--- title: How to Create Stylized Materials in Substance 3D... description: Environment artist Radu Sircu breaks down his process for five stylized materials made in Substance 3D Designer and shown in Unreal Engine 5. The materials... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/how-to-create-stylized-materials-in-substance-3d-designer-ue5-wiz54tvji twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: How to Create Stylized Materials in Substance 3D Designer & UE5 | daily.dev og:description: Environment artist Radu Sircu breaks down his process for five stylized materials made in Substance 3D Designer and shown in Unreal Engine 5. The materials... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/how-to-create-stylized-materials-in-substance-3d-designer-ue5-wiz54tvji og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/WIZ54tVjI.png og:image:alt: How to Create Stylized Materials in Substance 3D Designer & UE5 og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # How to Create Stylized Materials in Substance 3D Designer & UE5 **[80 LEVEL](https://daily.dev/sources/80lv)** · 5 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Environment artist Radu Sircu breaks down his process for five stylized materials made in Substance 3D Designer and shown in Unreal Engine 5. The materials include cracked earth, bathroom tiles, a Soviet school notebook, rocky moss and generic moss, each built with specific node setups. He used Height Extrude for rock and book depth, Multidirectional Warp for natural-looking cracks, Slope Blur for edge deterioration, and Tile Sampler with Alpha Merge for notebook page overlap. Ambient Occlusion nodes helped build tonal base colors instead of relying on height alone. Each texture took him 2 to 4 hours of after-work time. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### How can I create natural-looking cracks instead of artificial-looking ones in Substance 3D Designer? Use the Multidirectional Warp node on your crack pattern. It often looks messy and over-breaks shapes, but applied carefully it can be the difference between cracks that read as artificial versus natural, as seen in a cracked earth material workflow that paired it with the Height Extrude node for rock shapes. _Artists refining procedural crack patterns can find more node breakdowns like this on daily.dev._ ### How do I get normal map variation across tile textures in Substance 3D Designer? Put a sphere shape into a Normal node, extract its color through a Gradient Map, and use the grayscale of the tiles to vary the normals. This technique was used specifically for a bathroom tile material to add realistic lighting variation across repeated tile shapes without manually sculpting each one. _Technical artists building tileable textures can track workflow tips like this on daily.dev._ ### Should I rely on height or ambient occlusion for base color in stylized texture work? Ambient occlusion is often more effective than height for getting a good base color with strong tonal variation, even though most people default to using height directly. Sometimes simplifying the AO output with a quantized grayscale produces a better stylized look, a technique applied across both a cracked earth material and a mossy rock material. _Developers and artists comparing texturing approaches can follow more breakdowns like this on daily.dev._ ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Breakdown: Improving Cracks on Your 3D Materials in Substance 3D](https://daily.dev/posts/breakdown-improving-cracks-on-your-3d-materials-in-substance-3d-fli2gpw7w) · 80 LEVEL · 1 upvotes · 0 comments - [How to Create a Wall of Faces Material with Substance 3D](https://daily.dev/posts/how-to-create-a-wall-of-faces-material-with-substance-3d-uefkkjpa7) · 80 LEVEL · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Procedural Wall Tiles Made with Substance 3D, Marmoset Toolbag, & UE5](https://daily.dev/posts/procedural-wall-tiles-made-with-substance-3d-marmoset-toolbag-ue5-kpfpcypal) · 80 LEVEL · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Creating a Detailed & Vibrant Scene with Unreal Engine & Substance 3D](https://daily.dev/posts/creating-a-detailed-vibrant-scene-with-unreal-engine-substance-3d-lcnnftsjr) · 80 LEVEL · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [How To Make Realistic, Multi-Layered, Tileable Forest Floor Material](https://daily.dev/posts/how-to-make-realistic-multi-layered-tileable-forest-floor-material-gnhorm0im) · 80 LEVEL · 2 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#unreal-engine](https://daily.dev/tags/unreal-engine), [#substance-3d-designer](https://daily.dev/tags/substance-3d-designer) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/how-to-create-stylized-materials-in-substance-3d-designer-ue5-wiz54tvji) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"How to Create Stylized Materials in Substance 3D Designer \u0026 UE5","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/how-to-create-stylized-materials-in-substance-3d-designer-ue5-wiz54tvji","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/how-to-create-stylized-materials-in-substance-3d-designer-ue5-wiz54tvji"},"datePublished":"2026-10-26T11:25:26.906Z","dateModified":"2026-10-26T11:38:21.298Z","description":"Environment artist Radu Sircu breaks down his process for five stylized materials made in Substance 3D Designer and shown in Unreal Engine 5. 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