PBR

UE4 and Substance Family

This is a reference board of material values for Albedo, Roughness and Metallic. This map is made by Dontnod Studio that made Remember Me game. A bit off topic but this game is stunningly beautiful.

-Albedo - Base colour map that should not contain any shadow information in it. This is one of the biggest changes. AO map can be used in the Unreal Engine 4, by connecting it to one of the nodes, but the difference is so minor that it's almost not worth it.

- Roughness - It is what it sounds like. This map is in grayscale and is defining how rough or smooth the surface is and how it reflects the light.

- Metallic - This map is grayscale too and it defines if material is metallic or not. Difference between  metal and non-metal is that metal objects don't reflect the colour of the light that they are exposed to. Metal objects reflect mixture of their own colour and colour of the light. So if we have a bronze ball that is exposed to a white light it will have reflections of colour red even though the light was white. 

New rendering method,new engine and new tools. With PBR workflow changed completely. In my opinion, with new tools like Substance Painter and Substance Designer it became much faster and much more entertaining. 

I like this adv image by Allegorithmic because it reflects the essence of both products ( Substance Designer and Painter) so well. Substance Designer is more of a technical approach to texturing with node systems, it's workflow suits people who are more technical. On the other hand Substance Painter is like 3D Photoshop where you can paint directly on the model as well as on 2D texture plane. Both programs got great preview screen and all the changes made are updated instantly so you don't need any other software to see how your last actions affected the texture. From my own experience I also must say that map baking system in Substance Designer is absolutely amazing. It does extremely clean job and didn't even need cage mesh in most cases. The other great thing is that if your mesh consists of several meshes that need to be baked separately you can just tick them off in Substance menu and it will bake only those that are on.

One other great thing is that substance got a pretty good library of materials with right values of albedo,roughness and metallic maps. All of them can be tweaked.