Hi. I wanted to get some advice on how to go about making textures and materials for a level. Despite playing around with UE4 for quite a while, I’ve never really thought about how to create any textures and later materials that I need. I am rather inexperienced in game development but I’ve made several working levels with blueprint and just used UE4’s starter content to get by as far as aesthetics was concerned. I’m looking for a way to create my own unique look to a game. I am familiar with GIMP and I use a program called Mr. Normal to create normalmaps. I’ve been trying to make something cartoony but I have much to learn when it comes to hand painting stuff. I don’t want to download someone else’s painted textures because then the style doesn’t feel like “mine”. As you can see I have quite a conundrum and I wanted to get some advice from you guys. Thanks so much for your help. 
You can find some pretty good tutorials about that topic on youtube: e.g ?v=hkXUzj71t1g
After you made the texture, I would recommend you to take a look at the material documentation (especially this site: https://docs.unrealengine/latest/INT/Engine/Rendering/Materials/ExpressionReference/index.html) + take a look at some materials from the starter content and other samples + just play around with the editor a little bit (best way to learn the material editor)
Thanks for posting that link
Great! I looked at that tutorial and made my first texture. How should I normal map this? If I use Mr. Normal or any other normal map generator, the material doesn’t pop as much as I’d like. I can use Blender to normal map it but I need to create a high poly mesh that matches up perfectly with my texture. Is there a more powerful normal map generator, or should I find a way to use Blender or a similar program? Thanks for your help.
There are two ways to do it
- as you already mentioned, you create a high poly model and bake the normal from it
- or you just use a program that bakes the normal from the texture. A good and free on is the one from nividia for photoshop: https://developer.nvidia/nvidia-texture-tools-adobe-photoshop But I think you will also find something like this for gimp.
You can control the strength of your normal map either in your program or with the UE4 material editor -> multiply your normal map with a Vector Parameter (X, Y, 1, 1). X and Y control your intensity, values lower than 1 will decrease it, and values over 1 will increase it.