Unreal Materials and Textures

This page will describe the material and texture standards, formatting, and hierarchy in PS unreal. Asset naming follows the layout on the main art page.

In summary, Materials are set up as instances of a limited number of material masters, which reduces the shader calculations required for the game. These masters are:

• terrain material
• ceramic building material, ie. tile roofs
• normal building material
• generic level asset material
• weapon material
• character skin material
• character hair material
• character armor material
• particle material
• flora material
• fur monster material
• carapace monster material

Textures are mapped to several input types, and are being converted to the newer PBR (physically based rendering) material system to take advantage of the higher quality results. Also, some textures use Channel packing for more efficient storage.

Texture types are:

• Albedo, or diffuse maps (including an alpha layer)
• Normal maps
• RAM (roughness, ambient occlusion, and metallic) maps: roughness is in red channel, ao is in green channel, and metallic is in b channel.
• Height maps (typically only used for landscape elements)
• SSM (subsurface mask) maps: distinguishes skin from clothing for subsurface effects
• Tint mask: primary color mask in red, secondary color mask in green, skin in blue

Normal Maps

The corresponding color to a flat surface for a normal map is RGB(128, 128, 255) or #8080FF. If you use this color you get flat surface, if you use any other color, even if it's the same everywhere, you get the mirror line. (modificato)