Automatic Importer Assets

Everything you need to get a plant in

  • An FBX of the plant you want imported
    • Rename it “SM_PlantName
  • The plant shader accepts a few different textures:
    • Color “T_PlantName_C”
      • This optionally can contain roughness packed into the alpha channel
        • If you don’t have a roughness texture, it is assumed to be 1. You can change this value on the material instance
    • Normal “T_PlantName_N”
      • Tangent space, basic stuff
    • Emissive “T_PlantName_E”
      • Full color emissive
      • The shader has an option to derive this using chroma keying that can work well in a lot of cases
    • Opacity Mask (Alpha) “T_PlantName_A”
      • Despite being greyscale, this MUST be exported as RGB (IE 24 bit color) as unreal has no idea what to do with an 8 bit greyscale texture. The red channel (first) is the only one that is used
    • Animation Normals “T_PlantName_NA”
      • Refer to the animation texture doc for how to author these
    • Animation Offsets “T_PlantName_O”
      • Refer to the animation texture doc for how to author these
  • Make sure you name everything correctly as the auto importer relies on the names to sort everything out!
  • You don’t need all the textures - often just color is enough!
  • Tip: Unreal likes PSD files for import, but TGAs are also totally fine. I often use PSDs so I can quickly edit the source and reimport, but not required. PNGs can work but often struggle with alpha channels
  • Everything is imported a full res (try to keep it at or below 2k) - we’ll lower some of these in editor in an optimization pass if needed