All materials were updated to v2.0 - change list:
- Moved to FAB.
- Dropped support of Unreal Engine 4.x - it’s my time to say farewell to old tech and fully embrace Lumen & Nanite, with all their benefits and flaws.
- Reworked material shader - now both metals and dielectrics using one unified shader, some other changes (like all features that are not compatible with Nanite and Variable Rate Shading were moved to extra shader, optional to use).
- Real Materials - Samples now free for everyone, as intended (FAB allows free assets!).
- All materials were tweaked to prioritize best look with Lumen GI & reflecitons out of the box. Some more polishing needed, but mostly they turned out quite good (with upcoming UE5.5 blurriness on smooth & semi-matte metals will be greatly reduced).
- All grayscale textures (roughness, heightmaps, masks) now in BC4 compression format (previously it was uncompressed G8), so metal materials now have 1.5x less VRAM consumption (sometimes even more), less for dielectrics.
- Added new material pack - patterns. If you bought “Real Materials Complete” package before - just update it, those patterns included in it for free.
- Some new materials here and there in metal packages and brick & mortar (colorful ceramic tiles). Summary there are 184 materials now (it was only 118 before this update!).
- Renamed package “Paint & grunge” to “Paint & rust”.
- Rusty steel materials moved from Steel pack to Paint & rust.
- Shorter names for materials and textures
- Switching on Lumen lighting & realtime clouds in demo scenes reduces on ~300MB each material pack → faster downloads and less dead weight in your projects. New demo scenes are not that fancy, but they still do their job.
- Metalness maps are completely removed (in majority of the cases inverted roughness map with some tweaks can be used or just put metalness map into diffuse alpha where absolutely necessary), so most of packs with metals will be even more lightweight to download and keep.
- Better single-fetch triplanar UV implementation (thanks to Visual Tech Art for sharing!) - now all sides have correct texture orientation, while previously half of them were mirrored horizontally.
If you’re already using previous version of Real Materials in your project - please back up it thoroughly before updating on this new version, best way to do that is to COMPLETELY REMOVE “RealMaterials” folder from your project before updating on new one (all materials have same ID so they will be ok after v2.0 packs installed, but everything else - textures and stuff - are not and will produce tons of duplicates and garbage if “RealMaterials” folder content was not removed before update.
Updating “Real Materials - Paint & grunge” package will be more painful because of changes, mentioned above:
- Renamed package “Paint & grunge” to “Paint & rust”.
- Rusty steel materials moved from Steel pack to Paint & rust.
So there will be physically missing materials of rusty metals in “Real Materials - Steel” package after update, sorry for that! But there are +5 new materials of grungy steel, hope it will be good enough compensation for the loss.
Same applies to owners of “Real Materials - Samples” pack - new one have somewhat different set of materials so there will be few materials missing after update but some new ones to compensate the loss.