Substance Preferences

Make changes to the preferred settings of Substance materials and save them for future use.

In the Menu Bar, click Edit > Preferences, then on the left side of the dialog box, select Scene > Materials > Substance. After making any changes, press Apply and Save to save them.

General

• Render Engine - Determines how Substance textures are rendered. Select one of the following:

  • GPU - This tends to be the preferred setting, as it performs better, is faster, and can handle large textures. GPU can compute up to 8K Substance textures.

  • CPU - Use CPU to lower hardware resources when multitasking or rendering. The tradeoff is performance. Large textures can be rendered, but it will be slow.

  • Automatic - The Allegorithmic Substance Manager chooses the best option for the render engine.

    Setting Render Engine Settings

    1. In the Menu Bar, select Edit > Preferences > Scene > Materials > Substance.
    2. Select an option from the Render Engine dropdown. Choose from GPU, CPU, and Automatic.

• Default Output Size - This determines the default output size when loading a Substance archive and resetting a graph. If using presets, see Applying a Preset to understand how output size is affected.

  Keep in mind, the larger the size, the more resources required for rendering.

  Setting the Default Output Size

  1. In the Menu Bar, select Edit > Preferences > Scene > Materials > Substance.
  2. Click the arrow next to Default Output Size and set a value.

  Note: To set different output sizes for width and height, click the Lock to unlock the proportions.

• Preset Behavior - Sets the behavior used when dealing with values not contained in a Substance preset. Select an option to determine whether these values are kept untouched or reset to their default values when applying the preset.

  Note:

  A preset only stores values, which differ from the default values.

  • Apply & Reset - Graph input values not contained in the preset are reset to default values.

  • Apply & Merge - Graph input values not contained in the preset are NOT reset.

• Use Preset Cache - Toggles preset caching on or off.

• Import Metadata - Enables the importing of Substance metadata from a file. When disabled, this metadata is not imported into VRED.

• Inline Textures - Reduces the VPB file size on disk when this option is disabled because only the parameters are stored in the file and not the generated textures. Though this makes saving a file quicker, it makes loading a file slower compared to inlined textures because all textures will need to be re-created when the file is loaded.

  To keep you informed during this process, the File Project Loading Bar will display the message, Creating Substance Textures..., when new textures are being created for Substance materials, if they are not stored within the VPB file.

  Tip:

  For Python users, to improve texture compression for VPBs, try vrMaterialService.compressTextures(). It saves main and GPU memory and improves the texture upload time to the GPU, which compresses all textures in a scene.