UE4 and transucent/soft mask materials

NomadSoul2501

Hi everyone,

I'll cut straight to it.
I'm porting a scene from UDK over to UE4 and I had a snow shader that was set to translucent so that I could play with the opacity whenever the snow intersected with other objects.
It gave it a nice wet/runny effect.

Now in UE4 setting it to translucent lights the whole object up as if it's beeing lit from another world!
I can't find a way to not make it glow. I can't think of a way to get anything to have a soft alpha for that matter.

Has anyone figured out how to get a soft masked material or how not to make anything translucent glow?

Here's what it looked like in UDK


I really liked the effect and any help would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers

billymcguffin

Hey Nomad,
Have a look at these pages from the unreal documentation:

https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Rendering/Materials/MaterialProperties/index.html#translucency

In particular, the "Translucency Lighting Mode" might be of use to you.
It's also worth noting that translucent materials cannot be lit by dynamic lights, which might be what's going on as well.

For the depth blend, have a look here (not sure if you needed this or not) :
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Rendering/Materials/ExpressionReference/Depth/index.html#depthfade

Can you post a screenshot of what's wrong?

Hope this helps!

NomadSoul2501

Hey billymcguffin,

Thank you for your answer. I read through the pages you attached and I have been using that DepthFade node.

Here's what's happening:


As you can see, the objects with the snow shader on them 'light up' after being set to translucent. It's as if translucent and additive are the same thing (they look identical btw).

billymcguffin

Make sure that the translucency lighting mode in your material settings is set to TLM_Surface.

NomadSoul2501

It is, what I got from the unreal community is that lit translucency is currently broken. Until they fix it it can't be done