Question How to disable specular completely for certain objects?

Hi!
I can't find a way to disable direct specular impact from real-time lights on a per-object / per-material basis. I can globally disable it either by toggling it off in the HDRP settings or in the light component settings. But that obviously disables it for everything.

If I turn down the smoothness value on the standard lit material to 0 then there's still a lot of specular lighting left:


If I set the material type to Specular and also turn down the specular value all the way down to the pure black, there' still some specular response, but its way better.


But what I want is the complete absence of the direct specular like when I turn it off in the light component:


I know that it's not physically correct, because "everything has fresnel" and other stuff, probably, but I want to provide my own specular lighting response for certain objects. And if it will be overlaid on top of the existing stubborn real-time specular, it will also be incorrect.

Is there some workaround for this?

Thanks!

 

Bump. Anyone?

 

Use the fabric shader model instead.

 

It has even less specular left than the Lit + specular, but it doesn't disable it completely, unfortunately.

 

Unfortunately, reflection probes don't affect/override the direct specular that comes from real-time lights. A custom pure-black reflection probe disables only itself...

I thought that maybe I can render the direct specular component into a rendertexture with the help of AOV somehow, but I was told in the other thread that it's not possible without performance impact.

 

Thanks for the detailed explanation, and I'm sorry if I get it wrong, but that's exactly the issue. I don't want to prevent the lights from affecting the objects completely. I want them to affect albedo, normals, provide shadows, etc. and the only thing that I want to exclude is the direct specular component. It's like if the "affect specular" option wasn't an off/on the switch, but rather a layer selection:



In other words, I need "affect specular" disabled for certain objects, while "affect diffuse" and the rest of the light impact enabled for all objects.

 

Yes, I thought of this option. But wouldn't such light duplication affect performance in a serious way?

 

Maybe this PR will help in this case : https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/Graphics/pull/2556

It fixes this behavior as far as I know, although you would need to upgrade your project to latest alphas

 

That's interesting, it was merged in 2020. Why is it only in the latest alphas? I'm using 2021.2 beta 11.

 

It's still open, not merged for some reason

 

I wonder what my chances are if I merge it myself into the 2021.2 beta...

 

This is hilarious. Im sorry you cant get good help OP. I would just set the reflection probe usage to OFF for the mesh renderer. Now when you put the smoothness to 0 there will be no light shine at all.

 

Also, when you set a material type to specular (versus metallic), all you are doing is aenabling a specular map for the shader. This is a map that only affect the Color of the specular shine, thats it.

 

There are no reflection probes in my screenshots. All the specular response is produced by two area real-time lights.

 

There is a default reflection probe that is applied in your scene.

 

What i mean is, if you dont have probe Unity will put a default one there that you cant see.

 

I'd also love to have a way to turn off specular completely for a certain material. Having a separate light for specular only doesn't work for directional lights unfortunately (because only 1 directional light can cast shadows)...
Thanks for pointing out the PR @Ruchir btw, I'm also wondering why it hasn't been merged yet

 

So, for anyone who is interested in this, the PR that @Ruchir has pointed out indeed fixes this behaviour. I've carefully merged it myself into 2021.2 b14 and it works perfectly. If the specular is set to 0 then the result is identical to disabling specular in the light component. Now I wonder how to correctly convert metallic workflow (metalness map) to specular workflow...

 

Hi. I double the request. Setting the specular color to black to cut the specular highlights is a great addition, but it is not usable for all material types, except the specular one.

I work a lot with vegetation, where you would use transmission or sss, where there is no way to control the spec color and you get that shiny metallic yellow white ish shading on backfaces. This can be easily disabled by changing one line of code in the shader in the forward pass, but no way to do it in deferred.

Having 2 directional lights it's not working with shadow casting as DrSeltsam said.

This is one of the most asked question when it comes to hdrp and vegetation rendering on my discord, so having this option on the material would be great. Thank you!

 

To exemplify, here is a branch using the lit shader:


And here it is with disabled specular:

 

Hey, you could use this function from UnityStandardUtils:

or this one if you are using ASE:


I guess it still applies to HDRP. I hope it helps.

 

Seems like what I need. Thanks!

 

Hello, are there any plans to add this feature after all? Any plans to add it to Subsurface Scattering or Metallic as an option to disable specular highlights? It would fix some many issues with vegetation.

https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/Graphics/pull/2556

 

I faced this problem recently, originally I thought it was a problem with one of the shaders I'm using, but turns out it's caused by the specular on the vegetation. My night scene is almost impossible to do because of this issue.



this picture is mild, it gets worse

 

https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/Graphics/pull/2556#issue but its on hold for long time

 

Bump, any news?

 

Bump, Unity pls fix this. Foliage with white specular is so ugly.

 

Are there any updates on this? It's annoying that there is still no proper way to get fully rid of specular light. The original PR on git is more than 1.5 years old. It was recently closed with the message that this will be recreated in the private repo...

 

These are great news, thanks for letting us know!

 

Just use a shader with custom specular occlusion enabled and put in black

 

Even if you set custom specular occlusion to 0, you still won't get rid of specular highlights from direct lighting. Currently there is no proper solution to get rid of specular light per object/material, but that should be fixed with the PR mentioned above.

 

I really wish the PR is applied on Smoothness instead of Spec Color. There is only one shader having the specular color, for the rest the PR is useless and most of us want it on transmission shaders.

 

God damn, unity, are you serious? Why we are still not have a control for specular?

 

In URP, for a pure-mirror metal (metallic=1, smoothness=1), clicking the "turn off specular highlight option" looks like an absolute mess. How has this not been fixed? I don't want to fix these kinds of thing myself because I know it'll just break something next time URP gets updated with a new feature.

 

Hi, the specular highlight off option in URP material isn't physically-based (for artistic use), which means you usually don't need to disable it.

Specular Highlight Off: disable (direct) specular highlights from Unity lights. This also seems to set metallic to 0 in Deferred rendering path.
Environment Reflection Off: disable (indirect) specular lighting from environment (reflection probes).

 

I'm not sure what you're suggesting here.
The specular option should turn off the specular highlight. Why is it just smearing white all over a metallic surface?
Am I just stuck manually editing the shader files? Because this just looks like to me like a weird bug.

 

Looks like I accidentally cropped the shader parameters at the bottom but right one has specular off, left has them on.

 

If the ring highlight is from skybox or reflection probe, this is called indirect reflection and you should remove it yourself.

As I mentioned, "Specular Highlights Off" also seems to set metallic to 0 in Deferred rendering path.

 

I've tested this again in 2022.2.19 (URP).

Forward (correct):


Deferred (incorrect):


The metallic in (Deferred) GBuffers is also set to 0 when disabling specular highlights but this seems to be expected.


I suggest switching to Forward rendering path or report this as a bug.

 

Alright, I'll be reporting this as a bug, eventually.
Forward is not really an option, deferred is improving my performance by a lot on PC.