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Texturing

Textures Look Different in Unreal Than in Substance Painter

Why the same maps shade differently

Also known as: Substance Painter vs Unreal look · Painter to Unreal mismatch · Textures too dark in Unreal · Wrong colors in engine

Quick answer

Textures rarely look identical in Unreal Engine and Substance Painter because lighting, tonemapping and material setup differ, but large differences usually come from four settings: the export preset, the sRGB flag, the normal map format and the packed map's channel order. Export with the Unreal Engine preset, turn sRGB off for the packed ORM texture, use a DirectX normal map and make sure the material reads the right channels.

How to fix it

Check in this order: that base color is imported as sRGB and the ORM map is not; that the normal map has its green channel set for Unreal; that the material wires occlusion, roughness and metallic from red, green and blue; and finally compare under similar lighting, since Painter's viewport lighting and tone are not Unreal's. A neutral-lit Unreal level or Marmoset Toolbag makes a fairer comparison than the default editor viewport.

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