How to remove unwanted shine (smoothness) on terrain?

Is there any way to turn off the smoothness without reverting to the legacy shader?

What you can see on the screenshot below is a unity 5 terrain with the new shader and some textures.
Given the camera/terrain angle and a directional light, a very bright shinny area appears over that texture (since it is the cliff texture I guess).
The texture itself is a png with NO alpha channel. Changing the smoothness factor towards 1 just concentrates the shine, but it won’t disappear.

It seems really unnatural to have shinning dirt and rocks :S (would look good for metallic/lustrous floors)

Screenshot

Link to screenshot

If you are using the standard shader, set the metallic to zero or a low value.

click on the terrain mesh and see what is used in the reflection probe. Set it at "off".

@screenname_taken Reflection Probes was already set to Off in the terrain :S

8 Answers

8

You NEED alpha channel, if theres none it will be intepretated as white which is high shine, add alpha channel in your image editing program and color it to black. It solved issues with shine for me.

Agree, and it also takes lots of time to do.... I mean one texture is good, but when you have them 300 ? Then you are f**ed.

Keep in mind that if you import the image with "read / write access" you can add / change the alpha values at runtime. But i agree that it would be more useful if they either provide a seperate shader which doesn't calculate specular highlight at all, or have some kind of option to turn it off. The first solution would make more sense since it would increase the performance.

Can u Pls pls show me how to fix this metallic shine problem..? i would be rly glad.. iam enough dumb and new to this area and this unwanted METALLIC shine is causing disaster in my terrain texture.. i wish you would help me with a detailed STEP-BY-STEP approach / video approach.. Thanks PS: if i didnt reply to this msg here.. then i rly wish you to reply me to my email gmail = ga.abdulsalam@gmail.com

Ahmed Abdul Salam... here it is..it's not my video though https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_T5utHSSu5w

I think it's good design. How else could you ADD shine if and when you need it? (e.g. obsidian floor or something). If you have many textures without alpha channel, you should start thinking why don't you have a basic and must-have channel, as well as google for some free auto-mass-convert tool, as there's probably at least one on the glorious interwebs...

Another alternative is perhaps to select the texture and change the Alpha Source in the inspector to “None”

This is the correct solution IMO - default import settings are "Alpha Source = Input Texture Alpha" even for JPGs. Setting this to "None" is what you should do for all JPGs (actually, Unity should), and also the Terrain Texture Editor window is aware of this setting and exposes a "Smoothness" slider as an equivalent for images without an alpha channel.

That works well for me. Thanks!

Working in Unity's HDRP and I had this issue. This solution completely solved the problem.

You are amazing! This should be the accepted solution what the heck?!

I don’t know of this helps anyone, but I just came on with the same question. If you click on the terrain gear icon and click on “Material” and set it to “custom” that took away the glossy shine for me. I’m not very experienced with Unity so I don’t know how this could negatively impact your project, but for me it was a quick fix, if that’s what you’re looking for. Good luck!

The default terrain shader is optimized (or it should be) and has some special "features", changing it to custom and leaving it "blank" will make it use a plain diffuse shader I guess. It may remove the shine but will probably look bad and slow. May work for small, simple terrains though :P

this worked for me

This worked for me without messing up my lighting work. Thanks!

Click on the material, go to Alpha Source and change to - From Grayscale

This resolved the issue for me. Thank you so much! I've been forum hunting trying to find a resolution..

This didn't work for my texture (png). It helped to put it on None.

Worked for me thank you so much!

Alpha Source "None" did not work for me but, "from Grayscale" did, thank you

Go to Terrain Setting change Texture to Built In Legacy Diffuse

all you have to do is click terrain, find reflection intensity and dial it down by like… A BUNCH!

I have saved my terrain by setting Alpha Source to From Gray Scale.

After that the glossy metallic and sun reflections went away. Btw it happened only on iOS build. Android did not have this issue.

Enjoy!

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The terrain material has a shader you made. Go and change the specular color to black and you get rid of shine

89696-noshine.jpg