Hello, I am a beginner to UE4 and I found out about a website called Quixel Megascans where they have readymade materials to download. I downloaded a soil material which after extraction gave me several different image files. How do I use this soil material on a surface in UE4? Thanks, any help is appreciated.
Again, thanks!
Few things you could do. Megascans is a great resource and allows you to make amazing blends of textures from their site using their Megascans Studio program. When you export them from Studio use jpg, png or tga format. That allows you to make nice blends of the textures and so you wont have to make complex materials in the editor.
For what you are asking and just importing those straight into the Engine then do the following:
Some basic knowledge of materials is needed, I suggest you watch some tutorials about the Material editor so you understand what is happening. Basically the Albedo texture is equivalent of the ‘base colour’ in the material graph. AO is ambient occlusion, normal is just normal. Specular is a value between 1 and O and so you can you the texture given to you or just plug in a constant and tweak it to what you think looks best.
Hope this helps but spending 20mins looking at the documentation will answer this too as it is very basic, try these links:
Also looking at the textures, you downloaded them in 8K. While that sounds good it will result in longer times for compiling the shaders and especially for soil I would say 4K is more than enough- not only saving computing power and performance but also hard drive space! If you use 8K then just make sure you have good falloff and LODs on your meshes.
Good luck!
If you then want to apply that material to a surface then simply drag the material you just made onto the surface. From the Megascans site ignore the .json, the png and .exr files as these are used in their Megascans Bridge and Studio softwares (not sure if these are available if you do not have a paid subscription to them)
Thank you, it works great!
