Managing texture for Unreal
Textures, derived from images, find primary usage in materials where they serve diverse purposes, such as defining a base color, functioning as masks, or leveraging RGBA values for calculations. Notably, textures can also be applied independently outside of materials, including their usage with HDRI.
Materials can harness multiple textures, each fulfilling distinct roles. For example, a basic PBR material usually incorporates three textures – Basecolor, Roughness and Normal map – but with Unreal Engine you can do much more than this, even with a smaller number of textures. Unreal Engine provides greater flexibility with textures compared to offline renderers. In fact they enable the amalgamation of multiple maps within single textures, utilizing RGBA channels. This approach optimizes performance and conserves disk space. These special textures are known as channel-packed textures. We will explore this concept further in due course.