Validation: UE5 Custom View Modes
Custom View Modes are extremely useful in Artists daily work.
In this post you’ll find Post Process materials for validating Albedo PBR range, Specular range and Roughness cost for Lumen Reflections:
How to add new view modes
Create a Post Process material, make sure you set its Blendable Location as “Before tone mapping”. The default view modes are stored in /Engine/BufferVisualization/. Name it descriptively.
In BaseEngine.ini (it’s in the config folder — \UE_5.0\Engine\Config) add a new line under [Engine.BufferVisualizationMaterials]. Just copy-paste an existing line and change the names and file path to your PP material path, for example:
PBR_BaseColorCheck=(Material="/Engine/BufferVisualization/PBR_BaseColor.PBR_BaseColor", Name=LOCTEXT("PBR_BaseColorCheck", "PBR BaseColor Range"))Then restart the editor.
You can specify a hotkey for this new visualization in the Editor Preferences.
Base Color Range Custom View
To validate if the scene is in the proper PBR range, you can use this simple Post Process material:
Non-metals have Base Color range of 60–240 sRGB.
- 60sRGB is the value of coal (0.04)
- 240 sRGB is the value of snow (0.87)
Metals have range of 180–255 sRGB. Rougher the metal — darker the albedo.
If Metallic has values lower than 0.8 (not raw metal), then the Base Color should be darker than it would be for pure metal.
Lumen Reflections Cost Custom View
By default, materials with roughness less or equal 0.4 cost the most for Lumen, extra rays have to be traced to provide smoother Lumen Reflections. Materials with roughness higher than 0.4 reuse Final Gather traces.
Specular Range Custom View
Specular represents reflectiveness of the non-metal surfaces in range of 0–8% (0.0–0.08), remapped to 0.0–1.0, where 0.5 = 4% reflective. Common non-metals have specular value between 2–5%, it has no effect on metals. Most of the materials reflect 4% of light at F0*, so just leave this value at default 0.5, that works for 99% of the materials. All Materials have specular, don’t set it under 0.2 for physically correct surface, those are mostly for debug materials.
* F0 (Fresnel Reflectance at 0 Degrees). When light hits a surface straight on or perpendicularly (at a 0-degree angle), a percentage of that light is reflected as specular. Read this guide for more info.
Originally published on Artstation on November 9, 2022.
