Trouble setting up new material

I’m relatively new to Unreal Engine, spending most of my time with it experimenting with level design. I was looking to make a forest scene, so I found a fitting PBR material on Poliigon. While it may not officially support Unreal Engine, I was wondering if it were at all possible to use this asset as a material, or even a landscape material. I’ve tried my best to create the material on my own, but it always ends up not looking nearly as good as the images I’ve seen of it. Besides what is in the screenshots I took, there as also a .tif file enclosed in the zip file with the textures, which may be the answer to the problem.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!
-J5

Could you be a little more specific on how it doesn’t look as good? Is it blurry, or stretched perhaps when applied to an object? If this is the case it may just need to be reduced in size in it’s tiling.

How exactly does it not look as good, could you be a bit more specific? is it stretched when applied to surfaces, or does it not have the correct look in general?.. if this is the case, I suggest adding a multiplier to your wiring… for instance on roughness. place a multiplier between roughness and the image you have attached to it, and tweak it a bit… you can do this with metallic, etc as well. you might be able to get it looking more to your liking. Hope this helps… Cheers. :slight_smile:

The Material seems to lack depth, AO is definitely working on the texture, but in the images of the texture on Poliigon, the texture was very 3D. So twigs and stuff would stick out more than the base ground layer. I can’t remember what it’s called. I believe that I am just wiring in the texture wrong.

I just figured out that I didn’t have the displacement correct. I now have it wired in, and now the texture is displaced and looking better overall, but I can’t help but notice that the displacement doesn’t look like it corresponds to the texture, it doesn’t look like the displacement is high enough resolution, or is isn’t in the right place (i.e. A rock doesn’t have a bump but a random pack of dirt does). The textures are all 6k and I am using tessellation so I’m not sure what is wrong.

Update: I found that the texture looks great on spheres as far as displacement goes, but as soon as I put it on a plane it loses all geometric resolution and displacement doesn’t match the texture well.

If you’re using a plane with only 4 vertices you probably won’t get good results because the tessellation doesn’t have much to work with, the sphere has way more vertices and that’s why it looks better. You can try importing a subdivided plane and use tessellation on that instead.

You can also try parallax occlusion mapping as an alternative to tessellation but it may be a bit more expensive.

That makes a lot of sense, thanks for the awesome response! It definitely looks better now.