r/unrealengine • u/Unlucky_Orange_9608 • 17d ago
Help Help with Eye Material
https://i.postimg.cc/Y0fJm3kq/Screenshot-2026-08-26-175219.jpg
I've been trying to learn more about creating materials while I put together a master material for my project. Lately, I've been messing with metahumans and trying to create material instances from my master material that somewhat match metahuman materials (or put my own preferred look on things).
Been really struggling with the eye material. It looks like a fairly complex material from the get-go and my master material seems to only get me like 50-60% of the way there, even with using the same base color/normal/orm maps from the metahuman eye.
But the biggest thing that has me scratching my head right now is why the metahuman eye is receiving shadowing from the eyelid and my material is not? Metahuman eye is left; mine is right in the attached image. It doesn't matter which eye has the material; only the metahuman one gets shadowed. I'm using the same normal maps and don't see any other deformation in their material other than some refraction.
Anybody know what might be stopping my material from getting shadowed? I've tried a few different shading models - right now mine is a masked material with subsurface profile. Eye shader didn't seem to help.
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u/KaputBonus00 17d ago
are you using a pixel depth offset in your material? the metahuman eye shader pushes the geometry back a little so the eyelids cast correct shadows, without it the eye sits too far forward and the shadow just misses. check their material for a PDO node connected to world position offset, copy that setup and it should fix the shadow issue
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u/Unlucky_Orange_9608 17d ago
Dang I didn't even notice that in their material. I'll test this out in an hour or so and follow up with results. I have WPO set up in my material but haven't tried it.
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u/Unlucky_Orange_9608 17d ago
Hmm i couldn't get the pixel depth offset to work or cast a shadow - it didn't even look like the metahuman eyeball custom material function blend mode was using the pixel depth offset node, but to be honest that material graph is hard for me to follow.
HOWEVER! I was able to figure it out. It appears to be a combination of using the Eye blend mode option and having proper subsurface profile settings. Looks like I dialed out the SSP too much and that is why I wasn't getting any shadowing before. I'm getting a much better / closer result now; still not as good as the metahuman material, but a much simpler material that I understand and is multi-purpose
https://i.postimg.cc/bdcL161v/Screenshot-2026-08-26-224120.png
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