Base Color vs Diffuse (+ texture naming)

Development Rendering
1

Hi!

I’m starting to learn UE4 and I downloaded a few texture to use them to create materials. After I unpacked the downloaded textures I noticed they contain either “base color” or “diffuse” along with the other maps (roughness, normal etc…). I looked after the difference but I still confused! Are they basically the same things? I read it few times, but I also heard the diffuse need for metallic while the basic color texture is something more simple stuff. Furthermore, the UE4 has no diffuse input in the material editor…

Can someone help me to clear it a bit?

A guy in a tutorial video also mentioned something about the naming of the textures… He said the UE4 can make difference among the textures by their name. If the end of the name of the texture is “_N” UE4 will know it’s a normal map or if “_R” then it for roughness.

Is it true? Why is it useful if I should connect them manually with the proper input?
Thanks!

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Diffuse and BaseColor are basically the same. I always used them as the same and never experienced problems. UE4 detects normal maps even if their names doesn’t follow any naming convention. You can find a style-guide here: GitHub - Allar/ue5-style-guide: An attempt to make Unreal Engine 4 projects more consistent</title It is useful because you can see on the name what type of texture it is. For example there are _ORM-textures (packed, ambient occlusion-roughness-metallic) which are in most cases like orange and you wouldn’t recognize at first sight that it is an ORM-texture or a orange diffuse texture.

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