What Texture File Types Does Unreal Engine Support?

Unreal Engine is designed to be highly versatile, supporting a wide array of common image file formats for textures to accommodate diverse artistic workflows and quality requirements. When importing textures, the engine processes and optimizes them for its internal use, regardless of the original format.

Common Texture File Formats Supported by Unreal Engine

Unreal Engine accepts numerous image file types for importing textures. This flexibility allows artists and developers to use their preferred tools and leverage specific format advantages like transparency, high dynamic range, or lossless compression.

Here are some of the most frequently used and widely supported texture file formats:

• PNG (.png): A lossless compression format that supports transparency (alpha channel), making it ideal for UI elements, sprites, and objects requiring cutout shapes.
• TGA (.tga): Often referred to as TarGA, this format supports both lossy and lossless compression and can store an alpha channel. It's a long-standing favorite in game development due to its reliable alpha support.
• JPEG/JPG (.jpg, .jpeg): A widely used lossy compression format, best suited for photographic textures where some detail loss is acceptable in exchange for smaller file sizes. It does not support transparency.
• BMP (.bmp): A raster image format that typically stores uncompressed data. While it can result in larger file sizes, it is fully supported for texture import within Unreal Engine.
• EXR (.exr): OpenEXR is a high-dynamic-range (HDR) image file format, excellent for storing wide color ranges, which is crucial for lighting textures, reflection probes, and high-fidelity environments.
• HDR (.hdr): Another high-dynamic-range format, commonly used for environment maps (skyboxes) to accurately capture and reproduce lighting information.
• PSD (.psd): Photoshop Document files can often be imported directly. Unreal Engine will typically flatten the layers upon import, making it convenient for iterating on textures without exporting to a different format first.

Importing Textures into Unreal Engine

Textures can be easily brought into the engine via the Content Browser. This can be done by utilizing the Import button within the Content Browser itself, or more conveniently, by dragging and dropping image files directly from your operating system's windows into the Content Browser. Upon import, Unreal Engine processes the raw image data into its optimized internal texture format, which is then used throughout the engine for rendering.

Key Considerations for Texture Workflows

While Unreal Engine supports many formats, adhering to certain best practices can significantly enhance performance and visual quality:

• Power-of-Two Dimensions: It's generally recommended that texture resolutions (e.g., 256x256, 1024x1024, 2048x4096) are powers of two. This optimizes texture streaming and mipmap generation, improving rendering efficiency.
• Appropriate Compression: Choose the right compression settings within Unreal Engine based on the texture's purpose (e.g., normal maps, diffuse maps, UI elements) to balance visual fidelity and memory footprint.
• Channel Packing: For optimized memory usage, multiple grayscale texture maps (like roughness, metallic, ambient occlusion) can often be "packed" into the individual Red, Green, and Blue channels of a single RGB texture.
• Resolution Scalability: Prepare textures at resolutions that meet your target platform's needs, providing higher resolution variants for high-end platforms and optimizing for lower-end devices.

Overview of Popular Texture Formats for Unreal Engine