See through water texture?

Development World Creation
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1

Id like to make a wayer texture that is almost completely see through? ? I can get it moving and I got the normal map I want but…how do I make it see through to an extent to where the normal map and speculation shows that its water??

Thanks!! I know its probably a simple question.

2

Create a Translucent material.
The opacity of the water surface depends on the angle at which you are looking at it and the depth of water. For instance a shallow body of water will look almost completely transparent when you are looking perpendicular to it, and if you look at it parallel to its surface, it looks like a perfect mirror reflecting whatever is above it.

UE4 Material editor has a node called Fresnel which is based on the camera view. You can you then use it to blend reflection cube map and opacity correctly.

3

i see. thank you :slight_smile:

4

The above method is actually based on UDK. I have not tried to recreate it in UE4. There has been some reports that UE4 does not handle translucent materials well. I don’t know if those reports are true or if they are fixed. So there is a chance that you might run into problems.

In case you can do some C++ coding, I will add some additional info which you might find helpful. To get a perfect water reflection along with proper specularity, people tend to use a multi-pass rendering technique.

  1. In the first pass, you simply render the scene from Camera’s view point and discard the water surface.(you will not render any of it).
  2. [This pass is optional ] If you want real-time reflection, you have to render the scene from reflected camera (ie the camera Z axis will be reflected wrt to water plane).
  3. You will render the water surface here. You have two textures (from pass 1 and pass 2). You will calculate fresnel co-efficient for each pixel and use ti to blend between texture from pass1 and pass2. This result will be taken as pixel color.

I have done a water demo using the above method in pure C++ and DirectX HLSL shaders (NOT using UE4 or any other Engine). So I am not sure how difficult it is to implement this in UE4, but I am pretty sure you might have to tinker with the source code.

Chek the following forum post. YOu might find something helpful :). If you scroll down, you can actually see the full Material setup

5

Ok I see…illl look into this as well
thanks for the info. :slight_smile: