This is a staticmesh with one material applied to it. The material is a translucent type material. It uses vertex painting to tell the staticmesh that only the "skirt edges" should have DepthFade, but the rest of the staticmesh should be opaque. In the second picture, you can see that the material is not being rendered…
In that case, I guess I'll have to use 2 sub-materials in the mesh. Which one would you say is the least performance-demanding? A.) One material is translucent, and the other is the exact same but is an opaque type with no vertex-painting. B.) Both materials are the same translucent material.
I tried setting it up to have 2 sub-materials (one opaque, one translucent) today. No more sorting issues, but for whatever reason the translucent portion has a slightly different appearance from the opaque portion: Anybody have any ideas why it is doing this? Even if I simply plugged the constant '1' into the opacity node…
basically you're hitting the problem of how unreal renders things. opaque materials are rendered using a differred renderer which allows you to have lots of lights and nice shading etc. translucent materials are still rendered using a forward renderer which makes the much more expensive, difficult to sort and generally not…
I found a way to fix the sorting issue and still have DepthFade! :D Principle of this Setup* Use Triplanar Projection Mapping (World Aligned Texture) to eliminate all UV seams and UV distortions. * There are two materials: One translucent, the other opaque (black). * Use vertex-painting to tell the mesh which part of the…
Thanks for the explanation. :) I'll explain why I have such a strange staticmesh/material setup: The bricks are actually a placeholder texture. It's meant to be replaced by dirt (or snow). These are slit trenches for soldiers to hide in, meant to be used in FPS games. The translucent skirt exists only to smooth the…
unfortunately Unreal has problems with self sorting translucent materials. sorting between different objects migbt be better, so you could try splitting the mesh along the bottom of the curved surface so you're never looking through the mesh at itself.
I've never thought about using dithering before. That's really interesting. :) I'll try playing around with the material editor to make a vertex-controlled dither. It should be doable with some fancier math and a noise map. However, I am also quite invested into using DepthFade to smooth the transition (because my…
This is wrong. Translucent materials are rendered with deferred shading as well as opaque. The issue is the lack of a forward renderer which CAN render translucency without problems (other than how depth sorting is handled). The reason deferred transparent does not work well is because everything is being rendered all at…
Actually, that's what I'm doing already. It's a bit hard to tell with the bricks, but they are actually being mapped via Triplanar Projection Mapping (although, I use Martin Palko's method, not WorldAlignedTexture). But simply matching UVs up isn't enough to soften the seam, because if a player walks over it then there is…