Some questions about standard shader properties

This is from the unreal wiki, so it may not apply here




So what exactly is the metallic slider supposed to do in unity? As far as i can tell, all it does is turn the material black.



I don' get that. Why is that useful? That looks like glossy rubber, not metal. Metals are supposed to be silvery/grey and reflective


I also have this other source code for a shader, "Standard (specular setup)" I don't quite understand what it is, the specularity actually seems to work a lot better on the normal Standard shader (with metallic set at 0)

But one thing i particularly dont understand is that the specular colour seems to be inverted




I don't understand this at all.

I think i need a reintroduction to specularity, and what exactly it is nowadays. Plus this metallic thing, and unity's implementation of PBR in general, since it seems to be different to unreal's https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Rendering/Materials/PhysicallyBased/index.html

 

I'm very new to this myself, but what it looks like to me is you have to bake lighting with a skybox in order to get metals to show properly ... whether using the standard shader or the standard specular shader.

 

well that is helpful, my metallic dog now reflects the sky with amazing detail.

Which i guess is neat, but i wasn't really looking for amazing reflections, i just wanted it to look metallic and shiny. does this stuff even work in realtime?

 

Beats me. I'm just a monkey pushing buttons.

I think the idea is that metals will reflect the sky or whatever static objects are in reflection probes. But I haven't really gotten into that yet.

 

Well he's only reflecting the skybox, and not the ground he's standing on. Which looks very annoying and strange:



I don't actually want a metal dog, i just want to learn how this lighting system works. Would i have better luck in another subforum?

 

(shrug) I'd think this is the right forum. Maybe you could ping a @name and get a response from "one who knows." Even if it is just a redirect to a helpful webpage.

 

oh i figured it out! i had to place a reflection probe and bake it. That seems to do the trick

 

Same issue is happening to me. Set metallic to 1 turns everything black. Its not necessary to place a reflection probe as I saw in other videos. Just slide the metalic. If I create a brand new scene it works ok.

 

Found the issue: for some reason my reflection source, under Lighting properties was setting to custom. Returned to skybox and now it looks metallic.