Hello so I was texturing an axe and wanted to get reflective metal but it seems that the default environment just reflects black. I then tried adding an HDRi as per standard but that seems to be even worse as it also reflects black but without highlights.

am i doing something wrong ? i feel that this should somehow work.

Hi Nick,

That's not much to go on.

It's likely one of these things:

Not adding a bright enough or interesting HDRi: You might have an HDRi, but it doesn't have bright areas to reflect.

Not connecting the HDRi to the reflection properly: You might have the HDRi in your scene, but it's not actually telling the axe's material to use it for reflections.

Something is blocking the reflections: There might be another object in the scene that's accidentally being reflected instead of the environment.

In simple terms:

Think of it like trying to see your reflection in a mirror in a dark room. You won't see much! The HDRi is like putting the mirror in a room with some lights, but if the lights are dim or the mirror isn't facing them, you still won't see good reflections.

Hopefully, this gives you a better idea of what might be going on with that axe!

You can preview environment light in COPs, but it's somewhat buggy and noisy. Whenever a parameter is tweaked in Preview Material COP, or rather whenever anything changes in the COPNet, the environment light will disappear along with the reflections. To make it reappear, one has to exit and reenter the COPNet, which will work until the next change of COPNet.

Happens on Vulkan, as well as on OpenGL viewport. Very frustrating.

Having said that, the only sane way of previewing materials that I found so far, is to keep the Karma render pane open and let it constantly render the material in the background.