Why does Unreal decide to mess with my textures?

RedOut

I've noticed for a long time that Unreal has been interpreting my textures in a very strange way. I feel like I'm being an idiot and missing something really simple but google didn't have any answers.

How do I solve this? I don't want to edit the texture with modifiers as it will lose quality. I am also rendering these textures for a landscape so I can't keep making small tweaks and hitting apply either because it has to build the whole shader and that takes forever with something like this.




These are TGA textures by the way.

Obscura

Thats a wrong compression setting on the texture.  Try enabling/disabling sRGB.

RedOut

Hey, sRGB is off and it still does this stuff. I looked online and this is the only answer I got. Is there a setting in the material editor I missed?

Menchen

If it is a color map, then it has to be enabled. Disabled srgb is for "data" maps such as roughness, metalness, normal...

leleuxart

Also the material editor thumbnail may not always be the best representation for your textures, especially when dealing with Landscape UV coordinates. You could be looking at only a few pixels scaled up in that thumbnail. For the best representation, use the Base Color viewmode from the G-Buffer or just remove the coordinates temporarily for the thumbnail to refresh. 

poopipe

Ue4 doesn't handle 16bit color images gracefully - It assumes the colour values are stored in  linear space which they almost always aren't. 

The best fix is to apply pow(2.2) or  pow(1/2.2) (I can never remember which way round) to the map in your shader.