RESOLVED: Why does my material look different based on view angle?

arcitek

I have what I feel is a pretty straight forward material that is a wood plank floor. There is no fresnel or anything that would impact how the material looks at a certain angle but yet, as you can see in my attachments, the same material on two different planes has a different color and reflection quality.

rexo12

The bright white highlight in your first image may be an incorrect reflection capture. I suspect it looks correct in the third image because it's using a different reflection probe. You can use the reflection viewmode to look at what your surfaces are reflecting. This can be solved by placing more reflection probes in your scene (and placing them more strategically).

https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/reflections-captures-in-unreal-engine/

For the record, PBR shaders do in fact have fresnel built-in, as that's how our model of real-world surfaces works (roughly speaking, specularity approaches 1 as the view angle approaches parallel).

arcitek

Thank you Rexo. I shoudl have thought about the reflection spheres I have in this scene. I could have simply tuned them off and baked again but I guess I got so focused on the material and lighting being the main culprit.

Interesting note on the build in fresnel attribute with a PBR shader. Makes sense since the physical properties of light interacting with all objects is impacted to a degree by view angles. I am not a shader expert in any way so I appreciate the insight.

arcitek

This material "issue" absolutely had everything to do with the reflection spheres. I feel like such an idiot for not even checking these as it is so basic but whatever. The strange thing is that I have built scenes like this in Unreal before (mostly archviz so higher fidelity) and I have not had an issue with the reflection spheres but in this case, they adversely impact the appearance of the floor planes, especially when there is more than 1 in the space. I switched over to the box reflection in this space and it took care of the problem. I am not sure the fact this project is set up to be a VR build has settings that would impact some of the visual characteristics. With Archviz, I am normally pulling out all of the stops to gain the most visual fidelity.

Thanks again, Rexo.