I am trying to make a basic carpet material, not having high expectations, but I am trying to figure out how to make a material appear soft.
Currently the material just looks like plastic mold (see photo).
Any ideas on what I can do make the material appear less plastic.
You can play around with the metallic specular and roughness settings. Soft and fuzzy objects usually have a high amount of roughness (which makes it less shiny).
But for really fuzzy carpets, you should check out the realistic rendering demo, where there’s a really nice carpet you can take a look at to see how it’s done.
Also for a basic soft effect, add or multiply some Fresnel over the diffuse or even into the emissive colour to fake that glow around the edges look.
If you’re running 4.11.x, give the cloth shader a go. It automatically adds the ‘fuzz’ effect you can achieve by adding in some fresnel.
By piping in some noise into the Fuzz property, you can vary the coverage and give it a more realistic look.
As a general tip if you add a zero value to roughness (gloss set to 1 by default) your material will have a flat output based on the texture in the base color and not look like plastic.
I highly reccomending reading about PBR workflow in UE4, it’ll help you understand how to create really nice materials and what all the inputs do! But to make your material less plastic-like, plug in a constant value of something like 0.7 or higher into the Roughness input. If you’re using 4.11, try out the new Cloth shader. It’ll produce a nice fuzzy Fresnel effect that soft fabrics tend to have.
Sorry but that’s incorrect, I think you might be thinking of another engine? In UE4 Roughness value of 0 makes it reflective like chrome, a value of 1 makes it like chalk. If nothing is plugged in it’ll default to 0.5.
