Is it possible to use translucent shader on UI text material?

Hello.

I’m trying to make a disintegrate effect on a Text Block in an UMG Widget where different parts of Text becomes transparent at different times.

I’ve set the material domain to User Interface and I’ve tried several different Blend Modes: masked, translucent, alpha composite etc. But no matter what I try, the transparent parts of the material always renders as opaque black in the TextBlock.

I can animate the Render Opacity of the entire Text Widget, and I can animate individual shader parameters. But I cannot figure how to make only the transparent parts of the Material disappear in the Text Block. Is there some setting I’m missing?

The material with an opacity mask:

In the actual text widget, the transparent parts are showing as opaque black:
image

I spent hours on this and couldn’t figure it out. Then 2 minutes after posting here I finally found the problem :rofl:

The problem was the Text Outline. Apparently the Outline fills the entire background the widget with the Outline color, not just the actual Outline as I was expecting. Since my Outline was opaque black, then the entire background was opaque black. I just removed the outline and now my shader is render exactly as intended:

image

Edit: Checking “Separate Fill Alpha” also fixes the problem while keeping the outline.