I’m trying to accurately recreate this simple blender material in unreal.
The vertex color is shades of gray. I guess I’m using black vertex paint to sort of fake ambient occlusion. In blender I connect the texture and the vertex color node “color attribute” via Mix Color > Multiply with the factor set to 1.0 and the emissive strength set to 0.7.
In unreal I have multiplied the color from the texture sample by the vertex color and added a multiplier for the emissive strength. This is a simplified version of the material that is used by almost every actor in our game.
We’ve been happy with the results but now that I’m working on these NPCs I’m having a harder time ignoring that I haven’t been able to completely accurately recreate the blender material, namely the “factor” slider on the mix color node in blender.
Adding another multiplier in the Unreal material seems to me to have the same effect as the “emissive strength”, lightening or darkening the entire material. The visibility of the vertex paint “shadows” seems to be permanently stuck on what blender would call “factor 0.6”, roughly.
I’ve experimented a bit with the lerp node but was not able to get closer to the goal. I thought maybe I could use the vertex color output with the “1 minus” node for the alpha input but the result just showed me how dim my understanding is. Of course it just let a lot of gray through — I can tell that the proper set up is just outside my grasp!
