I am using the water system plugin by unreal (in ue5.3) which uses a masked single layer water material. The problem is i need an additive/translucent material to render through this water so the player can see where to build objects.
In the screenshots you can see opaque renders through fine, but additive does not. I’ve tried:
Translucent prio ordering, no solution.
Ticking custom depth in the mesh render options, doesn’t help.
The water mesh doesn’t have an overlay material option.
Enabled ‘Enable order independent transparency’ in project settings.
I understand custom depth/stencils could solve this, but how would i make it render through the water only and not other objects? Tutorials i see usually just use this method for rendering through any asset.
I’m not a material or render wizard so unable to experiment with various different methods easily. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Hi Zac. Currently im using an emissive additive material for the translucency. When i try an emissive opaque it doesn’t feel as good to preview building because you can’t see through the material, and it just looks already built. I want the translucency from survival/crafting games when you preview your builds before committing. This wasn’t an issue until the water
I don’t think there’s any other way to fix this, other than by not using the single layer water shading model.
To my knowledge, Single Layer Water is “opaque” translucency, meaning it is rendered as full opacity, but looks translucent because it is sampling the scene color. Unfortunately the Scene Color doesn’t include any translucent materials, hence they all disappear.
Custom depth should work because you’re effectively doing the outline in a post process material which runs after the water has already been rendered.
Thanks all for your replies. In the end I added a boolean on these building locations for ‘in water’. This then assigns an opaque material to it for these instances only.
