Unity 5 Standard Shader, Specular settings issues, is not being useful for artists

Hello,

So as the title says, I believe that all of the specular (and reflections) concepts applied to the Standard Shader materials in Unity 5 are .. well .. somehow useless from an artistic point of view.

I can understand this whole idea of

Physically Based Shading​

and

Energy conservation​

but being honest, ... I don't care at all to respect "real-life-light-physics-rules" when I'm actually designing something from an artistic perspective.

I think the idea to have a single shader for all your material needs (the Standard Shader) is trully great!, especially if the shader is already taking care of optimizations to run in different platforms and such..
But also, if this is going to be the shader which you will be creating 90% of your materials, but it must be flexible, really really flexible so that you can exploit all of its features.

So right now, the specular settings are probably the worst part of the shader, and this is even worst because the specularity is now tied together with the Reflection levels of a material ... and this might be the "correct real life behavior" of a material but it is .. absurd .. when you are artistically designing your scene in the editor .. so who cares about "correctly respect" real life light rules

So just to give you a simple example,
I'm now testing with this material:


and let's say that I definitely like the size of the specular dot that you see in the screenshot above, .. but I only would like the dot to be more diffuse and less brighter, .. and right now with the Standard Shader I don't have a way to modify the "brightness" of the specular dot without, at the same time, making it bigger along the surface

So if I try to decrease the brightness of the specular dot, .. then the specular effect is just becoming bigger and bigger across the surface:


And to make it even worst, .. every time you modify something related to the Specular levels, you are also modifying the Reflections in some way .. so all this is really absurd when you just want to artistically modify your materials to get the lighting looks as the artist wants in the scene..

As a final word,
this is a request, and I only would like that the Unity team understand my point of view about this.
I hope that the Standard Shader becomes more flexible in the near future, because it is a very good idea to have a single shader for all your scene materials, but it must have really flexible settings and not so "tied-together-settings" as it is now.

Please vote for this topic or leave a comment/answer if you think so
Thanks!

 

Are you relying on the smoothness slider on the Standard shader? If so, stop doing that. You need to create a metallic/gloss map. The hardest part is getting the alpha channel correct. That is where all the action is.
I don't know if this is completely related to your issue, but I was having a similar issue struggling to find a balance between the reflections and specular. I posted about it here:
https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/specular-dot-from-lights-when-smoothness-is-100.405242/

 

Thanks for the tips @TTTTTa, I'm looking at it.

But yeah!, I'm trying to not use more textures, .. and I'm always getting quite near the final look that I want for the material, but we have these minor things missed in the specular settings that just make it impossible to get the desired final look.

Even when using specular-textures, I believe the process is quite tedious already, since you will need lot of trial and error until you get the expected results.

So I believe the settings should be more flexible, and especially not being all tied-together with this useless concept of "Energy conservation" or whatever ...

 

I agree that the process of creating the specular file is tedious.
What I want to do one day is create a modified version of the standard shader to allow a strength manipulation of the alpha channel, done right in the shader so I don't have keep tweaking the specular file over and over until it looks right. I'm sure it wouldn't be that hard to do eventually. But it might be worth looking into ShaderForge on the asset store.

 

Sounds like that you aren't interested in correctly using PBS, but want something based on your rules. I would recommend the new amplify shader editor. It's very cheap and easy to use.

There isn't a problem with the way Unity has done the standard shader. It's pretty much industry standard, you're just not using it for that purpose.

 

Thanks for your thoughts.
But I'm just saying, ... this is the "Standard" shader! It meant to be the shader used for 80-90% of your material needs, right? So I guess it shouldn't be so restricted to a PBS model, because eventually you will get to a case where PBS is not exactly what you need.
So I wonder, how much difficult would it be for the Unity team to add, let's say, a check-box in the inspector saying "Enforce PBS" ?
So if this is checked in the material, then all PBS calculations are enforced and tied together. But if it is unchecked, then the lightning calcs wouldn't be all tied together and the developer could freely modify the specularity without modifying the reflections and so on... and it should be on a material basis, so that you could have just one material to not enforce PBS, but the rest does!
Just a thought, but I guess it will never happen

 

I just want to point out, that the split of specularity and reflectivity (even in offline rendering) was never about "artist control". It was always because specular highlights are easy to calculate, while reflections really took a while to calculate back in the day (and they still do).

Yes you do. If you are using the Specular version of the standard shader, the RGB is the intensity while the alpha is the smoothness/glossiness.

 

I don't think you can.
Could you post two screenshots showing your results? (as i did in my initial post)
The specular "dot" size is always changing for me if I just want to decrease its brightness!

 

Compensate by changing the smoothness so the end result looks like you want?

What you are describing is not correct. If anything, if you reduce specularity to a darker color, the specular size gets smaller.

 

Your screenshots are probing my point.
The size of your specular dot changed while you decreased/increased its brightness.

 

Yes, because specular is a blob, and over/under exposing that blob means some parts are too dark to bee visible. So reducing the brightness means it appears smaller (and afaik that's how it is everywhere)

I still don't understand how that stops you from doing what you want.

 

This never happens.

 

I think he doesn't understand roughness in relation to it.

 

Keep up that good work @hippocoder!