icy drum
I've always wanted Epic to add a retroreflective shading model to the engine, but they've not done it yet. Then one day I was thinking about how retroreflectivity works. It's basically just light being reflected directly back in the direction it comes from. So I thought why not just make a material where the normals always point towards the camera? Well, it works! Then, I thought to piggyback off of the clear coat shading model in order to get a second normal to make it look more physically correct, and here we are.
It's certainly nowhere near perfect. There's probably some obvious improvements that could be made like adding textures or using Fresnel somehow. Also, there is some sort of diamond shaped artifacting going on that I'm too material noob to understand why it's happening and if it can be fixed.
A proper retroreflective shading model would be a much welcome sight, but this solution works a lot better than I had anticipated it would especially for how simple it is.
