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Substance Painter: Two Methods to Creating Tiling/Seamless Textures and Export Them (Step-by-Step)

Category: Substance Painter
June 13, 2024

Tiling is a method of repeating a texture horizontally and vertically to cover large geometry surfaces.

Tiling textures are ideal for walls, floors, ceilings, landscapes or any continuous large surface.

You can create seamless, tiling textures right inside Substance Painter and there are two methods you can use to do so.

I use this all the time (primarily the 2nd option), especially when creating modular assets that need tiling textures.

In this tutorial you'll learn:

  • How to tile textures using a Sample Plane Asset inside Painter
  • How to create your own custom Tiling Plane to import into Substance
  • How to add a human scale reference to judge texture proportion
  • How to use Standard and Smart Materials for tiling textures
  • How to export textures for UE5

Video Tutorial

2 Methods for Creating Tiling Textures and Using Tiling Planes

Method 1 is to use a Sample Asset inside Substance Painter.

Method 2 is to create your own tiling plane in 3d modeling application, export it and import it into Substance Painter.

I will cover both methods.

With Option 2, I will show you additional way to make your tiling textures scale correctly.

Method 1: Sample Tiling Plane in Substance Painter

Use a Sample Tiling Plane that comes with Substance Painter.

Go to File > Open Sample: TilingMaterial.spp

Delete the default layer setup.

Apply any Standard or Smart Material onto the plane and adjusted various properties within each Material Settings or individual layers.

If the plane is Spiky then turn off Displacement/Tessellation to 0 in Shader Settings:

Method 2: Custom Plane from Maya to Substance Painter

Second option is to create your own tiling plane in 3d modeling application, export it and import it into Substance Painter.

In Maya

Create a single quad.

I used the following dimensions:

  • Width/Height: 900
  • Subdiv Width/Height: 3x3

I like using 900x900 because it will make each quad 300x300cm. Which is a good standard wall size in UE5. This gives most accurate size to determine scale of the tiling textures.

Select the plane and in UV Editor go to Modify > Unitize:

This will place each quad to fill the entire 0-1 UV space so the texture can tile.

Export the plane as FBX.

Go to File > Export Selection with following settings:

  • Smooth Mesh
  • Smoothing Groups

Bonus: export the plane with UE5 Mannequin.

I like to do this because it allows me to set the correct default scale for tiling textures instead having to constantly change the initial tiling in UE5.

In Substance Painter

Import the tiling plane into Substance Painter.

Create new project by going to New > New Project:

  • Choose a Preset: I'll be using Unreal Engine 4 (Starter Assets)
  • Doc Resolution: 2048
  • Normal Map Format: DirectX
  • Compute Tangent Space Per Fragment: enabled

Under Display Settings, change Environment Map to Studio White Soft or another neutral HDRI. This will ensure you don't have any color distortion coming from the HDR image being used for lighting.

Now apply any Standard Material to your plane and it will show you how it will tile:

If you are going to apply Smart Materials onto your plane then Bake Mesh Maps, otherwise you won't see Smart Materials being displayed correctly.

Go to Baking Menu (F8) and choose Bake Mesh Maps with default settings:

Smart Materials require Baking Mesh Maps for them to be displayed properly.

Now since this is a flat plane, you won't see any procedural Substance Painter effects work with Smart Materials. But to have the Smart Materials be displayed correctly, you need to Bake Mesh Maps.

After Baking Mesh Maps, drag and drop any Smart Material onto your plane to see how it will tile. Adjust any Layers to make changes.

You can now use this plane for any future tiling texture work.

Exporting Tiling Textures

Let's export the textures so you can use them outside Substance Painter.

Go to File > Export Textures:

Choose a preset and define some settings.

  • Output Directory: choose where to save these textures
  • Output Template: where are you going to use these textures, I chose Unreal Engine 5 (Packed)
  • File Type: I keep mine at PNG and 8 bit (defaults)
  • Size: texture resolution of the exported textures
  • Padding: Dilation infinite (default)

Then click Export.

You now have tiling textures to use.

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