16 bit PNG Import Issue Washed Out Textures with SRGB

16 bit PNG Import Issue Washed Out Textures with SRGB

Here is the thread I posted on Substance Exporter when it turns out to be a UE4 importer issue.

Nothing eh?

Same thing with 8 bit PNG. The texture looks good in the texture preview window, but once it’s on the mesh it looks washed out.

Exporting the textures from Substance Painter as TGA solves the problem, but introduces a new one: now the mesh looks wet and sparkly… like it just got out of the shower. I had to run the Roughness channel from my texture through a Multiply node (multiplied by 3), to get it to look less shiny. :frowning: If it looks fine in Substance Painter, why doesn’t it look the same in UE4? Is there a different implementation of PBR in UE4? Because I thought PBR was supposed to follow rules of “real-world” lighting on material surfaces, based on formulas and stuff… to reduce these sort of inconsistencies from happening.

  1. Your BaseColor and Normal should be always 8 bit before importing.
  2. If you import a texture as 16 bit when you add it inside a material it’s set to “Linear Color”, And then if you make it 8 bit and reimport the texture, you should go inside your material and change your texture from “Linear Color” to “Color”. It should automatically do it for you, but sometimes it doesn’t.
  3. After importing your Roughness, Metallic and AO, open them and uncheck sRGB then you will get correct reflectivity as in substance painter/designer.

In case someone comes across this later…
I had to follow the advice to export the Substance texture as 8bit then import to Unreal and Check the sRGB box. This makes the texture look the same as in Substance. See Luos comment below the answer here