

💡 Tip: If your model has multiple materials, each one will export as a separate texture set — ideal for multi-material assets in Blender or Unreal.

⚙️ Step 2: Open the Export Textures Window

1. Go to File → Export Textures.
2. In the Export window, you’ll see options for:
   • Output Template
   • File Type and Bit Depth
   • Output Directory
   • Texture Sets to Export

This window controls exactly how and where Painter exports your texture maps.

🧩 Step 3: Choose an Output Template

Substance 3D Painter comes with built-in export templates optimized for popular workflows.

For Blender

• Select Blender (Principled BSDF) from the Output Template dropdown.
• This preset exports:
  • Base Color
  • Roughness
  • Metallic
  • Normal (OpenGL format)
  • Ambient Occlusion

These textures plug directly into Blender’s Principled BSDF Shader.

For Unreal Engine

• Select Unreal Engine 5 (Packed) or Unreal Engine 4 (Packed).
• This preset exports:
  • Base Color (RGB)
  • Occlusion, Roughness, Metallic (packed into RGB channels)
  • Normal (DirectX format)

🧠 Pro Tip: UE5 prefers DirectX normals, while Blender uses OpenGL. Be sure to pick the correct preset for your renderer.

💾 Step 4: Configure Output Settings

• Output Directory: Choose where to save your textures (create a /Textures folder next to your model).
• File Type: PNG or TIFF recommended for quality and transparency.
• Bit Depth: 16-bit for high-end rendering, 8-bit for real-time engines.
• Resolution: Match your project settings (e.g., 2048×2048).

Click Export to start the process — Painter will generate all the texture maps and save them in your chosen directory.

🧠 Step 5: Importing into Blender

1. In Blender, switch to the Shading workspace.
2. Add an Image Texture node and open each exported map:
   • Base Color → Color input
   • Roughness → Roughness input
   • Metallic → Metallic input
   • Normal → Normal Map node → Normal input
   • AO → Multiply with Base Color or use in Composite pass
3. Set your Color Space:
   • Base Color → sRGB
   • All others → Non-Color

🎨 Result: Your model now looks exactly as it did in Substance 3D Painter — physically accurate and PBR-ready.

🧱 Step 6: Importing into Unreal Engine

1. In Unreal Engine, drag your textures into the Content Browser.
2. Create a Material and open it in the Material Editor.
3. Connect the maps as follows:
   • Base Color → Base Color
   • ORM (Occlusion/Roughness/Metallic) → corresponding inputs
   • Normal → Normal input
4. Save and assign the material to your model in the viewport.

🎯 Pro Tip: Use the Packed template export to save file size and improve performance.

✅ Conclusion

Exporting textures from Adobe Substance 3D Painter to Blender or Unreal Engine is quick once you understand presets and map types. By choosing the right template, your materials will retain full PBR accuracy with zero guesswork.

👉 Start a free trial of the Adobe Substance 3D Collection today and master the complete texturing-to-rendering pipeline.