Hello, I am trying to setup this model to work in UE:
But I cannot figure out how to have the metallic parts be opaque and the glass transparent and refracting.
I am using blend mode → translucent, with Lighting mode set to SurfaceTranslucencyVolume
but this makes the sorting all wrong and it looks like the mesh is flipped.
Then I tried switching from Translucent to “Masked” but this doesn’t allow refraction.
Plus it requires dithering to make the alpha mask blend “smoothly” but the result looks really noisy.
Separating glass from metal parts makes no difference, as the glass as you can see is not supposed to be all clear but it has parts less transparent due to smoke.
Thank you in advance!
So if i understand what youre saying correctly, you want the same material to be transparent in some areas and opaque in other areas right?
The only way that i can think of right now is to have a sort of “uv map” that is alpha only (black and white) with the glass parts being all black and the metal parts being all white (or the oppisite, i cant remember) and hook it up to the opacity node or a lerp, though i remember using it without a lerp without a problem. That way the black parts (glass) will have an opacity of zero and the white parts (metal) be fully opaque. Ideally the same should be done for the metallic and other properties.
The ideal way would be to have two material slots for the metal and glass, and if tge model doesnt have two materials it isnt too hard to do if you have the fbx. Just go into blender or 3ds max or maya or whatever, select the metal vertices and assign an independant material to it from the glass. Export it back and it should have two slots for materials.
Thank you Zamiel. This is what i did in the end. I separated the object using two materials, one for metal and glass and I kept the metal with no transparency and made the glass feature transparency with refraction.
I couldn’t make refraction work as I wanted,
but at least the dirty parts of the glass are opaque by using an alpha mask texture. Still looks like its lacking reflectivity so I need to resolve this problem next…
Here what i have in Unreal (left) and what I have in Substance Painter:
