Im trying to plug my Spec map into my material. Regardless of if its plugged into the metallic or specular slot it wont reflect the color its supposed to and I cant find anything online about this.

137040-goldright.jpg

You might be used to how Unity does things, where you can use the Specular PBR workflow, in which you can use an RGB texture to determine the color of the specular highlight.

Unreal uses the Metallic PBR workflow for their materials.

In UE4 the color of the specular highlight is determined by the Base Color input (if its a Metal).

Both the Specular and the Metallic inputs receive a scalar value or a grayscale image, they are not supposed to be used to define what is reflected or color of the specular highlight.

The Metallic input defines if a surface is metallic or not, 0 or black being non-metal and 1 or white being metal.

The Specular input defines how reflective the surface is (only works on non-metals).

The Roughness input (it also works on a 0 to 1 or black to white ratio) is also really important for the reflections and specular highlight, too high and there is almost no reflections and the highlight is too big and subtle, too low and it looks almost like a mirror with a highlight that is too small.
Gold is neither, so you need to find a good value.

The reflections are also incredibly important, so make sure you have a reflection capture affecting your object, (metals are nothing without good reflections).
SSR also helps a lot.


As an example I put an image of a simple material I made a couple of days back trying to replicate the gold coins from Mario Odyssey.

Essentially all you need is a good gold color for the Base Color input (you can google for a physically correct value if that is what you are aiming for), 1 for the Metallic input (its a metal after all) and 0.25 for the Roughness input (You might wanna increase it to 0.3 to 0.4 in your case, maybe even higher).

I also have SSR on (no reflection capture though, I only noticed that after taking the screen shot, but the SSR is doing 90% of the work).

TL;DR
Gold color + 1 value in Metallic + low Roughness + SSR and Reflection Capture

Hopefully that is what you need.

Edit: I just noticed how old this question was…