Is there a shader model in Unreal that allows for the tinting of a specular or environment reflection with a particular color? It seems that standard material wont allow me to do this.
In most other dcc apps, you have the ‘reflection color’ slot which can be a color or a texture. And with it, I can cause the reflections and speculars to be tinted to a color other than shades of gray.
Basically im trying to create a pearlescent effect, buy having a color on a surface ‘flip’ to another color when affected by reflection or specular. Im not trying to flip the color on a fresnel basis but a specular basis.
Am I just using the wrong shader model? Is this even possible in UE5.1.1?
The standard shading model actually does this. But in a good/bad way depending on your particular goals.
Unreal uses a metalness based PBR workflow, meaning that the reflections are tinted according to the metallic output, with the color used to tint derived from the base color output.
This works well for most materials, but it really sucks if you want to make something with say… iridescence/thin film interference… or literally any material that has a more stylized reflection.
I haven’t messed with it much but 5.2 has a new experimental material system called Substrate (previously known as Strata) which from what I understand, should address this problem by allowing you to decouple the specular reflection color from the base color. For example thin film interference is something they showed heavily in the documentation for it