ANSWERED: Quixel > UE4 mats
Hi all, so I have searched the web for some time now looking for some solid information on using Quixel with UE4 - in particular, which maps go into which material slots~
So, some are obvious ---
AlbedoM = Diffuse
AO = Ambient Occlusion
Normal = Normal
Metalness = Metalness
But what about the others?
Bump
Gloss
Can I use Quixel to make all of the other map slots that UE4 has to offer?
So, some are obvious ---
AlbedoM = Diffuse
AO = Ambient Occlusion
Normal = Normal
Metalness = Metalness
But what about the others?
Bump
Gloss
Can I use Quixel to make all of the other map slots that UE4 has to offer?
Replies
For example say you have a painted scratched metal, the scratches are showing on your metalness map in quixel, but UE4 as of now will not be able to render them properly, so inside the engine you will see blown out flat white scratches that look nothing like metal. What you have to do is just give a 100% black value to your metal slot inside UE4 and push the scratches on your roughness map instead. Metalness is only used for separating metals from other objects on your texture, say a gun with a wooden handle for example. High frequency metal detail on metalness maops don't do well in UE4.
As far as glass materials go, there are a lot of different ways of creating glass in UE4, but i got decent results using quixel and just adding an opacity map to my material tab for the glass items.
For 99% of assets in unreal you only really need to worry about your albedo, normal map, roughness map and AO. Use UE4 constants for metalness map unless as i mentioned earlier you have a UV layout with some metal parts and some non-metal parts. Don't really bother with spec, the spec value difference between objects in a PBR setting is so little that changing it won't make any difference, if you really need to, use a constant for spec map slot as well.
I'm not sure what you mean by this - UE4 supports a float value between 0 and 1 for Metalness (see documentation here). It's true that in a 'metalness' PBR workflow you generally only pick values of 0 OR 1, unless you're creating mixed materials, but they do render correctly in UE4 and should look similar to 3DO's preview.
KageMao > If you export to UE4 Optimised, as Wiktor said the Bump gets mixed into your Normal Map and the 'Gloss' map gets inverted into a roughness map. So a typical material will look like this:
I haven't had any luck with a scratched painted metal material inside UE4 using metalness map as far as i know it has been a known issue for some time now. You run into issues if you have a solid black metalness with white small (high frequency) scratches, the scratches presented on the metalness map look fine in 3DO and some other PBR based renderers, but UE4 doesn't render them properly.
If you know of a good work around to get that to work in UE4 please share!
IIRC dDo defaults to using black on the albedo for some scratched metal materials, I know that doesn't work well in UE4. Or it could be that UE4 doesn't like interpolating between 0-1 values, in which case, you could up the contrast of the metalness channel (or the mask you are using on the layer in dDo) so you avoid any value between 0 and 1.