Unreal Engine: Materials for Architectural Visualization

Introduction

• Create materials that look as real as possible in Unreal Engine

1. Important Workflow Considerations

• Why is UVW mapping important?
• Geometry detail vs. Texture detail
• Why texture procedurally?
• The advantage of bitmaps in Unreal
• Understanding scale and resolution
• Environment vs. asset texturing
• Our choice of texturing application

2. Building Materials Inside Unreal

• How and when to use Unreal's Material Editor
• Creating a new Material
• Setting up the base colour
• Adding the roughness
• Blending the normal maps
• Exposing parameters for reusability
• Build flexibility into materials

3. Using Substance Source and Share with Unreal

• Downloading the Substance plugin
• Using Substance Share
• Accessing and navigating Substance Source
• Using downloaded .sbs files in Designer
• Taking .sbsar files into Unreal

4. Putting Bitmap 2 Material to Good Use

• What makes a good starting photo?
• Using the B2M standalone application
• Utilizing B2M inside Substance Designer
• Using B2M inside the Unreal Engine
• Working with patterns in B2M

5. Benifits of Procedural Texturing

• Understanding the Relative to Parent option
• Creating tileability
• Adding flexibility to our materials
• Simplifying materials for game engine use

Conclusion

• Next steps