How to texture clothing in Substance Painter for Second Life

Substance Painter paints materials, not just colours: fabric, leather and metal that react to light. Second Life can show that directly with PBR materials, and you can still export classic maps for older viewers.

What you need

• Substance Painter
• An unwrapped low-poly garment (FBX or OBJ), ideally with its high-poly version
• Blender or the Second Life viewer to assemble the material

Steps

1. Export from Blender. Export the low-poly as FBX with one material per Second Life face. Material names become texture sets in Painter.
2. Create the project. New project, choose a PBR metallic-roughness template and the OpenGL normal format, and pick 2048 as the working size.
3. Bake mesh maps. Bake normal, ambient occlusion, curvature and the others from the high-poly. Smart materials depend on these.
4. Paint. Build up with fill layers and masks: base fabric, then seams and stitches, then wear and dirt, kept subtle.
5. Export for PBR. Export base colour, normal, and a combined occlusion-roughness-metallic texture (the glTF layout). Build the material in the Second Life material editor or as a glTF file.
6. Export for Blinn-Phong. For the classic system export diffuse (with some shading baked in), normal and specular maps.

Tips

• 1024 is enough for most clothing; use 2048 only where it shows.
• Look at the result under Second Life's own light, at midday and at night, before selling.
• Keep the Painter file: recolours are a matter of changing one fill layer.

Next

• How to make PBR materials for Second Life
• How to make a texture changer HUD for Second Life

Words you do not know? See the glossary. All guides: how-to guides.

This page is a written overview. In the SL Designers video courses you watch clothing being made from start to finish, and our Blender addons take over much of the technical work.