Having a weird transparency issue in Unreal 4.19. See-through mesh.

kginsey

Hey guys, I tried to make a single mesh object with just one texture -- in this case a little radio device -- and on the device I tried to give it a transparent glass screen and underneath it is a radio station readout. Everything looks perfect in Substance Painter but when I pop it into Unreal things go a little wonky. Here's what I'm talking about.

I have the material set up as translucent, which works for the glass part at the bottom but for whatever reason parts of the mesh without opacity are see-through (i.e. you can see the handle through the front of the radio). If anyone knows how to fix this I'd really appreciate any help. Thanks!

Obscura

This is an expected behavior. Transparent things doesn't write into the depth buffer, and therefore they can have sorting artifacts like this. Its also a bad practice to have 1 material on such an object because really only the glass would need translucency, and instead you are using it on the whole mesh. Other than not being able to correctly sort things, you are making the non transparent part needlessly more expensive than they could be. 

kginsey

Obscura said:

This is an expected behavior. Transparent things doesn't write into the depth buffer, and therefore they can have sorting artifacts like this. Its also a bad practice to have 1 material on such an object because really only the glass would need translucency, and instead you are using it on the whole mesh. Other than not being able to correctly sort things, you are making the non transparent part needlessly more expensive than they could be. 

Gotcha, thank you for the explanation!