In part seven of this tutorial series, I will show you how to quickly get started using textures to make materials in UE5.
PBR Materials
I have provided a link to the book if you want to follow along
I modeled and UV unwrapped this book in Blender and assigned three different materials
I downloaded three textures from Ambient CG
When I import the book, notice that the three materials I assigned to it in Blender are present
I can now import my textures
Now I can start building my actual materials
I double-click on the leather material to open up the leather material
I delete the base color because I won’t be needing it
I open the Content Draw and drag in my textures
I connect my color texture to the Base Color
I connect the roughness texture to the Roughness
I connect the normal texture to the Normal
I then Apply and Save the Material
Back in the Viewport, I can now see the material applied
The material is too large so I need to make it a bit smaller
I open the material and right-click to add a Texture Coordinate node
I connect the Texture Coordinate node to each of the UVs on the textures
I can now change the tiling in the Details panel
I then Apply and Save the Material
I can now repeat this process for the other materials
Substance Painter Plugin
To get the Substance Painter Plugin, open the Marketplace and search for “Substance 3D for Unreal Engine”
This plugin allows you to access the Substance 3D Asset Library
Add it to your cart and checkout
Open your Library on the Epic Games Launcher and search for the plugin
Then install the plugin to the Engine
You will need to restart the engine in order for the plugin to be available
Once the engine has restarted, under Edit > Plugins, search for “Substance in UE5” and activate it
Then restart the engine once again
I now import the shack that I downloaded from Sketchfab
I also make a folder for my materials
To access the materials, you will need an Adobe ID – if you’ve used Mixamo, you would already have an ID
To access the materials, I just click on the Substance 3D dropdown and choose the Substance 3D Community Assets option
This will open a website where I can access my materials
For the roof, I will look for a rusted metal
Once I find a rusted metal, I will open the material and download the file
I can now import my rusted metal material into the Materials folder
I will be using the default import options
Now I can drag-and-drop the rusted metal material onto the roof
If I double-click on the material to open it, I can use the UV Amount to change the scale
I repeat this process for the other materials