Unreal didn't invent its own shading model. Instead Unreal and a bunch of other game engines now use what is called PBR (work on this started in Pixar before ga

Unreal didn't invent its own shading model. Instead Unreal and a bunch of other game engines now use what is called PBR (work on this started in Pixar before game engines) I think the possible explanation on why they may look different to you than other PBR engines (say renderman or unity) is that IIRC UE4 has slighly different curves for roughness and other properties. but still I would credit it to what the other comment said about shared assets and people using defaults. you can see information from disney here: https://disney-animation.s3.amazonaws.com/library/s2012_pbs_disney_brdf_notes_v2.pdf https://disney-animation.s3.amazonaws.com/library/s2012_pbs_... and here are the ue4 docs, with some other references at the bottom: https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Rendering/Materials/PhysicallyBased/ https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Rendering/Ma...