Animating between material types at runtime

Development Rendering
1

So I’ve got a specific use-case for a material transition. I want to go from an emissive material to a refractive material with a noise based transition.

Here’s a similar effect I made with rendermonkey a few years back: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARJRJ0Rnf-4

The problem I have, is that afaik emissive and refractive materials are actually different types of material? In that they likely get rendered in different passes (refraction happens after the scene is rendered presumably).

So how do I actually transition between types of materials? I’m just trying to figure out a nice transition between a basic emissive material, a refractive “stealth mode” material and do a nice transition between them I guess.

Any thoughts?

2

Actually you can do that with an emissive translucent material, and adjust the transition with IF node for emissive and refraction. However you wont get a fully opaque look like the example video with translucent materials unfortunately.

Edit: Read your post again and yeah, it wont work with translucent emissive. Transition you are talking about is opacity rather than refraction, so… :\ You can use a Masked material but then you wont get refraction.

Edit 2: Another technique that came to mind; use two meshes on top of each other, one with translucent and another one with opaque materials then hide/unhide the meshes whenever the transition occurs.