The following information applies to Unreal Engine 5+ (5.4+ recommended)
Product Support
Textures: Full PBR Texture Support (Available from Unreal Engine 5+)
Models: .FBX Support
HDRIs: Full Support
How to import Poliigon Models into Unreal 5
Make sure to choose .fbx as the file type in the download options from Poliigon.
Unzip the model file downloaded from Poliigon, and drag the .fbx file into the Content Drawer.
Unreal should create a material for you if you leave the default options in the import settings.
Set up the model’s texture following the texture import steps in the following sections.
How to import Poliigon PBR Textures into Unreal 5
This guide assumes you’ve created a Material, and have already imported your desired Poliigon textures into your Content Drawer by dragging and dropping.
For the most up-to-date material creation, you may want to enable Substrate materials. You can read more about Substrate in Unreal’s documentation here.
To enable, go to Edit > Project Settings.
Find the 'Rendering' section, then the 'Substrate' subsection, and tick the checkbox.
You may find that you need to specify the colorspace for some of the maps. Double-click each map: Roughness, Metallic, and Displacement. In the settings, untick the 'sRGB' checkbox for each.
You will also need to flip the green channel of the normal map. Double-click the file in the Content Drawer. Then, go to Texture > Advanced and tick the ‘Flip Green Channel’ checkbox.
Double-click the material in your Content Drawer to open the node editor.
Drag your texture maps from the Content Drawer into the node editor space. Unreal should recognize and assign Sampler Types to your map files. You might see a notification saying the normal map has the ‘normal’ Sampler Type. That’s correct.
You can then connect the maps to the proper inputs. The map assignments are straightforward. If it’s unclear which map node you’re looking at, click on the node and observe the map name in the Details section.
Ambient Occlusion and Displacement maps link directly to the Material node, not the BSDF node.
If you don’t see a displacement input, click on the Material node. Next, search for ‘tessellation’ in the Details section. Finally, check ‘enable tessellation.'
To see nanite displacement on a model, enable Nanite support for the mesh.
double-click the mesh in the Content Drawer
tick the checkbox for 'Enable Nanite Support'
Using ORM maps in Unreal 5
Poliigon now ships ORM maps with all new materials. This special map is typically only used in real-time rendering and game applications. In Poliigon’s case, this texture holds Ambient Occlusion, Roughness, and Metalness data. Each type is stored in its own channel: Red for Ambient Occlusion, Green for Roughness, and Blue for Metalness. Simply connect the output of each color channel to the inputs just mentioned.
How to import Poliigon HDRIs into Unreal 5
Unreal Engine requires HDR images to be in the .hdr format, which Poliigon doesn’t offer, so you’ll first need to convert them. For this guide, we’ll use Adobe Photoshop as an example, but a free program like GIMP will work.
Open the .exr file in Photoshop. You may find that you won’t have the .hdr option when using the normal ‘Save’ option, but selecting ‘Save as a copy’ should allow you to select .hdr. If you want to use the .jpg version of the HDRI, set the image to sRGB and 32-bit. If you don’t, you can’t export it as an .hdr.
In Unreal Engine, go to Edit > Plugins.
Enter ‘hdri’ in the search bar, then tick the checkbox to enable the HDRIBackdrop plugin. You’ll be prompted to restart Unreal to make the change.
In the Place Actor menu, search for ‘HDRI’, then drag the HDRIBackdrop actor into your scene. This should automatically open the details for the HDRIBackdrop.
Drag your saved .hdr file into Unreal’s Content Browser. Then, drag the HDRI to the ‘Cubemap’ setting in the Details menu. This will replace the default HDRI.
