Adobe Substance 3D Painter Texture Cache Folder

Bottom Line: It is 100% safe to clear the Adobe Substance 3D Painter cache. Clearing temporary viewport and shelf caches will NOT delete your 3D .spp project files, custom smart materials, or exported texture maps.

What is the Substance 3D Painter Cache Folder?

Located at %LocalAppData%\Adobe\Adobe Substance 3D Painter\cache on Windows (or ~/Library/Caches/Adobe/Adobe Substance 3D Painter on macOS), this directory is used by Adobe Substance 3D Painter.

Substance 3D Painter uses this folder to store:

• Baked Texture Maps: Pre-baked ambient occlusion, curvature, normal, and thickness maps used for smart material masking.
• Shelf Asset Previews: Thumbnail previews for 3D materials, brushes, and HDR environments.
• Iray Viewport Cache: GPU raytracing render buffers.

Over multiple 3D texturing projects, texture bake caches expand to 10 GB to 40 GB+.

Can You Delete Substance Painter Cache?

✅ Yes, it is completely safe to delete.

• Zero project damage: Saved .spp files contain your full layer stack and remain 100% safe.
• Fixes GPU out-of-memory crashes: Clearing texture cache is Adobe’s official fix when Substance Painter runs out of VRAM while baking 4K/8K maps.

How to Safely Clean Up Substance 3D Painter Cache

Method 1: Delete via Substance Painter Preferences (Recommended)

1. Open Adobe Substance 3D Painter.
2. Go to Edit > Settings > Resources.
3. Under Cache, click Clear Cache.

Related Guides

• Learn about deleting Photoshop Scratch Disks.
• How to clean up Blender render cache.
• Check if you can clean DaVinci Resolve CacheClip.