What texture maps do you need?

So I’ve been looking around and can’t quite figure out how this works. Lets say I went to CG textures and found a brick wall picture. Which maps would I need to plug into a UE4 material to get all the needed details like roughness/gloss to make it look good, and where would I plug them in? I haven’t found much on turning 2D textures into materials. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Go and watch this tutorial, it may help: Unreal Engine 4 Beginner Tutorial Series - #13 Creating Materials - YouTube

Typical composition of a game material :

diffuse or albedo or base color (basically the same thing)
roughness
metalness
normal
ambient occlusion (sometimes)
Displacement or height (sometimes)

AFAIK on cg textures they only provide the diffuse map. You’ll need something like allegorithmic’s bitmap2material to generate all other maps from the diffuse. Or better, use something like megascans and substance source, each ‘‘material’’ comes with all the textures you need. Diffuse/rough/normal/metalness/AO/curvature, etc.

Ah, thanks for all the info! Very helpful

On most of the categories this is correct.

However, if the OP wanted some textures to use and learn from, check out the “substance” and “3d scans” categories
Both seem to include most maps you’d want (normal, roughness, height, metal, etc).

http://www.textures.com/browse/3d-scans/114548
http://www.textures.com/browse/substance/114546