Hi all,
I’d like a bit of help creating a material that looks like the attached image please. Currently I’m using a basic emissive material from this tutorial (Unreal Engine 4 Emissive Material - YouTube), but although the result is nice, it’s too CG, too clean and I’d like some advice how to make it look more realistic please. I’ve got a basic grasp of UE4 materials and was looking for something not too complicated. Thanks.
Don’t use emissive materials to light things, instead you can use a point light and adjust the source radius and width and it will create a tube light
? I thought that’s what emissive was for?
One suggestion is to actually use two meshes. The inside one is emissive, and the outside one is glass.
With a single material, you could try using a clear coat shading mode to allow for a clear reflective surface in addition to the emissive material.
Then there are more subtle things, like the amplitude of the light varies along the mesh, so adding a sine wave based on the u or v coordinate might help modulate that.
Another way is to use an emissive material to get all the detail of the light fixture right. But don’t make it to actually emit light. Use a point light with a long source value and put it inside the light fixture mesh. You may have to disable cast shadow for the lit part of the fixture. You can do this per material in the mesh settings.
Emissive creates a glow but doesn’t automatically emit light, it’s always best to use actual light actors rather than using emissive materials for lighting.