What is Substance

Substance is a hyper material that embeds as many channels as necessary, such as diffuse, height, normal, specular, etc. It is dynamic, multi-layered combinations of texture maps. It can be modified and adjusted in real-time. In the following illustration shows the graph of how a substance material is made by Substance Designer.

It is very lightweight, and can help you to save the space of your hard drive while delivering exquisite and realistic texture effects to your project.

The best part is, the substance material (*.sbsar) can be shared between 3Ds Max, Maya, Unity, Unreal and many more applications for creating realistic texture for objects in CG industry.

On the Adobe Substance web site, you may find a database containing tones of ready-to-use substance material templates.