Understanding the different types of assets in the Assets panel

Adobe Substance Painter has a variety of asset types that you can simply drag and drop on the model and customize according to your preferences. In this section, we will go through each one of them and learn about their usage.

In the following figure, the asset -type icons have been labeled with numbers from 1 to 8:

Figure 2.24 – Various types of assets

Let us now explore what each icon labeled with the number entails:

1. Materials: Materials comprise tiling materials that are standard and consistent. They don’t require baking and don’t have any mesh-specific details. Materials can be created using a fill layer in Painter, but for additional control, use Substance 3D Designer or Substance 3D Sampler.

If you type Human Skin in the search field, you will find human skin under the materials. Human skin is widely used for humans, cartoon characters, and creatures.

2. Smart materials: Painter’s Smart materials are a one-of-a-kind feature. They feature mesh-specific characteristics, in addition to tiling and uniform detail, that are automatically customized to your mesh. You must first bake your maps for this to work. Only Substance 3D Painter can create and use Smart materials.
3. Smart masks: Smart materials can be applied to any layer in the stack. However, Smart masks can only be applied to the effect stack because these are effect presets (for masks specifically). We will learn about effect stacks in Chapter 4, Working with Masks in Adobe Substance 3D Painter, and Chapter 6, Working with Materials and Smart Materials in Adobe Substance 3D Painter.
4. Filters: These are effects like the filters you find in Adobe Photoshop, such as blur, color correction, and emboss. However, these are specially designed for Adobe Substance 3D Painter.
5. Brushes: These provide you with brush types; you can also customize available brushes:
   • Particles: This falls under the brushes category and can provide you with physical effects that can act as physical particles on your meshes, for example, dripping oil, spray paint, rust, and so on.
6. Alphas: Alphas are used for the shape of the brushes, text, decals, and stamps, and as a height map.
7. Textures: These are generally JPEG or PNG files or other formats of colored images such as LUTs, which are lookup tables and are most commonly used in color grading. All the imported texture files can also be accessed under this category. The details of texture subtypes are given here:
   • Grunges: These can be used as masks or as an effect to create some dirt, damage, or wear and tear effects.
   • Procedurals: These are procedural effects that you can apply on meshes. You can customize them to get random results that will prevent a tiled or a computer-generated look and feel, and output more realistic and natural effects.
   • Hard Surfaces: These contain a variety of normal maps that will allow you to create an effect with an engraved or height map (displacement) effect. These are specially used for effects such as screws, bolts, grills, and so on.
8. Environment maps: The environment is a representation of the infinite space that surrounds the three-dimensional scene. These are HDRI files that give you realistic lighting results that are derived from the HDRI files themselves. There are a variety of HDRI files under this category.

Hopefully, you have understood the different types of assets and their usage, so let’s learn how we can apply them in our next section.