Creating Materials in Unreal Engine 5 and Understanding ORM Textures (Day 14)

Source: Dev.to

Day 14: Creating Materials in Unreal Engine 5 and Understanding ORM Textures

I opened the Material Editor and saw nodes everywhere—nothing made sense at first. Confusion is part of learning Unreal Engine, and this post is part of my daily learning journey in game development.

Creating a New Material

1. In the Content Browser, I right‑clicked and created a new Material, then gave it a proper name.
2. I downloaded a material from Fab to see how real materials are set up.
3. I opened the material I created and began examining the node connections.

Exploring ORM Textures

While inspecting the material, I noticed that textures were split into different channels:

• Ambient Occlusion (A)
• Roughness (R)
• Metallic (M)

Instead of using three separate textures, Unreal Engine packs these channels into a single texture—commonly referred to as an ORM texture.

Why One Texture Connects to Multiple Nodes

• Performance: Fewer textures mean fewer draw calls.
• Memory Usage: A single texture consumes less VRAM.
• Rendering Speed: Consolidated data speeds up the shader pipeline.

My staff explained it simply:

• O – Ambient Occlusion
• R – Roughness
• M – Metallic

Understanding that a single texture can feed three different inputs cleared up a lot of confusion.

Key Takeaways

• Materials are technical, not just visual.
• ORM textures exist for performance reasons.
• It’s okay to memorize first and understand later.
• Practice and repetition will make the concepts clearer over time.
• Progress may be slow, but it builds a strong foundation.

If you’re also learning game development, keep experimenting and see you in the next post! 🎮🚀