Before I even get started on this tutorial I want to provide a massive thank you to Lev, over at levlevlev. He is a very knowledgeable person about 3D modeling for FiveM, and if it wasn’t for him, some of my projects would NOT be happening! So thank you SO much!
If you’re anything like me you will be someone absolutely in love with – and potentially obsessed with – Substance Painter for texturing your 3D models. This program has taken what was once a photoshop-cryfest, and made it a smoother experience for texturing models. That being said, I know plenty of people who still use photoshop to texture, and it isn’t a bad thing, but Substance Painter has surely made it a LOT easier.
Today, I am going to give you some tips and tricks to properly export your textures from Substance Painter, starting with prepping, and then I’ll share with you what was shared with me: an export preset. That’s right. Get absolutely excited.
Important Textures
Okay, so when we’re exporting textures for GTA V, we’re going to be looking for three specific maps off the bat. Diffuse, Specular, and Normal. You do not create an emissive map, or a “glow” map, but instead have a completely different way of doing things, do not worry about this right now that’s a whole different conversation.
So yeah, diffuse, specular and normal. If you’re doing 3D modeling, you should probably know and understand the basic terminology of it. i will in the future, be creating a quick vocab list, but, yes.
Baking Mesh
Something I have learned about creating for GTA V, is that you want to bake your models. Baking your models puts an added dimension of depth with shadowing onto your item, and can honestly take your creations to a whole different plane. Now, the one thing I’m not a fan of is the way that PBR and non-PBR baking is implemented but, alas, you gotta do what you gotta do.
How to bake your mesh in Substance Painter:
Press F8. This will open up the baking panel.
These are the settings I use for baking my mesh.
Baked Lighting Filter
So what? Baking your mesh isn’t enough? No, sadly not. Well, maybe? But apparently it just doesn’t get the job done right. I obtained a filter for like, 5$ from Clear. But, you should be able to use the regular baked lighting filter built into Substance. Honestly, I just wanted to try it out? You can check it out though if you want. I’m still playing with it! But, this will give you an idea of what the textures are going to look like.
Patterns Incorporated Into Diffuse Layer
This is a big one, y’all. So, I was taking my Rainy Day Boots I made for SecondLife, and bringing them over to FiveM and something I ran into was the fact that when I was exporting my diffuse maps, the pattern I placed on the boots wasn’t exporting with it. If this is happening to you, read my tutorial about incorporating patterns into your diffuse export from Substance Painter.
Exporting Textures
Let’s assume you’re ready to go and ready to export those textures from Substance Painter. You will want to take this file for the GTA V – FiveM export settings and you will put them in the folder:
C:\Users\theel\Documents\Adobe\Adobe Substance 3D Painter\assets\export-presets
Once you have placed this export setting file into the preset folder, you should now be able to ctrl+shift+e and export with this setting applied! Do note, it is wise to have a file that is in 1024, and exports to 1024. Even lower (512×512) if you can as textures are typically a leading cause in asset oversizing in FiveM. This will also save clothing devs from having to optimize your textures which is time consuming in itself.
IMPORTANT TO NOTE: Currently, there is no option to export as a DDS within Substance Painter. I do know there are “plugins” that you can find, but I have attempted to install all of them with numerous python errors. So, export as a PNG and then follow my tutorial for how to exchange your PNGs to DDS!
Download the Substance Painter FiveM Export Settings File:
