Some help for people creating

Community Community & Industry Discussion
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While Epic already has beginners guides and stuff to help get you started i figured i would share some things that i had to figure out myself that are different from UDK that make life easier with UE4

Right now i only have a few things to share but i will add things here as i figure them out, i encourage others to post helpful tips here as well

FBX Export - When exporting FBX format from your modeling program make sure to use FBX version 2013 as 2014 or any other version will usually not import to UE4 very well and may cause degenerate faces as well as normal degeneration

Disable Texture Streaming - To disable the much dreaded texture streaming (great for showing off renders or assets at their highest quality) do the following:

  • Click **Edit **at the top left
  • Click Project Settings from the Drodown
  • Click **Rendering **from the left side of the popup window
  • Under the Textures tab
  • Uncheck Texture Streaming
  • Close and restart UE4 IMPORTANT

Disable Static Lighting - To disable static lighting and only use the Dynamic lighting channel do the following:

  • Click **Edit **in the top left menu
  • Select Project Settings from the dropdown
  • Select Rendering from the left menu of the pop up
  • go to the **Lighting **tab
  • Uncheck the box for Allow Static Lighting
  • Restart the editor *Important!

**GlobalPostProcessVolume **- This entity allows you to change all of the visual world settings such as a Depth of Field, Saturation, Contrast, Vignette, Lens Flares, etc. and allows you to add PostProcess Materials/Screen Overlays

In order to make the process volume global (affects everything) go into the Post Process Volume tab of it’s properties and check the box that say Unbound

Metallic and Roughness explained - So when i first started creating materials in UE4 i was a bit confused as to how Metallic and Roughness worked but now i have a good understanding of the inputs

*Metallic: * This input controls the overall reflectivity of the material, at it’s most basic you can attach a OneVector to it where 0 is no reflection and 1 is fully reflective, you can also multiple your OneVector by a mask or a specular map to get allow for more control

Roughness: Think of Roughness as sort of a reflectivity threshold, it basically controls how diffuse the reflections are, this can also be controlled by a OneVector, 0 being completely clear and 1 being completely ‘Rough’. You can also multiply your OneVector by a mask or specular map to get more fine tuned results

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Thanks , this is good stuff, keep on letting us all know what goodies you find because each little bit helps us all understand UE4 just a little bit better.

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The first post has been updated

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this isn’t quite right, the “Metallic” node is for whether or not a material is metal, the “Roughness” node is for how rough the surface is for example if you had a piece of polished aluminium it would be very smooth witch wouldn’t scatter the light coming off its surface and so giving a reflection but if you had a piece of brushed aluminium even though it would be smooth to the touch the surface is actually quite rough scattering the light and so it wouldn’t give a reflection.

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That is the official description but it’s misleading, if you have Metallic set to 0 there is hardly any Screen Space Reflection, if it’s set to 1 you have full SPR like a mirror finish

Roughness diffuses the reflection to go from more of a chrome look to a soft plastic look from 0 to 1 - Metallic does not affect the Material’s substance so it’s a bit misleading to call it Metallic, it should have been called Reflectivity

When creating it makes more sense to think of it as the reflectivity controller then adjust it’s physical surface properties via your node tree

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, haven’t run into any of these issues but thank you for the contribution. I am sure it will be a great assistance to many!

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Cheers, !

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I wasn’t saying its wrong but more like offering a different way of thinking about it, here is an image to show what I mean better.

the first material has no metallic and full roughness, the second has full metallic and full roughness and the third has full metallic and no roughness. I have to disagree with you when you say metallic should be named reflectivity because if you look at the second image you will notice two things, 1: the reflectivity as you call it has not changed at all even though it is fully metallic because of the roughness, 2: it looks like metal (witch is what I meant earlier).

as I said just giving you another way of thinking about it, hope that’s clears up my previous post:)

ps, I just saw your ocean material, very nice wave motion you have achieved there:D

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Great pointers. Special thanks for the Unbound of Post-Process.
But I agree with .
Metalness affects:

  1. Presence or absence of tint in the reflection - be it from SSR or Reflection Environment. Metals tint the reflection with the values you have in Albedo (blue tint in the car-post above).
  2. The Presence and Intensity of Fresnel. Metals have close to none Fresnel dependancy.
  3. How the material interacts with SSR and Cubemap of any kind (from Reflection Environment, or Ambient Cubemap in Post-Process) - if the material is completely metallic and there are no Reflection Environment Probes, no Ambient Cubemap and No SSR (turn the intensity to 0 in Post-P.) the object will appear pitch black, with baked lighting or in a Movable Mesh. The only thing you’ll see is the specular highlight, if there is a light that directly affects the mesh. You can make such an experiment with the default props. And it makes sense, as metals have only reflections basically and close to none diffuse light.
    Here’s a chair in the aforementioned conditions with all the metal parts appearing completely black, as it stands in the shadow and there is no direct lighting.

776×741 75.7 KB

Roughness not only affects the sharpness of reflections from SSR and cubemaps, abut the size of the specular highlight and its intensity: the less rought the surface - the sharper the reflection, the smaller and more intense the highlight (energy preservation).

This how I see the engine handles all of it. It’s a very cool approximation. I really would not describe the real world surface behavior exactly the same way :).

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When you use a 2014 version, such as Maya 2014, you would receive a version error when attempting to import your FBX model.

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im having a lot of trouble with getting the C++ source code any help would be appreciated

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What exactly are you having trouble with?

https://www.unrealengine.com/ue4-on-github

The UE4 source code is housed on Epic’s GitHub page, you’ll need to download the source code and extract it to whatever designated folder suits you, then download the 2 required updates and copy them over into the source code folder.