Why, on mobile, am I unable to see any speculars and only roughness?

Hey all!

im doing a simple level in UE4 and I have all the specular reflections and pretty lights and crystal clear shadows in the editor and on PC. But when I test on mobile it’s like all the materials have a 100% roughness and nothing reflects, there is no speculars and nothing shines anymore! Any idea where it all went?

Thanks!

There’s a setting inside each material’s defaults to do with mobile roughness. Does that make a difference?

I did try that, unfortunately it didn’t make a difference… Maybe it’s the way I’ve set up the material? I don’t see why it would change between the editor and mobile though

It changes between editor and mobile because they are different in a lot of ways. One used a deferred render (editor with DX11) and the other is ES2 (mobile). They don’t use the same shaders and don’t have the same feature set. That is why it looks different. The nvidia shield tablet or shield 2 is the only mobile device that is an exception to that rule as of now but isn’t supported just yet in Unreal Engine 4. So with mobile it’s either 100% reflective or not at all.

Wow thank you. I didn’t realise but yes now that you’ve explained it, it does make sense. Don’t suppise I can ev able ES2 in the editor? I can load th same level on OS X and it looks the same but it doesn’t have DX like windows does… How would I get reflections on mobile then? The mobile demo seemed to achieve it but I have no idea how!

You can get reflections but it’s all or nothing 0 or 1 and make sure to add a reflective sphere.