Hi ,
My material has Metallic and Specular set to values of 1+ and the material still shows up with barely any highlights.
Admittedly, transparent materials look better than they did in the original 4.0 release, but far behind the quality of specular reflections on transparent materials i’ve worked with in other engines (example: CryEngine default water material)
I’ve included screenshots from a very basic material below to illustrate my example.
If the engine truly supports specular highlighting on transparent materials then feel free to move to the support section of the forums, but I’ve yet to see ANY example anywhere of a transparent material that has specular highlights. If you know of a way to get a specular reflection on a transparent materials (like a glass window, or water surface) then please let me know how that can be achieved through the currently available engine material editor. I’d ask that you provide an example of how is done if you do move it to a different forum.
The picture below is a high specular with a 50% metallic surface - looks great and is what I expect (for an Opaque)
The picture below is a high specular with a 50% metallic surface - looks terrible, as the metallic component simply washes away the color and provides no specular reflections at all. Moving the opacity value from 1 to 0 does nothing to the specular reflections, but does slowly fade out the object until it is fully transparent.
Ideally, a fully opaque transparent material would look identical to an opaque material with the same color,spec,normals,etc… I know thats not the engines rendering pipeline works, however most other engines do far better than UE4 does at the current time.