Substance Painter as Look Dev workflow
Using Substance painter as a look development solution rather than a final output can expand your texture flexibility and at the same time reduce your draw calls in a lot of situations. The main premise of this workflow is to initially create your textures in Substance painter as you normally would but then export the correct maps and reconstructing them in Unreal Engine.
1 Bake your meshes and create your textures.
2 Export the Normal, AO, and curvature maps (you can make specially configured exporter to avoid exporting them one by one)
3 Export any additional masks that you created like dirt, smart masks etc by right clicking end exporting
4 Create a folder that hosts your main texture created and save as a smart material
5 Open the tiling sample file and apply the smart material and export as a tiling texture
6 Import everything in Unreal and rebuild it as shown above
After baking your mesh use the Substance configuratior setup to export Normal and a channel packed AO Curvature maps.
Look development phase - Simply start create your textures as you normally would on your mesh. Use the AO and curvature maps as fill layers to get a feel on how they will look in Unreal.
Right click and save any additional masks you wanted to output including smart masks etc.
Create a top folder and drag all the other folders textures etc in it. Save this folder as a Smart material and close the project.
Open the Tiling Material project from the Sample projects in Substance painter.
Import the smart material you created before. You may need to import individual texture layers sometimes depending on the texture complexity. Note that any specific paint layers will have to be added as individual masks.
Importt the tiling textures textures, AO/Curvature and any additional masks and reconstruct the material in Unreal.
Material detail of the final material.