I’ve seen materials tutorial. I don’t know, however, how to make semi-transparent objects behave like they’re receiving light from environment.
closest I’ve seen is in Material demo level, wherein some materials set with Volumetric materials reflect some of light objects. But even there they have Z-sorting issues and seem to completely ignore rest of environment lighting.
One would expect that transparent surfaces will support specular lighting without any problems. Unfortunately I’m afraid that UE doesn’t allow that right now. I tried to port my ocean shader from UE3, and had big problems getting specular highlights on water surface. I checked how Epic created water in Cave example scene. Turns out they used two plane meshes one on top of other. Lower plane simulated water color and specular reflections, while top plane simulated water refraction. Guess we will need to wait until this gets improved.
Transparent materials(set to TLM_Surface) do have reflections even though not so great, but it may look weak by default. However specular value helps in this occasion.
If it’s a flat plane, one solution is to add a cubemap texture to emissive channel. I haven’t had any luck with TLM_Surface myself. Even in content examples it doesn’t show any reflection, even though label says it should.
In order to get reflections from TLM_Surface you need to have a working scene already with at least one SphericalReflectionCapture actor. nearest one will be used on translucent surface. It’s not a great reflection for many surfaces (flat water) and it’s missing direct specular completely. This is an area we are working to improve.