I’ve made a dragon character in ZBrush using hair cards, painted in substance painter as a practice mesh and I’ve run into a strange issue where the hair is fading out when the camera gets further away (See attached pictures). Right now, the hair material is using an opacity mask that was output by substance painter from the material alpha. In substance painter, the material shows fine.
Slight note: I am not using the UE4 default settings in substance painter, I unpacked the textures and the alpha is no longer being packed into the base color. I am using this alpha as the mask
https://forums.unrealengine.com/core/image/gif;base64
At this distance, no hair is visible. There is supposed to be a trail of blue hair going from head to tail
I’m not seeing any pictures so either the forum is messing up or you forgot to add them.
That said, here is a link to an example of how to fade a material as it get’s nearer to a camera. My guess is that there is a “1-x” node somewhere that is inverting the effect.
If your textures are fading out at a distance, it’s most likely mipmapping. What resolution is the alpha? Look at the mip settings for sharpening over distance, which can help retain some of the shape. Or offset the mip bias by a negative number in the texture sampler input in the material. Or increase the Opacity Clip Value to use more, albeit harder/jaggier, of the alpha texture.
Edit: Also what does the alpha look like? It might just be too thin overall to hold up in any situation.
After a little tweaking, setting the mip bias solved the issue (we tested by just setting it to 0 as an absolute to see the effect and then tweaked the bias until we were happy with it). Thanks so much for your help, I was pulling my hair out over this one!
