Amazon just added Substance Integration to their Lumberyard game engine in the form of an extension. Lumberyard is Amazon’s fork of CryEngine released several months ago. You can see Lumberyard in action in this video. Substance is a pair of products from Allegrothimic composed of Substance Designer and Substance Painter. They enable you to recreate real world materials for physically based rendering (PBR) and is proving extremely popular among texture artists. Substance Painter was featured in our GameDev Toolbox series earlier if you want more details.
Amazon announced the new extension on their blog:
To enable the Lumberyard Substance Editor tool, go to your Project Settings inside the Project Configurator and select “Enable Packages” on the top right. This will let you enable the Substance extension for your project.
Working with .sbsar files within the Lumberyard Substance Editor grants many advantages over standard workflows. Ceramic tile textures, for example, could have sliders for adjusting the size of tiles, how they’re arranged together, and how they’re lined up. In the editor, you can make changes to these variables and see the results update in real time. To do this, use the editor to import your .sbsar file, which will then generate a .smtl (our file format for Lumberyard Substance materials) and .sub files (Substance textures). When selecting your .sbsar file, you’ll see your Substance file’s exposed settings as well as all the textures that can be generated from it.
From the Lumberyard Substance Editor, you can also change parameters at run-time using Lumberyard’s Flow Graph. As you configure a texture applied to an object in your game world, Lumberyard will show you real-time previews of the end result, both from the editor window and on the actual object. Substance works within Lumberyard as a project extension, which includes the ability to use the Substance API, the Lumberyard Substance Editor plugin, and Flow Graph nodes.
