Hi Michael, I have never used Substance Painter or anything like that), but:
there is at the moment a known bug, that doesn't let you add an Image when you ask a question directly under a Lesson.
You can however add an Image as a reply to your own post:
That might help others to answer your question.
Thank you, Martin! I'm uploading the images now to help illustrate what I mean
Before applying the Edges Scratched texture:
AFTER applying the texture to the mask:
Finally after adjusting the texture, I get this result which looks really bad. In comparison to the instructions, the instructor immediately got nice results before even adjusting the texture. And when he did adjust it, he raised the wear level to 5.5 or something like that. I need to bring it to 0.01 to even get any results unless I invert the mask, which doesn't make much send to me. Even then it won't behave normally.
My final theory is that when importing the high/low meshes, it had a checkbox to "unwrap" and I'm wondering if I should have unchecked that box since the unwrapping was already done. I'm going to experiment with that later today to see if that was indeed the issue. I'm new to substance, so it's a lot more frustrating than Blender at the moment, haha.
Apologies for the long message, but thank you so much for help and guidance!
UPDATE:
My theory worked! In the first video regarding importing the FBX in Substance, "auto-unwrap" was unchecked by default.
In my substance, it was checked, so I left it. That messed up the UV's which we created in Blender, and the results were not as expected.
After reimporting and unchecking "auto-unwrap" the mesh worked as expected and the materials now look correct and great.
Cheers friends, thank you!