How to add soft fade to plane following the .png alpha

[JeFawk]

Hello

I’m trying to add a slow fade at the edges of the plane, for the plane to look like the png image. However, it’s very sharp instead.

I tried playing with dithering but it just dithers and looks ugly. Obviously I’m a rookie and got not much of an idea what I’m doing

Any help would be appreciated, especially in the form of an image if possible so that my small brain can understand.

Someone said this:
“dither opacity with the camera to plane object distance
and set the planes material to masked
camera and object location are available as material nodes”

But I really don’t understand how to apply it.

Thank you

[ClockworkOcean]

You can’t really dither with a skybox

The skybox is designed to always look like it’s at infinity, if you do align the bricks with it, it will just look weird.

[JeFawk]

It’s not a skybox, it’s just a plane. I use it in an AR project to make a small background behind the ship.

[ClockworkOcean]

And you want the ship to fade into the plane?

[JeFawk]

Not quite. The plane has the texture of the .png I put in the post. The .png fades with a gradient to transparency.

When I apply it in UE5, that gradient fade is gone, and instead is replaced with a very sharp cut (the oval shape)

What I want to achieve is for the plane to blend in a bit with the background of the AR (floor, wall, wherever the user places it ofc)

[ClockworkOcean]

Ah…

You need to fade the material using a grayscale mask. Set the material to translucent and use that mask to control the opacity. Masked is on/off.

Do you actually have an alpha channel, have you checked in the texture editor?

Gray scale will do also…

[JeFawk]

Thank you very much!! it works great!

(Images in case anybody finds this useful later on)

[ClockworkOcean]

Great