Tone down reflection / shine

[anonymous_user_3fd16379]

@;531549

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).

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.

@;531549

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.

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.

@;531549

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.

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.

@;531549

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.

I expect I’ll struggle a lot in the beginning here until things start clicking in my head. 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. 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.