Hi! I’m relatively new to Unreal 4, and unfortunately I was put into a class to create a level before I had really learned the program, so I’m both a bit confused and short on time.
My level is a cave, and I wanted to have crystals around. I followed a tutorial on digitaltutors / pluralsight and the effect is nice but not what I wanted.
I wanted the crystals to be colored and less see-through, a bit more cloudy. I like how the material is otherwise and the fact that it changes and catches light when you move. I also wanted it to glow, which I know you can do with materials, but I have no problem with doing that with lights!
Is there a way to make this less translucent, more foggy and colored? I’ve tried a lot of experimenting and haven’t been able to come up with any ways to twist this one to work. Does anyone know of any other crystal tutorials that I could try out and see if that’ll work?
Beyond the incorrect normals problem, the next big thing I see is that you are using SceneTexture as the basecolor of your material, so in effect your opacity and refraction are fairly meaningless in this state. And you are doing some weird secondary refraction using that scenecolor lookup that really shouldn’t be there.
You should use a basecolor that represents a mix between your outer crystal color and the inner cloudy color. Your opacity should decide how much you see this base color and cloudyness vs the clear refraction and thus should be the major parameter to tweak. Maybe consider giving opacity some slight texture as well. You currently have no cloudyness because your basecolor is the same as your refraction color, the scenetexture.
It looks like this material is both translucent and subsurface though which is pretty weird. You will really lose the ability to properly tweak the subsurface when doing that since the engine is basically reusing opacity for the subusurface opacity in this case. So you should multiply your subsurface color by a vectorparameter to gain some extra control over the subsurface. I would probably not even use translucency here and simply use a simple cubemap and do my own simple refraction on that.
The comment about the normal being wrong is also important. Better to have no normals than wrong normals.
A tip: those crystals get cloudier at the base. Consider using a gradient along the length of the mesh to make the opacity greater down there. The material function “BoundingBoxBased_0-1_UVW” is great for that, just component mask out the B channel.
Also roughness should be very low such as 0 to 0.2 otherwise the surface will not appear very reflective.
