Add an option to remove sun glare/reflections on parts

[Fire540Games (FireForge)]

As a Roblox developer, it is currently not possible to not have the sun reflect on parts. Sun reflections on SmoothPlastic are especially obnoxious in some cases, and there is no way to remove it. In most games, sun reflections make the game look better. However, there are some cases where we don’t want that.

In the game I am currently working on, I am trying to use the SmoothPlastic material for solid colors. At certain angles, the sun reflects on it and makes it look much brighter. I would like for it to appear the same color at all angles.

I made 2 posts a while back about this:

How do I get rid of the sun glare on Metal?

What are you attempting to achieve? There is a sun glare on parts with the Metal material. I have CelestialBodiesShown disabled on my skybox, but Metal parts (and probably all materials with specular) still reflect the sun. I don’t want sun reflections. What is the issue? [image] The skybox: [image] What solutions have you tried so far? I found another thread that said to set Lighting.Brightness to 0. I tried that, but it gets rid of shadows. [image]

Sun reflection still shows when Sky.CelestialBodiesShown is false

If a game has a custom skybox (Sky object under Lighting) with CelestialBodiesShown disabled, sun specular reflections/bloom still show on parts. It would make sense for sun reflections to be hidden when the sun is hidden, right? [image]

My lighting and skybox settings

[image] [image]

This bug occurs on all 4 lighting Technologies (Compatability, Voxel, ShadowMap, and Future). When Lighting.EnvironmentSpecularScale is set to 1, it becomes even worse, and has a Neon material effect around the…

Part of a reply I got from @Homeomorph is this:

@Homeomorph

I recommend setting Lighting.Brightness to 0. This will disable direct lighting from the sun. If your world looks too dark after this, try increasing Lighting.ExposureCompensation.

The problem with this is that setting Lighting.Brightness to 0 is that it removes shadows. But what if I want to remove sun glare and keep shadows? That isn’t possible currently.

If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my development experience because I would be able to disable sun reflections on parts.

An example of sun glare on SmoothPlastic

[Operatik]

Those aren’t called reflection from my own 3D modeling experience. According to Blender, they are actually called specular. The API on the Lighting only allows it to be amplified and not actually removing the specular completely:

Lighting | Documentation - Roblox Creator Hub

[nooneisback]

You can eliminate this by using a surface appearance with a blank white image for its roughness map. That’d mean that all of your parts have to be mesh parts, but that’s all you can do for now.

[nooneisback]

The normal map is the one responsible for this effect. Here’s slate with a blank normal map (done by editing files):

This makes a lot of sense given that sun still casts shadows even if you disable it. Your request should revolve around having the ability to disable celestial body shadows.

[Serrattor (Zed)]

yeah this glare is killing my entire game, and your solution works in studio unfortunately not in live game:
studio:

live game:

just disgusting, have you found any new workarounds for this problem?

[nooneisback]

You could try using a MaterialVariant with the same fix I provided.

[Serrattor (Zed)]

It does work with materialvariants yeah, unfortunately my mesh is transparency based not overlay so I have to look further… shame this works in studio but is unreleased…

(bottom is material variant, top is surface appearance)… shame

[nooneisback]

Ah, you could just set the normal map in the surface appearance then.

[Serrattor (Zed)]

tried every version of that, pulling normals up in blender, transparent normal, blank white normal, blank pink real normal, black normal, everything, unfortunately to no avail

[angelfirecompi (wind)]

i found that if you use a blank white image as a roughness map for a material variant, it removes all glare:)
Before

After:

[tabby0x (tabby)]

This is not what he means likely. What this is talking about are “Specular Highlights”. Probably the control one wants to have is if a light affects these “effects” on a object. Typically most engines that are more modern have controls per light. Such as “Specular Intensity, Normal Intensity, Diffuse Intensity”.