Help with desaturated textures in materials, urgent
polycounter lvl 9
Hey all! I'm new to unreal, working on my final student project, and I've hit a really frustrating block with my textures and materials.
I'm doing a low poly hand painted project, and all my materials that I import are automatically checked with sRGB. This makes them incredibly washed out and desaturated, really ruins the highlights and the shadows. Thanks to post processing they don't look too bad when the scene is built, but I'd really like to fix it since some of my foliage objects don't look as good as they could.
So yeah, the weird problem. I uncheck the sRGB option in my textures, and in the texture preview they look nice and bright and saturated. Then, I open the material for the object to check how they look now.
Here is what happens with all the materials that I have:
You can see that in the texture preview in the bottom left that the texture is nice and bright with strong shadows. Fantastic, that's how it's supposed to look! But when it's applied into the material space..... it shows REALLY washed out again (look at how grey it is in comparison!). On the actual object (a bush in this case) the textures are still washed out.
Can somebody help me fix this! I'm fairly new to unreal and don't know much about materials, I just get by from trying things out, so if you could make it as simple to understand and fix as possible I would be forever in your debt. My project is due in a couple of days and it would be great if I could get my foliage looking the way it's SUPPOSED to look rather than faking it with post processing.
I'm doing a low poly hand painted project, and all my materials that I import are automatically checked with sRGB. This makes them incredibly washed out and desaturated, really ruins the highlights and the shadows. Thanks to post processing they don't look too bad when the scene is built, but I'd really like to fix it since some of my foliage objects don't look as good as they could.
So yeah, the weird problem. I uncheck the sRGB option in my textures, and in the texture preview they look nice and bright and saturated. Then, I open the material for the object to check how they look now.
Here is what happens with all the materials that I have:
You can see that in the texture preview in the bottom left that the texture is nice and bright with strong shadows. Fantastic, that's how it's supposed to look! But when it's applied into the material space..... it shows REALLY washed out again (look at how grey it is in comparison!). On the actual object (a bush in this case) the textures are still washed out.
Can somebody help me fix this! I'm fairly new to unreal and don't know much about materials, I just get by from trying things out, so if you could make it as simple to understand and fix as possible I would be forever in your debt. My project is due in a couple of days and it would be great if I could get my foliage looking the way it's SUPPOSED to look rather than faking it with post processing.
Replies
sRGB is annoying. Are you sure you want it unchecked? What I've come to understand is that you do want sRGB for full colour textures (which you have) and you don't want it for ie. different greyscale masks in the red/green/blue channels. sRGB makes the contrast punchier, which is why it's bad for masks.
I dunno, that material's so simple that if it's not (lack of) sRGB it's likely another setting on the texture.
That is basically THE only question you need to answer. If it looks good in the level screenshots, then its fine. Don't worry too terribly much about how it looks in a node in the material editor.
Also, if your texture is authored in sRGB space, you'll want to leave it on. Be sure to check the color profile in your image authoring application. And if its not, perhaps turn on the sRGB profile, so the color spaces sync properly.