So last week I started a new scene and I’m kinda new to UE4’s lighting and atmosphere setup since I’ve always took my shots in Marmoset with HDRs.
Anyway, I’m trying to do different overcast/cloudy lighting setups in UE4 but for some reason I always loose my normal map detail… I mean the normal bumps are there and they kinda look white from side view but from top it’s just as if its not there. I also tried the method Jacky posted in another thread but with no luck
I wanna know if there’s anyway to get around this preferably without any dynamic lights. The look I’m trying to go for is similar to the one in St Quentin Scar map in Battlefield 1 and I know only that’s professionally lit by lighting artist but I just wanna get the feel/mood of that scene. here’s some screenshots of it:
Notice how the battlefield scene is very wet. That makes the basecolors dark and adds specular to everything which means when looking down you will still get nice glints of the sky from the wet specular.
Losing normal map detail for overcast settings is a pretty common problem and generally means you need to pay more attention to having nice cavity type details, or making sure the HDR sky has at least a nice gradient going on. Often times people end up using overcast HDRs that are very symmetrically even and those can be a challenge to maintain detail.
This is why you will often see things like lots of variation in wetness, or maybe moss that is vertically aligned which is just another way of hinting at the tiny normal map details. Or like the Char level from gears2, a light layer of dust on everything can also be effective. But even so, having nice variation in your roughness maps becomes much more important than normal maps for many of these kinds of scenes.
Thank you Ryan. Currently I’m not using any HDR images and was trying to get that weather lighting using the sky sphere. What about any lighting settings or techniques? I’ve read somewhere that I can have two directional lights in two opposite direction but obviously is a terrible idea.
Also Simon Barle has a scene with overcast whether which im gonna link below:
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Notice how the battlefield scene is very wet. That makes the basecolors dark and adds specular to everything which means when looking down you will still get nice glints of the sky from the wet specular.
Losing normal map detail for overcast settings is a pretty common problem and generally means you need to pay more attention to having nice cavity type details, or making sure the HDR sky has at least a nice gradient going on. Often times people end up using overcast HDRs that are very symmetrically even and those can be a challenge to maintain detail.
This is why you will often see things like lots of variation in wetness, or maybe moss that is vertically aligned which is just another way of hinting at the tiny normal map details. Or like the Char level from gears2, a light layer of dust on everything can also be effective. But even so, having nice variation in your roughness maps becomes much more important than normal maps for many of these kinds of scenes.
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Actually wet materials usually does lose specularity. Water specularity is 0.255 in UE4 terms which is lower than most materials have. Wet materials are more smooth which make specularity more noticeable. Wetness also darken the BaseColor so contrast between diffuse and specularity shift a bit for favor of specular.
Wet materials also lose normal map details because water flood microsurfaces.
All these effects are based on material porosity.
What you say is technically true but is a bit of semantics. I just meant wet materials look shinier, which makes them appear more reflective and is another way of showing normal map details. You do see the effect of more normal map detail because of the increased contrast and the sky reflecting off the top of details. It’s not about the lighting response of the basecolor at that point as you point out, its more about the more noticeable reflection details.
That grass overcast scene is nice. Notice he has pretty high quality AO for the grass, and even the ground looks to have some undulating in the lighting detail. Its unclear if some of that variation is painted in or all responding to lighting. If its responding to lighting then he probably has the HDR set up so that one side is a bit brighter. But it does look to have subtle AO baked in as well. Its nit picking but I feel like the normal map on the rock mesh is too strong for that overcast environment, or there isn’t enough bounce on the underside details. Maybe the lichen is just missing subsurface which would help a lot.
So i did put a HDRI image of a cloudy sky with a giant dark cloud in the middle to have the gradient sky you mentioned on my Skybox. I also bumped up specularity by tenth and I did notice huge differences which is great however I’m still missing alot of detail on darker materials.
So heres some screenshots of my scene:
Overal scene with world settings on the right
The rock normal is working good for now (Spec: 0.1), maybe because of lighter basecolor?
However i have problem with a table that I textured in Substance painter. Here’s how it looks with different specular levels:
Heres how the table look in Substance painter (how i was hoping to look like in UE4)
Ive always had this problem with overcast weather but never cared enough to fix it. But today i wanna solve it for once and for all. I know its not just me having this problem. I wish someone could just make an official tutorial on this subject alone
If you are not going for wet look then I would leave specular node alone. It won’t do any good to pick specular value arbitarily. But for very wet materials specular should be 0.255.
