Hey guys, I’m getting this strange specky look in my blended sand material, and it only happens when its in a shadow (left). You can see the dryness of it in the light on the right. The spec in the shadowed sand disappears when i get super close to it, which is ideally how I want the sand to look in a shado. I’ve got a 0 constant in my spec input, and I have my roughness maps lerped in correctly, and my lights are dynamic. I’m not too sure what it could be, any help would be appreciated, thanks!
What does your material and textures look like?
Here’s my blended material, I’m reusing the red channel in the one packed mask since I just want a dry sand and a sparkle to come from the sand
But I still get the same unwanted specular when I just plug the textures straight into a simplified material.
Those reflections are most likely coming from the roughness, not the specular. I’d remove the specular value and set the roughness to 1 and see if that result works for you.
Not having a constant at 0 in the spec map actually makes my texture look a little brighter and more washed, and the sheen is still there with just the normal map and color plugged in, hmm. I’m a little stumped on this one.
Still can’t seem to figure this one out, any help is appreciated!
Yeah, something doesn’t seem right, but I don’t have any suggestions, that reflection shouldn’t be there with that last material setup.
Did you remember to compile and save the material? Could you post the G-buffer views (roughness and such)?
Thanks for your help Zac! Joni, yes I did compile the material. It’s definitely showing up in the unlit mode (middle box) of the buffer visualization!
It looks like the “sheen” is gone in the shadows, and I’ve narrowed it down to it being the normal map. The only way I can get the weird specular from showing up in the shadows is if I set the sampler type of the normal in the material to “linear color”, and the compression settings to "Default (DXT1/5, BC1/3 on DX11). When I do this though, my textures get more dark. I always set the sampler type to normal and the compression settings to “NormalMap (DXT5 etc…)” which should be the "correct one. Is there something wrong with how I’m importing the normal map? I have my green channel inverted, and the settings to what would theoretically be the correct ones.
I have seen this once when I was using a manually specified skylight cubemap and it turned out the cubemap did not have mips. The way the engine lights objects with cubemaps is by choosing the right mip to match for the roughness. If you have no cubemap mips, even the diffuse can look like specular since the diffuse is just a very blurry mip (or ‘integrated over hemispheres’ if you want to talk fancy). Other than that, I am not sure.
I suspect this could be affecting your scene since its only showing up in the shadowed areas and unlit viewmode but its hard to say.
I did specify my own cubemap that I got online, I’ll give that a try tonight and update the thread! Thanks Ryan!