Painted metal in UE4?

Swarm22

Hi, I was experimenting a little bit yesterday with how to create a realistic looking metal that has a layer of paint on top like pipes. I tried the basic approach of setting metal to 1 and having the albedo be the colour that I wanted the paint but it doesn't come out looking like paint, more so like a stained metal or a metal that is somehow naturally that colour.

Since paint isn't metal, i'm thinking that the metal setting should not be set to 1 and maybe something like 0.7 or 0.5. I'm not quite sure. Is there any method for doing this properly that somebody has figured out yet?

Thanks.

Farfarer

Well, paint isn't metal and so you just turn metalness down to 0 as treat it as a non-metal.

You'd only ramp it up if there were areas where the paint was removed, exposing the metal beneath.

WarrenM

This is a stumbling block for a lot of people. Metal that is covered by something isn't metal. It's whatever the thing covering the surface is.

ZacD

Unless whatever is on top of the metal is transparent or blends into the metal, a material is typically metal or non metal. There is some paints that seem semi metallic as well. But unless the paint is semi-transparent, you need to go off the metalness value of the paint.

Swarm22

WarrenM wrote: »

This is a stumbling block for a lot of people. Metal that is covered by something isn't metal. It's whatever the thing covering the surface is.

Makes sense. I think what gets me is even when metal is painted, it still looks metal so I assume it needs to have a certain % of metal added to the shader settings. Guess not.

Thanks for the replies.

MooseCommander

Swarm22 wrote: »

Makes sense. I think what gets me is even when metal is painted, it still looks metal so I assume it needs to have a certain % of metal added to the shader settings. Guess not.

Thanks for the replies.

If by "it still looks metal," you mean that it is still reflective and shiny, you'll want to adjust your Roughness and Specular values, not your Metalness.

Try putting a constant of .75 into your Spec (the default is .5) and lower your Roughness to between .2 and .4, you'll probably get the effect you are looking for.

Anywhere the paint peels off and reveals metal underneath, you'll need a Mask plugged into the Metalness slot to represent this.

JedTheKrampus

You can also use the clear coat material if you've got something that's got a clear glossy dielectric layer over a metallic layer or a rough dielectric layer, like lacquered wood or lacquered metal or soda cans or car paint, but that's probably not what you want.