Maya and UE4 reflective maps

mistergood100

I am trying to texture a skyscraper in Maya and then import it into UE4. I was hoping that I could just have the skyscraper as 1 piece and use a reflective map to cause the windows to be reflective but not the walls. However, when I apply the map, it just causes the windows to be a dull grainy gray

Farfarer

What's the roughness set to on the windows?

mistergood100

Well I haven't messed with the material much in UE4 yet because I can't even get it to work in maya. I recently realized that I was an idiot and forgot to render in mental Ray, but unfortunately instead of nothing being reflective, everything is reflective

mistergood100

This is the file I plugged into the reflection field of the texture

mistergood100

With this diffuse map

LMP

In UE4 with roughness, black is a mirror finish and white is totally diffuse.

AdvisableRobin

Perhaps you aren't aware, Unreal 4 renders differently than Maya, using a system called Physically Based Rendering. This post here links to an encyclopedia dedicated to the information surrounding PBR systems.

mistergood100

No I wasn't aware, I started UE not too long ago, so it's a learning process. But I still can't understand why it won't even work in Maya.

malcolm

mistergood100, as mentioned above UE4 does not correspond to Maya in any way. Any material work you do for a Maya or Maya Mental Ray render will not carry over into unreal 4.

If you want to get it working in Maya first you need to tell us what material system you are using and what render engine you are using in Maya. For example are you using mental ray with standard Maya materials, or are you using mental ray with mia materials, etc. Post a screenshot of your material setup and I'm sure we can get it sorted.

As I recall in mental ray when using a blin shader there are actually two inputs which control how reflective an object is which is pretty hacky and feels unnatural. First set reflectivity to 100%, then plug in your reflection mask into the specular colour slot. This should give you what you want, then if you want to make the brightness of the reflection less intense you can dial back the reflection slider. Or just leave that alone and adjust your texture in Photoshop to be darker to make the reflection less intense. On a side note reflected colour does nothing in mental ray, this is a maya software render setting which is ignored by mental ray.

I believe this all feels shitty and broken because mental ray has its own set of shaders called mia materials which are closer to the physically based system in unreal 4. You could also skip mental ray all together and go with the viewport shaders in Maya 2014 and above, unless you want ray traced reflections.