Importing Textures into UE4

Importing Textures Into UE4

Welcome to this tutorial, today we are going to work on bringing textures into your game. We are going to cover three different types of textures and how they can be imported into your game, along with how to apply them.

Tiled – These textures can be applied to large areas and multiply to cover the surface but look seamless.

Tiled Texture

Non-tiled – Textures are one offs, a door frame, window frame stop sign are all examples of a non-tiled texture, these cannot be multiplied.

Non-Tiled Texture

Decals – are basically stickers that you apply to objects in your game, decals could be rust, blood splatters, grunge etc.

Decal Texture

Adding a Decal Texture in UE4

Step 1: Importing a texture.

The first thing we need to do is source a texture. A seperate tutorial, made by Mario, demonstrates how to create one of each of the three textures in Photoshop that we will be using. You can follow his tutorial and then come back here to finish this tutorial.

So I’m going to use a rust texture made by Mario and import that into my game.

First thing we need to do is import the texture into Unreal. To do this open your game. Then in the context browser select the Starter Content folder and in the textures folder we are going to select import.

We click the import button beside new.

The reason that we follow Mario’s tutorial is because the file type for the decal needs to be a .TGA. This will all be discussed in that tutorial.

Once you click import you will be asked to select the file, locate your file and click open, but make sure you select the TARGA file type and not the .PSD file.

Step 2: Creating a new material

My texture has been imported into the game. Now we need to add a material.

The texture is imported but the star symbol means it is unsaved.

To add the new material scroll down to the bottom of the textures folder and right click in an empty space, from the pop up menu select the material option. Then name your material decal rust. 

Here we can see the blank material that I have created.

If you then double click on the newly made material, it will open the material editor which should look like this.

Our texture is not in the material editor yet, that is why the ball is black. 

Now the problem here is that we have no actual image to create our decal from, so what we need to do is take the imported decal from our content browser on the left and drag it into the grid on our material editor.

The decal  has been brought into the material editor.

The next thing we need to do is connect the decal to the info panel.

Here we connect the detail to the info panel.

Once this is connected click on the info panel. The options on the left will change.

What I've done below is selected the info panel and changed the blend mode from opaque to translucent. This is one step closer to eliminating the background so the decal goes on without a pure white background.

The details on the left hand side have changed.

We connect the bottom most channel on the texture to the opacity option on the info panel.

We also need to change the material from a ‘Surface’ to ‘Deferred Decal’. The result is we now have a decal texture. Hit save at this point.

All I did here was click the black triangle beside surface and select deferred decal.

Step 3: Applying a home made material

Now that we have this done let’s get a surface prepared to apply the decal to.

What I have done in the below picture is I’ve opened the starter content folder and I dragged a copper material from the materials folder directly onto the wall.

Note: the material came from the materials folder, not the textures.

Now that this is done we need to take in a deferred decal from the place section under the visual option scroll down to find deferred decal. Once you drag this into the game this is how it will look.

The material we created with the decal needs to be applied to this.

Now that we have entered the deferred decal we need to actually connect our decal to this decal.

To do this drag the material you created in the textures folder and drag it over to the materials box on the left hand side.

We drag and drop the material into one of the empty boxes and this will apply it.

Now to get this decal to actually work is going to take some manipulation, because of the way the deferred decal is positioned, so with it selected, hit the space bar in order to bring up the rotate widget, then click and drag along the blue and red arcs to the decal to rotate into a position taht you are happy with. 

The purple arrow tells us the direction in which the decal is facing.

Now I’m happy with the location but not the scale. So if you hit space again you will get this widget (below) this is used for scaling and I’m going to scale mine till I am happy with how it looks.

Clicking on the green arrow and dragging up or down will scale the decal.

I’m happy with the scale of this decal. Now we are finished applying the decal we can save the progress and move on to the next texture.

Adding a non-tilable texture into your game

We’re going to insert a non-tiled texture into our game now, again this texture is thanks to Mario and the work he has done.

Step 1: Importing a non tiled texture.

So I’m going to import the texture into the textures folder as done in the decal tutorial.

In content browser open the textures folder in the starter content folder, then click import and locate the file. Make sure that the file you are trying to import is a .TGA file or targa.

This is the texture that I have chosen. 

Step 2: Making a new material.

I've now imported the texture and made a new material in the textures folder in the starter content folder the same way that I did in order to create the decal. To create a new material right click on a blank space and select material.

When you create the new material it will show a black and grey checked ball.

Now I’ve already made the material but what we are going to do to make this material to resemble the texture that, we want we double click on the new material, this will open the material editor. We need to then drag in the glass door texture like this. These steps are exactly the same as in the decal tutorial.

The Texture was brought in but we do not change any settings this time around.

Now that we have the texture in we only need to connect two things, see the below image.

Connect the top arrow into the base colour and the bottom arrow of the texture into the normal. 

Step 3: Applying the texture.

Now we need to save this and our game also. Once that is done we can drag the material onto a surface.

When I dropped my texture onto the door, it multiplied…

This can happen and it is easily fixed.

This isn’t the finished result, what we want to do is to go to right of the screen we will change some settings to fix this. The bottom left of this image, there is 3 drop down menus, and select ‘Alignment’ from this drop down, select ‘align fit to surface’. There you go a successfully applied non tiled texture. Dont forgot to hit save.

Ive fixed my texture.

Adding a tilable texture into your game

The final section of this tutorial is adding a tiled texture, again we have Mario to thank for the texture used in this tutorial. This is the texture we will be using.

Step 1: Importing the texture.

This is a nice texture that will tile nicely.

First thing we need to do is import the .TGA file into the textures folder. Once this is done we import the .PSD version of the file also into the textures folder.

Step 2: Making a new material

We then need to add a new material by right clicking on an empty space and selecting material. Once this is created and named, double click on the image to open the material editor. Then we drag the two versions of the texture file into the material editor.

Here I have imported both of the files .PSD and .TGA. 

Now we need to connect these two files into the info node, match your links to mine.

I added the roughness to try and make the texture look a little rougher.

Step 3: Applying the texture.

Now hit save and the texture is ready to use.

We can now click and drag this material onto a surface and then it will cover the whole surface.

This is how the texture will look when applied to a material.

Here’s a close up of the bricks.

I dragged the texture on to one side of the wall and it tiled the whole object.

This concludes the tutorial on how to import your textures into Unreal Engine 4.