30 Metal Smart Materials & PBR Textures — VOL 09

Metal is the surface a hard-surface artist spends most of the week on, and the one that most often ends up reading as plastic with the metallic slider pushed up. Volume 09 is thirty procedural metal smart materials built to stop that happening — full Substance Painter layer stacks, with the 4K PBR texture sets baked out alongside them.

What you get

• ✓30 high-quality metal smart materials (SPSM)
• ✓30 4K metal PBR texture sets
• ✓Preview renders
• ✓Two smart materials released as a free sample

This volume carries the widest software list in the series — 3ds Max, Blender, Cinema 4D, Maya, Substance Painter, Unity, Unreal Engine and ZBrush — and the second half of the pack is the reason. The SPSM files only open in Substance Painter, but the texture sets are plain PBR maps at 4K, so an artist who never touches Substance still has thirty finished metals to assign.

In a working scene the two halves do two different jobs. A smart material goes on the hero asset, where its masks can read the bakes and the wear can be tuned until the silhouette tells the right story; a flat texture set goes on the background props, where nobody is going to inspect the edge damage. Shipping both is what lets one purchase cover both levels of attention.

Having thirty of them on the shelf also changes how a session starts. Instead of building a base metal out of a fill layer every time, you audition four or five stacks against the model, keep whichever is closest, and spend the hour you saved on the detail that is specific to this asset rather than on the one common to every metal you have ever textured.