ZB was also becoming the favorite tool to many ‘digital Nomads’ (lel), and they wanted to show those Normal maps for everything they were worth.
I’m not kidding when I say, many games made in UE3 lacked a Gloss or Specular map (even big studio ones, you know who you are, shame on you) and looked like they were passed in an oil massage parlor or something. I cannot recall how many packages I unpacked to study the game, ONLY to see a Diffuse and Normal map in them, nothing else per asset.
TL;DR: UE3 got it’s ‘look’ because everyone wanted their characters to look like oiled up models, because they had sculpted normal maps, and didn’t understand the importance of Spec/Rough maps.
UE4 doesn’t have a ‘look’ because it’s going for PBR, which many other engines are also doing, so the homogenization of the material curbs those comments, and because vs. as early as 5-3 years ago, we have much better resource which explain and teach these aspects.
(Jesus, I just realized only recently we started polishing Spec definitions – pun intended).
