I’m trying to create a water material, but I have this very weird problem I’ve never faced before.
Whatever I do with my materials in the Material Editor, they will look completely dark. I haven’t been able to find any similar problem on the internet, but it seems like a bug so I decided to ask about it here. Here’s a comparison of the material in the tutorial and my material with same settings:
I tried to move the light around by holding L + LMB, but then I saw that every material I preview in the Material Editor now has a weird shadow - with sphere preview object, half of it is shadowed. I have no clue what could be the problem here.
Yes. It’s a tutorial from the year 2015, but the problem doesn’t seem to be associated with that. Even when I disconnect the Specular from the material input, the result will remain the same.
It seems to be some sort of lighting problem inside the Material Editor, but I have no clue how to reset that - here’s an additional .gif where I have removed Specular and added 0.1 Emissive to the material (Here’s the result)
Another question: Why wouldn’t I want to use Specular in UE4 PBR workflow?
Strange. Did you change any other option for the material? What if you try with a brand new material and leave it to default? Do you still get the issue?
UE4’s PBR workflow uses Albedo + Metallic + Roughness. Specular is something related to the old way of defining materials (Specular/Glossness workflow) and typically doesn’t need to be touched in a PBR workflow. Check here:
I see that. I tried your same setup with 4.16.3 and I am totally unable to reproduce your issue. Anything else you may have modified? Are you previewing on an own mesh or on a default one?
I’m previewing the default mesh (Sphere for all the examples I’ve shown so far) and I can’t recall changing anything drastically. I only changed the automatic exposure under the View Mode settings earlier in the level editor, but then I changed it back to automatic to check whether it has caused the issue. I am not sure what else could have caused the problem, I haven’t changed much. All the materials have this weird shadowing problem.
Is there any possibility to reset the editor settings?
You can attempt an engine repair from the Epic Launcher. Just click on the downward pointing arrow close to your engine version (orange button) and choose Verify. That will verify and fix the engine in case something has been altered.
Are you using Forward Rendering? I think I remember that there was a bug in 4.16.x where materials will look very dark in the material editor preview if FR was turned on. It has been fixed in 4.17 and higher.
Dude been having the same problem here, everything happened after I turned off auto exposure, so the only way around I found was to uncheck the Auto box and modify the exposure on the case below -4 works for me. The only bummer is that you need to do that for every material or go back to auto exposure.
And if you want your material to look like the one in the picture you should have a metallic value of 1, as I see you have no value on that slot.
