Substance Graph
Procedural material authoring in Substance Designer
Also known as: SBS · Substance file · Designer graph
Definition
A Substance graph is the node-based authoring format of Substance Designer — a fully procedural pipeline that produces parametric materials usable in any engine. Unlike Substance Painter (which paints on a specific mesh), Designer outputs reusable tileable materials with exposed parameters (color, roughness range, damage amount). The output .sbsar file can be plugged into Unreal or Unity at runtime, letting tech artists ship "one material, many variations."
In production
A Substance Designer graph is built from atomic and compositing nodes (Perlin Noise, Slope Blur, Height to Normal, Warp) chained together to procedurally generate a full PBR set — base colour, height, roughness, normal, metallic — with every parameter exposed as a slider for downstream tweaking, unlike Substance Painter which paints directly onto a specific mesh's UVs. The graph is exported as a .sbsar file, which both Unreal Engine and Unity can import as a live, parametric material asset — meaning a level designer can drag the sliders for "rust amount" or "edge wear" at runtime or in-editor without going back to Designer. Environment artists commonly build a single master material graph and expose 6-8 parameters, letting the same graph generate dozens of visually distinct instances across a game's prop library. Because the graph is resolution-independent until export, technical artists can author at 4K in Designer and bake down to 1K or 512 for mobile targets from the same source graph without redoing any node work.
