New Foliage Shader - How to setup a mask for the Subsurface Color Slot

Development Rendering
1

Good afternoon.

I am new to setting up shaders for Unreal. Can someone point me in the right direction on how to set up a mask to only allow Subsurface color to work on the leaves on my branch…not the bark.

I have the bark masked out in Photoshop but I don’t know where to attach it in the shader.

Also adding in another texture for a mask is going to pull performance down. Can I just pack this new texture mask into the Alpha slot in my normal map texture? As my regular diffuse texture has the full alpha already packed. in.

Thanks folks!

2

make sure sub surface node gets color from leaves and black from stuff that not suppose be translucent

albedo - |
black - | lerp node - output is green for leaves and black for everything else
mask- |

yes you can use it as alpha for normal map

you can use green channel from your albedo as a mask if there is enough contrast

pull of green channel and use power, add and floor nodes to do sort of chroma key effect

3

Thanks for replying. Just to clarify.

Albedo and my Mask plugs into a Lerp Node then the lerp node plugs into the Subsurface Color slot?

I’m not sure why you have a Black node and a Mask node? Don’t they do the same thing?

Sorry I’m still learning much about shaders!

Thanks again Piroman.

4

As black i meant zero :slight_smile: yes it does mean the same, simpler version of that would be to multiply albedo with your mask or inverted mask if white is not translucent parts (one minus node)