From the course: Unreal: Architectural & Industrial Visualization

Working with textures - Unreal Engine Tutorial

From the course: Unreal: Architectural & Industrial Visualization

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Working with textures

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- [Lecturer] Now that we have the components of our visualization in place, we've added collisions and we're able to interact or at least move around the environment, it's time to start to bring this to life and bring in some textures and materials. So let's take a look at how we can rapidly bring in textures and how we can work with those textures within Unreal. It's important to note that Unreal will compress your textures for you so that, really, a good rule of thumb is to work with a nice high res texture and then dial in how you want Unreal to compress or handle compression for you. Now, we've worked with importing assets previously, now we're going to do the same type of approach for our textures. As you can see, if you're working along with the exercise files, I'm using Chapter 06_01 and I'm in this Geometry folder, underneath Content, but I'm working within Textures and this is where we want to put all of our texture maps. So I'm just going to right-click and I'm going to go to Import to /Game and I'm going to bring in some of the final maps. Now, you'll have all of these existing within the scene in the final project, but you can certainly import any different map that you want. I'm going to select all of these textures in here and bring them in. Now, some of these textures are quite large so of course the entire set is going to take a bit of time to bring in. We should talk about what's happening here. We're seeing that we're getting some messages popping up and this is Unreal telling us that it's identifying normal maps and it's telling us that it's applying those as a normal map or treating them as a normal map, not just a regular diffuse or color texture map. It's identifying those normal maps and is it imports these items in we're able to bring them in and see them as to what they're supposed to be, which is good, that saves us time from having to go in and define that as a normal map. Now that we have all of our textures imported into our project, we can start to work with them. So you can see they're quite a few textures imported in here and they're all different sizes and they represent different channels as well. So we want to start to work with how the textures come in. Some of these textures are quite large and we don't need them to, essentially, be full resolution within the game, Unreal will take care of the compression for us. What I want to do is go over to our art texture map here. This represents some of the paintings within the scene and you can see that we have several images in one UV layout here so that we can just have one texture map applied to, essentially, five different paintings so that we're saving some memory there with one map. Now, we can see that as we bring this in, I know that this file is actually quite large, I believe it's about 16 megs on disk and we're seeing that the Resource Size here is just under three. And we can dial this down further, if we wanted to. Here are the most important things to take note of here, that Resource Size, how it's reading it in, what physical size the map is and the maximum size is defined as in-game. All of these things we can change. So, for example, if I wanted this texture map to be no bigger than 512 we would see that update up above, we'd see the Resource Size, which is substantially different and we would see a preview as to what we're getting in the viewport here. So that's a little bit too compressed for my liking and also actually this is the default compression setting we're using here, you can certainly play with that. You could even change your maps down to something like Grayscale. We're going to leave it to the Default setting in here. And let's just try something like 1K to see what that would give us. That's certainly a little bit better there, but really setting it back to 2048 is giving us our cleanest view in here and for visualization we do want it to look quite nice in there, so we're going to leave it at that. Now, of note, on the Texture Editor, which is the window that we're in here, we can go ahead and edit things like Brightness and change different settings on things if we really wanted to. I don't want to do that on my images because I have adjusted these already in Photoshop to give me the overall look, but it's nice to know that we have that option here if we ever wanted to change any of these settings in here, we could very quickly do that and have the ability to affect anything within our texture. So I was playing with the Vibrance there and I should just point out that anything that you adjust you're going to get this little yellow, kind of swivelly arrow and if you click on that it'll just reset the value back to the default value for you. It's also a nice indicator to show you that you have edited a value, you have changed it there. This one here we change back to 2048, we actually don't even need to do that, if we hit it back to zero it's going to keep it what we had it at here anyways, because it's already set for that maximum resolution. So let's go ahead and hit Save, exit out of there and now let's begin to work with the textures further here so that we can see how we can start to build these into materials. We have some textures in our game, now let's convert them into materials and begin to apply them into the scene. We'll take a look at that here next.

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