Maya and UE4 reflective maps
polycounter lvl 2
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
Replies
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.