Update: You can now download Substance Player from the following link -
https://substance3d.adobe.com/documentation/sp31/substance-player-2294742.html
What is a Poliigon Material Generator?
Here at Poliigon we use Substance Designer to make a lot of our materials. It’s a powerful application for creating amazing looking procedural PBR texture sets.
A SBSAR file allows us to give you access to these Substance Designer setups, allowing you to customise the desired look in many different ways. You can then either save off the final textures to use in your preferred 3D Application or, if your application supports a Substance plugin, you can edit these materials live within your scenes.
Customising a Material Generator
Depending on the file in question there will be numerous ways to customise your material. In the case of bricks this could be anything from the size of the bricks, the gaps between them, the color, pretty much anything you can think of. Our Substance Designer artists have done their best to setup as many useful values as possible.
For a more in-depth look at a specific material, please check out our YouTube playlist where we have created a video for each of the Substance files we offer.
Using the customised material
If you use 3DS Max, Maya, Cinema 4D or a variety of other compatible apps you’ll be able to customise these materials directly within your 3D model, while they're applied to the intended object in real time.
Links to Substance Plugins
3DS Max: https://www.substance3d.com/integrations/substance-in-3ds-max
Maya: https://www.substance3d.com/integrations/substance-in-maya
Cinema4D: https://www.substance3d.com/substance-cinema4d
Unreal: https://www.substance3d.com/substance-ue4
Houdini: https://www.substance3d.com/content/substance-houdini
If you use an application that doesn’t currently have a Substance plugin, such as Blender. Then you can use the free Substance Player application to customise your material, save off your textures and then use them like any other PBR texture set.
Steps to setup in Blender
Although Blender doesn’t have a dedicated Substance plugin it’s still really easy to use SBSAR files in both Cycles and Eevee.
Please see the video at the top of this article for full instructions on how to use these files in Blender.
Download and install Substance Player
Download one of our SBSAR files and load it up in the Player application.
Customise the material as required (see links)
Export the Substance into image files, you’ll only need base color, roughness, normal and height selected. (The default export settings are fine but you may want to select .tif or .png, rather than the default .jpg as a filetype.)
Jump over to Blender and make sure the Node Wrangler add-on is enabled in the user preferences menu.
Create a new material on the object you would like the material to appear on.
With the principled Shader selected, press Ctrl + Shift + T, this activates the ‘Load Principled set’ feature of the node wrangler addon. From here just select all the files and the addon will create all the nodes for you.
All that’s left now is to activate adaptive subdivision for superior results.