Foliage Quality Issue - Between UE4 & Substance Designer

Hi All,

Im working on foliage for a game I’m working on and can’t seem to figure out whats causing some issues for me.

Below is a picture from substance designer for some grass (Exported as 8 bit PNG)


Here is my material in UE4

Here is the base colour texture setup (No sRGB or else it washes out everything)
And Lastly the viewport:

As you can see the substance designer output does not match UE4 at all, and Im kind of lost on what to do from where. My lighting setup is super simple: no shadows, skylight, directional light, sky sphere, and atmospheric fog. I’m hoping someone can shine some solution on me to help with this, and I appreciate any help offered.

There’s a few things I notice:

A) The export format of 8-bit PNG could be incompatible with the import format or the material setup (less bits per pixel might mean it is brighter)
B) There’s no texcoord nodes connected to any of the texture samplers in the material.
C) In Texture Settings in Unreal (3rd screenshot?), try decreasing Brightness / Brightness Curve, and increasing any of the next 4 in the list (Vibrance thru Hue). Not by a lot, though. Vibrance is similar to Saturation, though it could brighten the result depending on how much Brightness is decreased. Hue is similar to Saturation in that it adds more of the current color to the output, I think.

In the foliage actor’s details panel of the grass, is it set to “Shadow Two-sided”?

You need to turn on sRGB for base color

@presto423
Thank you for the suggestions! I tried out your solutions but sadly it didnt work until I realized you mentioned PNG. I use this because its compressed and doesnt seem to lose much data but for some real it breaks my texture. I exported in TGA and my issue has been fixed! Here are the before and after:



@Arkirsa

Thanks for this suggestion as well, the only reason I didnt have it turned on was because I saw that it didnt desaturate my base colour map.

Yeah, PNG’ll do it too. I was into creating logos in InkScape for a while, and that program saves / exports primarily in PNG, not in JPG. And logos are often only accepted in PNG, TIFF, or JPG type. It would cause issues with coloring output, I think. There should be import settings for reducing the compression level in the export application, and there possibly is in Unreal. But with Unreal, it’s usually a matter of simply dragging / saving / unzipping files to the project folder, which I think ends up bypassing import settings for certain kinds of files (such as PNG).

It’s probably worth looking into how sRGB desaturates base color maps, especially because it’s one of the required settings for different materials and particular properties / nodes.

One of the main issues with PNG / JPG is the amount of re-rendering of the original image those do to apply some aspect of smoothing and get rid of ‘artifacts’ (that term is now synonymous with a visual problem). The grass looks cool, though the brighter version doesn’t look bad either…perhaps it’s a use-case thing. Nice job solving it.