Want to know what the frack that is?

Digging into the PBR problem, I realised UE4 comes with some preset materials, in this picture: rough grass.
Pretty rough if you ask me!

As you can – barely – see, materials can become quite complex, all the nodes between the maps are either LOD – level of detail – or parameters which allow to fine tune what the material looks like ingame.

Very good news, the designer of Materialize answered a question I asked him by mail:

The Unreal roughness map is the inverse of the smoothness map, you can use a OneMinus node in Unreal to convert the smoothness map to roughness.

The edge map is a texture that you can overlay on top of the diffuse or albedo to add more definition to normal mapped edges and creases, but how you use it is artistically up to you.

Good! So the Smoothness map Materialize produces is the reverse of the commonly used roughness map. I didn’t ask him why he wasn’t making a roughness map in the first place since he was kind enough to answer my question.

I’m thus a bit further on the road of PBR materials comprehension, which is of no importance since whatever I do they look like shit ingame, I still have to learn about lighting, post-processing and loads of stuff I don’t even comprehend the name, but the show must go on!