the Quixel Bridge inside UE5 is giving me ORDp textures. I have no idea what such a texture is. can anyone help?
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From what I can find it seems to be a heavily packed texture. R maps to Ambient Occlusion, G maps to Roughness and B maps to World Displacement.
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It will be great if you hit me up when you find out what ORDp texture is , im looking for it but still no idea where to connect to it
Quixel bridge has bad default compression for ORD for see all channels change compresion to default
do you mean in the texture in UE?
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There’s a few naming conventions used for “packed” texture maps. These are usually single-channel, linear textures (such as opacity, metalness, roughness, ambient occlusion) packed into a 3- or 4- channel texture file.
Common abbreviations:
O - (Ambient) Occlusion
R - Roughness
M - Metallic
D or Dp - Displacement
C - Color (same as Albedo or Diffuse)
Ca - Cavity
Cu - Curvature
Worth noting that if it’s a lower case letter, it often should be considered “part of” the previous letter, so Dp is “displacement”, the “p” on its own doesn’t mean anything.
The order of these in the filename is always RGBA, so the first abbreviation is packed into the red channel, the second into the green, and so on.
Why do this at all?
It’s quite wasteful to have many texture files associated with one material, because even if they are all just greyscale maps, having three separate files for roughness, metallic, and occlusion is…
- Three separate files the engine has to open
- Usually a larger file size than one packed file
Due to the sheer number of combinations possible, you’ll see quite a few, such as “DRO” which is sometimes seen on Quixel decal materials.
Well, a decent guess would be: Displacement, Roughness, Occlusion. It might also be Displacement, Roughness, Opacity.
So, 3D artists will consider how many channels of data are needed for each map, and compress accordingly, to try to enhance performance.
With Albedo (color or diffuse), you need three channels. Not much of a way around this, unless you are creating a greyscale texture that you intent to tint or something (could be useful for rocks, for example).
With normals, you will usually need three channels. Sometimes, you can discard blue and just use the normal information from red and green.
The vast majority of other information is a single channel, so can be packed.
Then you want to consider whether a 4-channel pack is more or less suitable than a 3-channel pack. For 3-channel, you can get away with a JPEG, but, you need to choose a JPEG quality. If your edges are already blurry and precision is not important (like maybe an alpha map), perhaps a medium compression setting is fine.
For 4-channel maps, you would need to use a PNG or other, larger file format, because JPEG doesn’t support 4 channels. So then the question is whether you want to have multiple smaller files as JPEGs with only 3 channels, or a single larger file like a PNG with 4 channels.
To verify what you’re thinking if you see a file with a weird name like ORDp, start by guessing, so…
O - Occlusion?
R - Roughness?
Dp - Displacement?
You can then open the file in Photoshop or a similar tool and look at just the red channel. Does this look like an occlusion map to you? You probably have other similar occlusion maps elsewhere to look at, to compare.
Once you can tell apart different packed textures, have a go at creating some! For example, I quite like to use ORM, Occlusion, Roughness, Metallic. Okay, so starting with an empty image, I’ll paste my occlusion map into the red channel, the roughness into the green, and metallic into the blue… export to JPEG, and there we go.
But here’s one… if you’re using PNGs for your textures anyway, why not pack some extra information into the alpha channel of the Albedo texture? It’s not doing much anyway, since that’s an RGB texture. Maybe you can put a cavity map in there!
Bit of a long-winded answer, sorry. Hopefully gives you what you need to successfully decipher what the texture’s author intended!
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Thanks a bunch for this explanation.
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Thank you so much!
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very gratefully thanks
Amazing! Thanks you.
This is a wonderful answer! Thank you very much!
Learned allot Thanks!
thanks for this …
Hello there.
I have a question about ORDp quixel textures.
The textures dimension are big enough (4096x4096) but the field of the images are very small. I mean, the objects captured in the pictures are very big and it’s use is very annoying because of the tile when assign the ORDp texture to the meshes.
There is a way to create ORDp personalized textures in photoshop using separated R,G,B channels and export it to png texture (or something else for UE5.4)? I just looked in google but without success.
Many Thanks, Gian