Substance Painted and exporting to Skyrim

[Darkwing241]

I've made a from scratch mod in 3dsmax, loaded it into substance painter and played around with some materials and masking to get it looking right.

 

I've scoured the internet and there is basically nothing out there in the way of a Substance paints to Skyrim guide.

 

As I understand it skyrim's texturing system is outdated and substance painter does not support it by default. https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/17917 has a plugin to export, but the written instructions are laughably bad.  I think the poster was assuming we would be following along with a French youtube video that has since been deleted.

 

I have experience editing models, and reusing stock skyrim textures to create new items.  I know nifskope/creation kit ect. at least at a functional level.  What I need help with specifically is getting the textures out of substance painter, and in the correct format.  

[coolfreaky]

i have found this : https://store.substance3d.com/blog/see-how-team-modders-uses-substance-recreate-skyrim

 

hope it helps .

[Darkwing241]

2 hours ago, coolfreaky said:

i have found this : https://store.substance3d.com/blog/see-how-team-modders-uses-substance-recreate-skyrim

 

hope it helps .

I've actually seen that one before, I did give it a reread though.  frankly it's awful.  The description of how to export is

 

"Once I’m happy with all my layers, I export out my maps and check to see how they look in the game engine." 

 

not exactly a detailed walkthrough.  

 

Frankly the whole thing reads more like an advertisement for substance painter then a guide, trying to convince experience artists to switch over.

[Andy14]

It's been a few years since I used Substance Painter for Skyrim. I use Blender for this today.
As far as I know, Substance Painter does not support dds. But other formats like png, tga etc.
So you should be able to export the maps and then export / save them as dds with Gimp, Photoshop or even PaintdotNet.

[Darkluke1111]

Sorry for the rersurrection of this thread. This was one of the first things I found, when I was searching the internet about using Substance Painter for texturing Skyrim meshes a few months ago.

I also wasn't really satisfied with the linked tutorials or anything else I found elsewhere so I started tinkering...

In my opinion the big problem is, that Substance Painter only supports the modern metalness-roughness pbr workflow, while Skyrim does everything with the old specular/glossiness workflow. Substance Painter therefore does not come with a shader, that renders your models similar to skyrim, which makes everything super annoying, because what you see in Substance Painter is not what you get in-game.

I therefore wrote my own Substance Painter shader which uses the same texture channels like skyrim (Diffuse, Opacity, Normal, Specular-level, Glow, Reflection) and renders everything pretty similar to skyrim. This makes texturing less tedious and exporting easier.

You can download it here: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/44400/?tab=posts&jump_to_comment=89341603

If my instructions are bad, your model looks strange or you have ideas to improve the shader, feel free to message me on Discord (My Discord name is also on the nexus mod page)