Translucent Decals. Can I have color ? please?

GlowingPotato

Hi!
I'm experiment with translucent decals. My first goal is to make puddles decals, and I think I achieved a good result.


Now, I would like to add a little bit of color to it. Like shades of green/orange, After all, it's a puddle inside an abandoned building. But if I plug a color in the color channel, I lose the translucency in the puddle. Like this.



This is my material setup:



Does anyone know if its possible to have a shade of color without loosing the translucency ? I know I can do it using a surface material, But i'm not sure about decals...
Also, I ended plugin a metallic value to have a better "wet look", But I'm not sure if this is the correct approach.

Without metallic:


As you can see, without the metallic value, the puddle is barely visible. 

poopipe

water is (believe it or not) largely transparent and is really only defined by it's specular response.
This means that in reality you can't see it when you're looking directly at the surface because light simply doesn't bounce off it in the right way. 

generally speaking for puddles I've darkened the underlying basecolor a little bit, decreased roughness to a very small value, flattened normals, set specular to 0.25 (matches the IOR of water) and relied on reflections to tell me where they are. (obvs fudging the values a bit  for artistic reasons) 

if you want to do something more expressive/NPR then there's more options but you'd need to draw a picture.  I'd avoid adding metalness though as it will react weirdly to lighting

Joopson

My first thought would be to darken the diffuse color way down, but I don't have experience with this particular use case to know if it'll do what you want.

GlowingPotato

poopipe said:

water is (believe it or not) largely transparent and is really only defined by it's specular response.
This means that in reality you can't see it when you're looking directly at the surface because light simply doesn't bounce off it in the right way. 

generally speaking for puddles I've darkened the underlying basecolor a little bit, decreased roughness to a very small value, flattened normals, set specular to 0.25 (matches the IOR of water) and relied on reflections to tell me where they are. (obvs fudging the values a bit  for artistic reasons) 

if you want to do something more expressive/NPR then there's more options but you'd need to draw a picture.  I'd avoid adding metalness though as it will react weirdly to lighting

Hi poopipe!

Do you have any tip on how I can darken the underlying basecolor a little bit ? If i plug any kind of color information into the material, translucency is gone.

poopipe

The changes they've made to deferred decal materials in ue5 make it a bit trickier to fake this stuff. 

You can reduce the opacity and it'll reduce the amount of color but at the same time it'll reduce the influence of your normals and roughness 

you could try controlling the opacity with fresnel  which does this sort of thing but it's a bit meh