When I don’t have anything to plug into a material’s input slot, eg for Specular, for Metallic whatever, what should I do? Should I create a constant of 0 and plug it in? At first I thought that if you don’t connect something in there it is not used; however, I now suspect that UE4 may use a value there which may be in fact undesirable;
Why do I say that? I’ll give you an example. I rarely use the ‘Specular’ material input slot; ie I leave it unconnected; I assume that UE4 uses a 0 there. Then I plug myself manually a 0 constant there or a 0.1 and I can see a difference! Only when I plug a constant of 0 or 0.1 I get the desired results. I am using roughness/metallic to determine the lightness/reflections of my material and as such I didn’t need the specular; But I still thought that the model looked way too shiny; thus I manually set specular to 0, or 0.1 and only then do I get the desired look.
So what is going on here? How are the unconnected material inputs handled? And how should I handle them? Should I plug a 0 to everything I don’t want to use, should I leave them be?