So far I’m not getting good results with metalness in materials. My metals just look black, even when my albedo is white. They look very shiny once they catch some specular highlights, but besides that, I can’t seem to figure out how to have good looking metals.
://i.imgur/jIoBfj2.jpg
I’m making materials in Quixel. In quixel I get similar results when I disable the image based reflections mode, so I’m thinking that it might be reflecting blackness. If I get really close to the object I start to see some colors from the floor because reflections kick in.
I’d like to ideally have the metal look somewhat silvery or whatever albedo color I give it. It seems like albedo only contributes to the parts where something is reflecting in the metal.
Here are links to what my textures currently look like just in case.
Setting the metalness to .9 might help too. I should be able to tweak the material in quixel. The unreal docs say we should really try to use mostly values of only 1 or only 0 as much as possible so I was going off that.
OK I read about reflection capture actors. My game is built off of procedurally generated levels, so that seems like it’s not an option for me since it seems like it needs time to bake along with the lighting. I’ll try values lower than 1 for metalness. It’s a shame, those results look amazing! I wonder if I can mod the engine to have it generate those cube maps at runtime the same way the editor on the fly does according to the docs.
the docs say its very rare to have metalness set to a value other than 1 or 0, not sure I’d go down that path. Check roughness value (yours looks way too dark make it more like 80-90% white) and reflection capture (as stated above).
It does say to use values lower than 1 for slightly hybrid effects. I’m not really sure how to get my roughness map since Quixel makes gloss maps for me. I saw one post say to just invert the colors. It seems to sortof work but I’m not sure how accurate it is. I also get different results slightly if my roughness map is optimized and stored in the green channel of a combined metallic/roughness/ao map.
Anyway I tried it and it doesn’t look too great my metals just look like a washed out dark version of the albedo if using lower values of metalness. So basically, is metalness useless unless we have static environments?
And it says if metalness is 1, base color is only used for specular reflections and otherwise contributes black. So that explains it.
In the end I also got good results with metalness, but some medium roughness. So, YESS! I can still use metalness and it looks great. I just can’t use completely shiny metals.
