How do I make transparent objects reflect light?

I’ve tried playing with translucency mode, but even with TLM_Surface (which apparently does nothing) transparent objects look incredibly artificial.

My game features a lot of semi-transparent objects, gelatinous blobs, glasses, water… right now I can see no way of making these materials.

I’d suggest to follow Materials tutorial to understand how UE4 works: it’s different from UDK and Unity: https://www…com/watch?v=lngF4VVNER4&list=PLZlv_N0_O1gbQjgY0nDwZNYe_N8IcYWS-

I’ve seen materials tutorial. I don’t know, however, how to make semi-transparent objects behave like they’re receiving light from environment.

closest I’ve seen is in Material demo level, wherein some materials set with Volumetric materials reflect some of light objects. But even there they have Z-sorting issues and seem to completely ignore rest of environment lighting.

One would expect that transparent surfaces will support specular lighting without any problems. Unfortunately I’m afraid that UE doesn’t allow that right now. I tried to port my ocean shader from UE3, and had big problems getting specular highlights on water surface. I checked how Epic created water in Cave example scene. Turns out they used two plane meshes one on top of other. Lower plane simulated water color and specular reflections, while top plane simulated water refraction. Guess we will need to wait until this gets improved.

So there’s just no way at all? That’s… incredibly crippling.

Also, what cave scene are you talking about?

Use a high value of specular(1 or higher) if you want to boost reflections.

Effects Cave is a project that will be available in Marketplace soon. It includes a great deal of particle effects, lights, and reflections examples.

You’ve completely missed point. There’s no proper surface shading in transparent objects, even with TLM_Surface.

Ah, alright. There’s been a preview somewhere, I take it?

Transparent materials(set to TLM_Surface) do have reflections even though not so great, but it may look weak by default. However specular value helps in this occasion.

Oops, sorry. scene is available for licensees and I assumed it’s there for public users as well, without checking that first.

If it’s a flat plane, one solution is to add a cubemap texture to emissive channel. I haven’t had any luck with TLM_Surface myself. Even in content examples it doesn’t show any reflection, even though label says it should.

Are you using mac or win? I don’t seem to see reflections of any kind on mac

In order to get reflections from TLM_Surface you need to have a working scene already with at least one SphericalReflectionCapture actor. nearest one will be used on translucent surface. It’s not a great reflection for many surfaces (flat water) and it’s missing direct specular completely. This is an area we are working to improve.