So after fiddling around with foliage materials for quite some time now, I finally managed to get some good results. One thing still bothering me, however, is that the shadows cast by the trees are way too dark - In other engines I always fixed this by lightening up the shadow color to a soft grey, but I didn’t find a way to do this in UE4 yet. Emissive color gives the entire material a “glassy” sort of tint, and I couldn’t find another setting that does this. Is there any known way to do this?
Thanks for the swift answer! So does that mean that I can only tweak the shadow color globally? In my other projects I always tweaked the shadow color of a specific object, depending on it’s geometry. Especially when doing foliage, that casts alot of shadows, that came in very handy. I take it there’s no way to do this in UE4?
If you only want to control the brightness of the material for the single mesh that’s possible by using the emissive channel in the material. This isn’t controlling the light rendering but the values of the material. The emissive will not cast light into your scene unless you are using emissive lighting from your static mesh, but that would be baked lighting and not be able to be changed during your game.
If I ever need to use emissive in any sort of way to get more out of material or whatever need I setup my material plugged into a multiply with a scalar parameter to control the power of the emissive and then the multiply plugged into the emissive channel.
Using this setup I can use a material instance and adjust the emissive power without the need to recompile shaders for my master material. You can also use a material parameter collection if you need to adjust any of this with BPs during your game.
