Unreal Engine: Materials for Architectural Visualization

Learn how to create and optimize materials for architectural visualization in Unreal Engine. Explore the benefits and drawbacks of some of the most popular visualization workflows.

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