hello, I’m trying to get realistic reflections on my glass material in the window. first i thought that maybe i could just add a fresnel node to my roughness and opacity but that didn’t work out at all and just made the material gray when viewed from the side. It doesn’t need to be arch viz quality but at least somewhat realistic.
thanks!
Yeah but you can change the lightning mode to “Surface Translucency Volume”, then you got roughness and metallic 
I just did a basic glass material out of the head till it looked somewhat realistic, so you might wanna change it.
Basically I set the metallic to 1 to don’t have too much colors and used a fresnel for opacity and roughness.
.
You might wanna add refraction then, but since the refraction index of glass is nearly 1 (so nearly same as air) I spared it here.
You can then use normals in the material and the fresnel to put in some imperfections. And you might wanna multiply the opacity with a parameter before the clamp to get more control.
EDIT: base reflection of 0.05 looks better than 0, so you might wanna change that directly
The material will be translucent, which means you don’t have access to roughness. Basic glass goes like this:
( material type ‘translucent’ )
What is the function of using fresnel for opacity and roughness? When modifying either, it can then modify the fresnel that’ll be different from what is intended or realistic looking. The fresnel is primarily for the refraction aspect, and specular. It’s simply an equation built into a node to get a certain effect, so connecting it to those other main attributes is more likely to distort it than get a realistic glass effect, is it not?
Yes since glass has nearly the same refraction index as air it might be better to use fixed values for roughness and opacity, so metallic 1, roughness 0, opacity something like 0-0.1
I sort of thought at water for a moment there, but water has a considerably higher refraction index than air.
Air is 1, glass is 1.5
i tried copying your glass mat and it looks great in the preview window, however in the actual level it looks pretty plain and boring. how can i fix this?
as you can see i have a reflection capture around it and i’ve also tried with planar reflection captures but it just doesn’t get the same look as the preview.
Hey, not my mat
The fresnel node will help a lot…
Does this actually work? I tried setting the shader up and it looks fine in the preview but does not provide reflections in the editor viewport. UE4.26 Post Process Realtime Reflections, Translucent / Refraction enabled. Works fine for non-translucent objects. The fresnel doesn’t seem to have any effect on reflections.
Fresnel and refraction behave differently depending on the size and shape of the object too.
You might need to try the other refraction algorithm:
It looks like setting the Translucency Lighting Mode to “Surface Forward Shading” worked on my end - I had tried this earlier tho. Deleted and created a new Post Process volume with Raytracing Translucency turned on and now it works… thanks for your input.
