How to use the V-Ray shader in Substance Painter 2020.1

In Substance Painter 2020.1 (6.1.0), Adobe introduced a V-Ray shader with two modes: VrayMtl - Metallic Roughness and VrayMtl - Specular Glossiness. The beautiful thing about these is that their parameters match the VRayMtl shader in your project. This way, you can paint, adjust the parameters — and you’ll see what you will get once you apply it to your own V-Ray shader in the 3D application of your choice.

Then, when you transfer all the maps in your 3D application, you can simply add them to the appropriate slots and you should be good to go.

Remember, though, that the shader in Substance Painter is not actually rendered in V-Ray. It is a rasterized rendering, not raytraced in V-Ray. Chaos Group actually made our own GLSL version of our shader and gave that to Adobe so that it can be integrated inside Substance Painter. The GLSL version of the shader makes sure that the parameters can be represented as closely as possible in Substance, therefore making it as close a match as is possible with rasterized rendering. So, for example, the specular highlights and breakups should be a very close match.

Please note: At 2:54 in the above video, the Metallic/Roughness workflow requires the "Use roughness" option to be enabled in VRayMTL's BRDF rollout. 

Substance Painter > V-Ray for Maya workflow

Last but not least, here is a clip courtesy of Elastic in Santa Monica, California, that gives a slightly different perspective — this time going into V-Ray for Maya from Substance Painter: