Static mesh issue at a distance

I am having issues with a box static mesh at a distance (once I make it physical). I want to have these boxes that you can pick up an deliver, but they appear white / brightly lit when at a distance. They appear as the 16 white looking squares in the center of the screen (looking down at them from a distance.

The look fine / great up close. I am not sure if this is a lighting or a texturing issue. How can I solve this so they look okay from further away as well?

I have no idea in particular what’s causing this issue because it depends on a lot of things ( what kind of lighting, lighting settings and material ).

But I can tell you that when I’ve had this problem, I solved it by basing material brightness on camera distance. Put a pixel depth node in the material.

I can’t make you a graph right now, not at a machine, but tell me you get stuck…

Or this, but the other way around:

what does your material look like?

@blindminds Here is the material for the barrels I switched to, which do the same thing. Tinkering with this section didn’t impact the issue.

on your distance photo, is the camera looking straight down? It seems to me to be the roughness setting, which is pretty hgh, and the angle of the camera and the reflection angle of the lights? The flat top surfaces are hitting just the right angle and the entire surface is getting bright due to the roughness. This is my guess. Would help to see a video I guess to really see how the lighting is reacting. What is your light setup?

@blindminds Pretty much, yes. However, it seems like a high roughness should stop strange reflections though. I don’t think roughness is the problem. I tried it with feeding in a constant roughness of 1 (doing away with the “Lerp”) and the problem still persisted. As I understand it, low roughness can sometimes cause reflection issues. It seems to only happen at a distance too. When I approach, it gradually shifts to the correct lighting.