Tone down reflection / shine

I’ve been playing with the M_Brick_Clay_New material. I’ve customized it quite a bit already from what it was out of box/download. Most importantly to note, I’ve created a mask of the mortar to use in changing the brick color and for the most part that was pretty successful.

In this picture I show 4 walls, the left is the original, the next 3 are with my color change and texture mask blending overlay.

The firehouse red looks really nice I think, except…

You’ll notice they’re nice and shiny compared to the original. The light really bounces off the surface. I’m looking for something I can do to tone that down again so it looks more like brick and less like a gloss paint.

Any ideas?

This is what I added to the original to get the effect.

Thanks.

Turn off specular.

Specular isn’t in use. It comes in through roughness and was set already. Although, I found If I went and changed a constant it would change how it looks to something that is more realistic. Now it looks more like brick with muck on the walls than painted brick with muck on the walls. :slight_smile:

Here’s a side-by-side comparison.

Here’s what I changed from the original Material. Changed the original Add constant from .5 to 1.5 and it looks better… I think. :slight_smile:

The “correct” way to reduce reflection in a physical way is to increase roughness. Add a multiply node just before the roughness input and multiply anything you are using to create roughness by a scalar parameter. Value 1 means no difference, higher values means increasing the roughness you already have and the oposite will happen for lower values.

You can also play with specular values in the same way. But in this case, higher values will increase the reflections.

Maybe you’ll want to keep roughness and specular values between 0 and 1 to keep your material physically correct. To make sure of that, add a clamp node right after the multiply one I’ve told above with 1 as higher value and 0 as lower value.

Specular shouldn’t be messed with much for simple materials like bricks, paint, wood, dirt, etc. It’s physically accurate at it’s default value. But for glass, gems, sometimes water, it’s helpful to tweak.

Specular looks fake imo, I don’t think you should use it unless you absolutely have to.

I put things back the way they were and added a multiply just before the roughness connector with a constant of 1 and this was the result. The one on the left was the original after masking and blending in the Red. The middle is what I did for gloss correction. The one on the right was adding the multiplier with a 1 constant. Using your method looks the most realistic yet as far as bricks are concerned. Not too shabby. Thanks.

This is just a learning thing for me now. I’m not getting into an actual project until I’m fairly confident I’m going to create something worth playing. :slight_smile:

Multiplying it by 1 shouldn’t get you any difference. Maybe the difference you are getting there is because of the camera angle (or something else that you changed by accident). What I suggested is for you to use a scalar parameter with initial value 1 (you’ll get no visual changes yet) and then you start changing that value to see the visual results in real time (the scalar parameter instead of a constant is for you to be able to change and see the results in real time).

That’s what should happen: If you increase that value, you’ll reduce the reflections you already have (reflections will become “more diffuse”). If you decrease the value, you’ll increase the “shininess” of your material (more “polished” surface, more reflections).

Multiplying by 1 = no difference:

&stc=1

Multiplying by lower values (eg 0.7) = shiny:

&stc=1

multiplying by higher values (eg 1.5) = diffuse:

&stc=1

Using the multiply node is just in case you don’t want to mess at all with whatever you have to generate your roughness texture for your material. But in this case (if you didn’t change the default node structure of that material), the final node in the roughness structure has a Lerp node that interpolate between a high value and a low value for different parts of the texture and generate a less uniform and more natural roughness texture. You can change those to get what you want too:

&stc=1

If you didn’t already, I strongly suggest that you read the documentation about the UE4 materials to understand how it works. If you just try to achieve results messing around with parameters by chance, you’ll be prone to misunderstand the way the thing really works and to struggle again in the future. Physically Based Materials in Unreal Engine | Unreal Engine 5.3 Documentation

You’re right! Apparently I added it to base color and not roughness. Also, the red overlay color was adjusted and that’s probably where the more natural color was coming from.

Right now it’s all about learning, so messing with anything is always an option. I expect it will be at least a year before I’m ready to tackle actually creating anything productive.

Good stuff, thanks. I’m still not sure that I understand exactly what Linear Interpolate is doing. I have more of a general idea that hasn’t quite clicked yet that you would use it in a specific place for a specific reason.

I expect I’ll struggle a lot in the beginning here until things start clicking in my head. :slight_smile: I’ve read a good lot of the documentation on Materials, but not quite all of it before I went into playing. Watched a lot of videos too. It was one of the videos combined with running across the blend overlay in the Palette that sparked my curiosity if I could do this change and veered off script for a bit. :slight_smile: I used a similar technique in graphics design work and just felt like playing and other than the roughness and maybe the exact color of the blend overlay it worked.

I find that often the documentation and/or videos are explained in a way that makes sense if you’re coming from another game engine, a previous version of the engine or have a basic understanding of game designing already, but if you’re just a typical PC, Network and electro-mechanical technician (Business Machines) who’s dabbled in Web and graphics design with a poor knowledge of PHP and mediocre knowledge of Visual Basic for about 20 years… well… I find myself often asking, “What do they mean by that?” I can generally pick stuff up like this relatively easily, but with so many changes between the different versions of UE4 alone, reading and videos just don’t seem to be enough since things are done differently from one to the next to the next and what you’re reading may have been how things we’re done 3 revisions ago, but not now. It can be frustrating for someone trying to learn. And this is just Materials. I haven’t really gotten into Blueprints in the documentation yet. A smidge, but not much. That isn’t even to mention the many other editors within UE4. By time I learn enough, how things are done will have changed 40 times. I suppose that is something everyone is going through.