So i’ve followed to tutroial and created a pretty nice water material, but for some reason, with the new sky atmosphere component, the lightning in itself does not reflect on my water.
I’ve noticed that whenever i put up my metallic (which is how i make the water look… well… watery) the entire thing just turns to black. i assume this has something to do with the fact that the light from the new Sky Atmosphere Component isn’t projected on the material in itself, so maybe htere’s a setting i’ve missed?
Attached is some pictures on the code in itself, how it looks with the new sky component, and how it looks without it.
Hope you’re able to help me! Thank you!
Also, i am extremely new to light settings and materials, so show mercy please
Everybody begun somewhere, so first a few tips on materials: If what you want to depict is not metal set it to 0, otherwise set it to 1. Unreal Engine 4 uses the PBR-metal workflow, meaning it uses a physical accurate shader to render all kinds of materials, distinguishing between metals and non-metals (also known as dielectrics). So a metallic value not strictly equal to 0 or 1, doesn’t make a lot of sense. The second point is because this is a PBR-metal workflow, one doesn’t usually mess with the specular value, if you’re going for a PBR-specular workflow sure, but make sure you’re consistent throughout the whole project. That said, that only applies if you’re going for photorealism. My third point would be, avoid using if or branch statements as they’re not very performant on GPU’s, you can use linear interpolation instead. Conclusively, this isn’t meant to tear you or your work down, those are just some guidelines, I’d recommend following. Further I recommend this article of the Unreal Engine 4 documentation: Materials | Unreal Engine Documentation .
Now to your problem, I guess you’re using the new Sun and Sky actor? Make sure the SkyLight component, found inside the Sun and Sky actor, is set to capture the scene if you want the skybox to be reflected inwards. There might also be the problem that the intensity is to small, so you might want to adjust that. But bear in mind that you’ll also increase the ambient light for the whole scene with that. Also you can read up on this article on the SkyLight itself: Sky Light | Unreal Engine Documentation . And for the new Sun and Sky actor: Sun and Sky Actor | Unreal Engine Documentation
.
Hope that helps. If you’re in need of further assistance just let me know.
Just a follow up on the former comment, as I ran out of space,
This is a very expensive material (I guess you’re using a translucent material, with the surface translucency volume lighting mode), just keep that in mind as you probably don’t want to use that material too extensively.
If you want to be physically accurate, you need to set metallness to “0”, as water isnt a metal.
Additionally you need to set the specular value to something else than “0” because having a specular of 0 makes your water non-reflective. See the documentation for more info. Leave Specular at 0.5 (the default) or set it to something that pleases your eye (The docs recommend 0.255 for water).
