I recently realized that when UE4 tries to import textures, it somehow doesn’t detect the name of the texture. It does make sure which one goes in as a normal map, but I have no idea how it does that.
So a problem arose.
Roughness map and metallic maps are gray scale images, but UE4 imports them as color images and at the same time, it imports them and turns on the sRGB by default.
Realistically, this is very disturbing as there are not just one or two textures in the game. Hundreds and thousands of them would be imported. Ain’t nobody got time to set every single one of them back to linear RGB?
So I ended up going this way to make life easier. When I make roughness and metallic map, I export them as if they are the R and G channel of another image. So I can save some file count and use the individual channels to connect to material node. A little bit more organized. And save 50% of time ticking check boxes. In theory.
What actually happens is, when I import them, UE4 recognize the the map as “Normal” map. I don’t know why it does that, but I did check the official naming convention on the WIKI, and _M or _Mask is specifically assigned to RGB mask texture. And the importer doesn’t tell any difference.
Is there possibility to add a feature where users can customize the importer naming match preference so that when importing texture, the file name will be checked, and all the texture setting will be set accordingly.
This can save a lot of unnecessary work.