30 Metal Smart Materials & PBR Textures — VOL 07

Thirty procedural metal smart materials for Substance Painter, released as volume 07 of the 3DRedBox metal line. Each one arrives as a complete layer stack rather than a flattened scan, which makes this a pack for prop and environment artists who want a metal reading correctly on the mesh in the first few minutes of a texturing session, and who want to keep adjusting it afterwards.

What you get

• ✓30 high-quality metal smart materials (SPSM)
• ✓30 4K metal PBR texture sets
• ✓Preview renders
• ✓A free section holding two of the smart materials

The reason a smart material is worth more than a folder of maps is that its masks are driven by your model's own bakes. Curvature, ambient occlusion and position feed the wear, so the same stack dropped onto a crate, a hinge and a gun receiver puts scratches on the edges that would actually catch and grime in the recesses that would actually collect it. Nothing is painted into a fixed place, so the material follows the silhouette instead of fighting it.

The 4K PBR texture sets exist for the half of the job that happens outside Substance Painter. They are ordinary image maps and work in any program that supports a PBR workflow, which for this volume means the six the studio lists it against: 3ds Max, Cinema 4D, Maya, Substance Designer, Substance Painter and Unreal Engine. The offline render, the real-time build and the look-dev pass are all served by one authoring session.

Two of the thirty are published as a free section, which is the sensible way to judge a pack like this. Open the stack, read how the masks are built, and decide whether it is something you would be happy to inherit halfway through a deadline.