I opened the Material Editor and saw nodes everywhere.
Nothing made sense at first.
Day 14 reminded me that confusion is part of learning Unreal Engine.
This post is part of my daily learning journey in game development.
I’m sharing what I learn each day — the basics, the confusion, and the real progress —
from the perspective of a beginner.
What I tried / learned today
On Day 14, I learned how to create a material in Unreal Engine 5 and got introduced to ORM textures.
In the Content Browser, I right-clicked and created a new Material, then named it properly.
After that, I downloaded a material from Fab to understand how real materials are set up.
I opened the material I created and started looking at the node connections.
This is where I saw textures being split into different channels like Ambient Occlusion, Roughness, and Metallic instead of separate textures.
That’s when I learned about ORM textures.
What confused me
The biggest confusion was understanding how one texture could connect to multiple inputs.
I didn’t understand:
- Why one texture was connected to three different nodes
- What ORM actually meant
- Why Unreal doesn’t use separate textures for everything
It felt overwhelming seeing so many nodes and wires.
What worked or finally clicked
My staff explained it in a simple way.
ORM stands for:
- O – Ambient Occlusion
- R – Roughness
- M – Metallic
Instead of using three separate textures, Unreal packs them into one texture because:
- Fewer textures = better performance
- Less memory usage
- Faster rendering
That explanation helped a lot.
I also understood that I don’t need to master this immediately.
Practice and repetition will make it clearer over time.
One lesson for beginners
- Materials are technical, not just visual
- ORM textures exist for performance reasons
- It’s okay to memorize first and understand later
- Practice matters more than perfection
Slow progress — but I’m building a strong foundation.
If you’re also learning game development,
what was the first thing that confused you when you started?
See you in the next post 🎮🚀
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