erm... reflective glass in UE4?

Count Vader

Super newb thing, but I seem to be having trouble finding straightforward solutions to this so far. I just want glass with reflections (aka, you know, glass lol)

It seems lowering the opacity value of a material accordingly lowers the reflection intensity, to the point where opacity of 0 results in no visible reflections. Is there not a simple/hack-free way to de-couple these two parameters (ie low opacity but reflections at full intensity). I have a materials tutorial for UE3 where glass is covered, but they use cubemaps and specular, so it's pretty outdated.

Vailias

Currently, not really. If you set the material blend to translucent, and the translucency lighting to "Surface" rather than the default volume setting you can get some reflections from the ambient reflection samples in the scene, but transparent shiny materials are still a difficult thing for the current Unreal render pipeline. 
And technically speaking lowering the opacity of a material will lower its reflectivity. (clear things let light through and reflection is light bouncing off) But combine a low opacity with a low roughness and you'll get close.

Count Vader

Actually, I guess you make a good point that I failed to consider initially, glass is only really all that reflective when there's something dark behind it. I'm not sure if that's purely a byproduct of contrast, or if there's something else in play (and if so, if unreal can replicate that effect), but yeah obviously if something lets through more light, it's gonna bounce back less light and thus have dimmer reflections.