There is no gameplay, this is for a movie. The objects are static but they have very slight vertex animation. Since they are mostly plants I think it’s called WPO. The PBR paradigm was suppose to simplify material creations and also make it more physical based and lead to a solution which works everywhere be it in the sun, at sunset in orange light and so on. But since this is still a game engine with many “shortcuts” taken to achieve an incredible real-time lighting it seems there are materials and situations which don’t work in every type of lighting. With a single material.
I tried hard to create materials which work no matter what lighting there is in the scene but after a while I realized that for better visual effects I could just change the material depending on the lighting - even if it’s the same type of object.
Automatic would be great, but if it’s not possible, manually placing some guide objects to change the materials where the guide objects are - would work too. And usually in a cinematic there are lots of adjustments anyway - it’s not like in a real-time game.
I could also select the objects in the shadow or in the light and just change the materials but that would be the third and most time consuming option.
Having guides over large areas - where you could simple add and change the many small actors/plants - during the scene building - and they would just adopt “shadow” or “in the light” materials would be a much better and much faster workflow.
Since the scene is very detailed - I’m taking advantage of the nanite “infinite” polygons solution - I’m trying to automate and simplify the workflow as much as possible.