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 PBR Textures into Unreal 5
This guide assumes you’ve created a Material, and have already imported your desired Poliigon textures into your content browser.
For the most up-to-date Material creation, you may want to enable Substrate materials. You can read more about Substrate from Unreal’s Documentation here, including how to enable it.
You may find that you need to specify the colorspace for some of the maps. Double click both the Roughness, Metallic and Displacement map (one a time) and in the settings, untick the ‘SRGB’ checkbox
You will also need to flip the green channel of the normal map. Double click the file in the content browser, then in the Texture > Advanced section, tick the ‘Flip Green Channel’ checkbox
Double click the Material in your content browser to open the node editor
Drag your texture maps from the content browser into the node editor space. Unreal should recognize and properly assign Sampler Types to your map files. You may notice for example, a notification that the normal map has been assigned the ‘normal’ Sampler Type, which is 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, simply click on the node, and observe the map name in the Details section
Ambient Occlusion and Displacement maps connect directly to the Material node, rather than the BSDF node.
If you don’t see a displacement input, click on the Material node, then search for ‘tessellation’ in the Details section, and then check ‘enable tessellation’
To view nanite displacement on an actual model, you’ll need to enable nanite support for the mesh you’re previewing the material on.
Using ORM maps in Unreal 5
Poliigon now ships ORM maps with all new materials. This special map is typically only used in realtime rendering and game applications. In Poliigon’s case, this texture stores the Ambient Occlusion, Roughness and Metalness information, but each are stored in the separate Red, Green and Blue channels respectively. Simply connect the output of each color channel to the inputs just mentioned.
How to import Poliigon Models into Unreal 5
Ensure you’ve selected .fbx as the file type in the download options when downloading from Poliigon
Unzip the model file downloaded from Poliigon, and drag the .fbx file into the Content Borwser tray. There are many import options that you may set as you desire depending on what kind of project you’re building
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 previous sections
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 it. For the purpose of this guide, we’ll use Adobe Photoshop as an example, but a free program like Gimp can also be used
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. Note that if you prefer to use the .jpg version of the HDRI, the image must be set to SGRB and 32bit, otherwise you won’t be able to export 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
Drag your saved .hdr file into Unreal’s Content Browser tray, then drag the HDRI onto the ‘Cubemap’ setting in the Details menu to replace the default HDRI