Hi everyone!
I’m generating materials in Substance Designer (see example screenshot: tile/scale-like roof material). Substance outputs a full PBR texture set, but I’m not completely sure which of these maps are already practical to use in Defold “as is”, and which ones require custom shaders/materials.
I don’t want to reinvent the wheel, so I’d love to collect some best practices in one place.
I’ve already found a couple of separate posts and examples on the forum, but I think it would be great to have one topic where all this info is gathered together – both for me and for future users searching the forum.
Here’s roughly the list of maps Substance can export:
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Base Color / Albedo
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Normal
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Height / Displacement (for parallax, etc.)
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Ambient Occlusion (AO)
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Roughness
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Metallic
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Specular
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Glossiness
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Opacity / Opacity Mask (alpha, cutout)
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Emissive
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Various masks / utilities like Curvature, Thickness, etc.
What I’d like to understand is:
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Which of these maps are already straightforward to plug into Defold’s default materials (sprite/model) without rewriting everything from scratch?
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For which maps are there ready-made community shaders or examples (e.g. normal maps, parallax/height mapping, AO, roughness/metallic packed channels, i found few, but maybe there is a topic about all of them in one place)?
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What is the minimal practical set of maps you use in real Defold projects (especially on mobile)? What do you keep as separate textures, what do you bake into BaseColor/vertex colors, and what do you pack into channels (for example R=AO, G=Roughness, B=Metallic, A=Height)?
In short, I’m trying to figure out a sensible pipeline:
Substance Designer → texture maps → Defold materials,
without overcomplicating things or duplicating work that the community has already solved.
Any example projects, .material + shader files, or links to existing threads are very welcome. Thanks in advance!
