What a decal is

Decals are used in Substance 3D Painter to stamp an image on a mesh.

They can be used add details to a scene by simulating small elements, such as a coffee stain, a crack in the concrete, a bullet impact or an electrical outlet on the wall.

Decals are materials with an alpha for every channel

On Substance 3D Community Assets, the decals accepted are on the .sbsar format and can be both procedural or based on an image.

Automatic quality check

When you upload a decal on Substance 3D Community Assets, the platform will perform an automatic check to make sure that the asset is working, complete, and does not have any dangerous data.

It checks a few elements:

• The material needs to have a minimum of the following outputs:
  • Base Color
  • Normal
  • Roughness
  • Height

Metallic is expected but not mandatory.

• The output size must be set as dynamic.
• It must be possible to create a render for the material.

Automatic Thumbnail Render

For all materials uploaded on the platform, the thumbnail is automatically generated during the upload process.

In order to create the displacement, it takes into account the physical size set in the sbsar itself, so don’t forget to set it when you create your material!

It is usually set in centimeters.

More than the physical size itself, what is the most important here for the render is the ratio between the width of the material (x and y) and its height (z).

For a flat parquet material it could be 200 200 0.5 (2 meters wide, half a centimeter between the deepest visible point and the highest one of the material), for a vinyl it could be 25 25 0 (25 cm wide, completely flat), for an old eroded stone wall it could be 150 150 9 etc.