Guys thank you so much for helping me. SpaceRogue, thanks for taking the time to show me what you did to fix what appears to be the same result I was getting. I like your solution and I’m going to give it a try immediately after I pen this post!
Now as a follow up, I was watching a Digital Tutors video on Maya and Unreal 4 Animating a Short Film in Maya and Unreal Engine (I still want to use UE4 so bad!)
When he got up to texturing his spiderbot, and placed it into UE4, upon added the Metal texture while setting up the material he got the same exact issue and said as much (paraphrasing) “the Metal makes the model black…” I was SO HAPPY to finally see it wasn’t just me experiencing this issue, and I sat up straight just waiting to see what he did to FIX it!
What did he do? Something I did right out off the bat, but dismissed it as not being correct since this was supposed to be a PBR material; he added a multiply node to the Metal value and reduced the 2nd input to around 50 - 70 percent.
Now from all the things I learned while using 3D-Coat, Substance Designer and Substance Painter - a material is either metal or dielectric; if it’s metal, the Metal value should be 1 if it’s not then it should be 0! Anything in between is just going for a subjective feel for how you want the model to look…
In my opinion Unreal Engine is breaking this PBR paradigm because as soon as an object has 1 (or a white texture) for it’s Metal slot, it ends up looking BLACK in the scene.
Thing is when UE4 became available at $20/month (when I OF COURSE) grabbed it, and even after it went free, simply texturing my model directly from the maps generated by Substance looked the SAME in UE4.
Now something has changed??! (In fact now that I think about it, when Unity finally went PBR as well, now my models look correct in Unity and now bad in Unreal; I wonder if Unity’s installer is hacking UE4’s installation!! :rolleyes: )
Here’s the same scene from above with what the DT training recommended as the solultion for the model going black after the addition of the multiply node (at 0.8) to the Metal channel:
http://www.willbelljr.net/public/unreal/metalat0.8.jpg
Looking at this VS the original image from 3D-Coat and Unity, the object just doesn’t like Metallic now with the metal scaled down to 0.8. The object is supposed to be “Steel”, that certainly doesn’t look “Steel” to me especially compared to the first image.
I feel something is broken since my models never looked black in the earlier versions of this engine - in fact I was amazed, at times saying to myself “my only limitations are my artistic skills…” since my models were looking EXACTLY as I authored them in 3DC and Substance Designer / Painter.
I’ll give SpaceRogue’s suggestion a try next - I SO want to move forward from this…