The material I’m trying to create is a sprite material that handles transparency effects cheaply on mobile platforms.
While i was playing Diablo immortal, I noticed that some npc’s have this fake transparency shader.
Instead of actually using any transparency. it just renders a black silhouette of the character, and every second pixel draws the background image.
The end product looks like a checkered grid of pixels mixed with background pixels, and it looks extremely cheap on mobile.
At one point there was 14 ‘fake’ translucent characters and 3 translucent UI objects at once.
Under materials in UE 4&5, we have about 5 different blend modes. I’m not sure if i need to add material blend modes, but that’s what it looks like.
I tried a few different things to get a ‘MobileFadingSpriteMaterial’ working by using masked blend mode, but I can’t find anything that works.
Has anybody tried anything like this?
I needed dithered opacity on my objects. The shader is really easy to make. You just take the alpha channel from a base color or texture alpha channel, plug it into a DitherTemporalAA node, and plug that into opacity.
The object must be masked blend mode, otherwise no performance gains to be had.
The Dither Temporal AA has a random node, best just leave it at 0 or else you’ll see some dizzying on screen motion artifacts that flicker the opposite direction from whatever the camera’s doing.
I’m shocked this actually worked without turning on mobile TAA support.
