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 (default 0.5), ao is in green channel (default 1), and metallic is in b channel (default 0).
- Specular map: how reflective is the material (default 0.5)
- Height maps (typically only used for landscape elements)
- SSM (subsurface mask) maps: distinguishes skin from clothing for subsurface effects
- Tint mask (0.0 black means NO, 1.0 white means YES) : 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)