One mistake I realized towards the end of the project is that it’s not worth wasting a lot of time trying to make the material look as realistic as possible, thinking that if the color of a tile isn’t perfectly saturated, the material’s credibility is lost; not at all.
Obviously, it depends on the project one is facing and its objectives, but I realized that the most important thing was, for all objects, to have coherence and complement each other, with none standing out above the others and simply fulfilling their function: that you believe it. If the texture you see in the viewport convinces you, once you place it in your scene in UE5, combine it with other textures, different props and decals, and add good lighting, it will look realistic.
Still, one shouldn’t underestimate the result of a good texture. In this sense, what I consider a realistic outcome is:
Color: Ensuring the color has variations, that is, that it changes constantly and isn’t just a flat color. If you look at any real material, no matter how simple the color, it has slight variations in it. These variations are what we want to achieve in our textures but be careful that, when adding many small details to the texture, they don’t become noise when viewed from a distance. So, it’s about finding the balance between small and large-scale details.
Roughness: This goes hand in hand with color, and like color, all materials in the real world have variations in roughness, however minimal they may be (unless they come from a factory). What’s most important to consider with this attribute is that it has a significant importance in terms of storytelling. A slight variation in this map can imply that a texture has gone through a completely different life, so, this attribute should be worked with great awareness.