So i made some pretty good looking materials for the ocean, one for when the player is close and a distant one. Now i’m wondering if it is possible to somehow transition these materials so when i get close it smoothly changes to another material and vice versa?
Distance fade node controlling the alpha of a lerp- I’d create parameters for the fade node so you can work on the appropriate feel.
I would love it if you went into a little more detail as i’m quite new to this.
Hey Kristusea, This graph is fading two textures based on distance and you can also control the fall off.
Cheers to mAlkAv!An for this.
And, welcome to the real world! (if you know what I mean)
That is very interesting but i’m trying to transition 2 complex materials that are translucent and contain normals. I’m assuming the setup for this would be much more complicated or even impossible.
I sort of came up with a solution though, basically i’m gonna place 2 planes and assign the 2 different materials to them and add a fresnel with opposite values to smoothly transition between the two. Don’t know how this will work but i’ll post back with results.
(Yes, i know what you mean =)
Update:
First issue i ran into is that no matter how far i set the fresnel value, if i look at a certain angle it will still show part of the material right next to me. I think fresnel is not the best method of doing this. I need the material to completely disappear around me in order to show the other one underneath.
Any help?
Update 2:
Fixed it!
Removed the fresnel nodes and added the above nodes. It works like a charm!
Show the material?
Sorry, Snipping Tool compressed it to hell.
Not sure what you are doing there. You want to fade one normal map into another? because I don’t anything else you would want to fade in/out.
This is only the distant water material. Basically i have 2 planes very close to each other, on the top one i place this material and on the other one i can place any material as the first one does all the work. (In my case i’m waiting for the water material they showed on the twitch stream) The normal maps are part of the water, the nodes connected to the opacity are doing the fading work. You get it?
The graph I posted above fades one into another if both are made within the same material.
Consider Base Texture and Detail Texture as two different sub materials. They can be as big and complex as you make them. And then using the pixel depth line you fade those two in and out. There’s no point in plugging that into the opacity slot. That’s for things like opacity for alpha blended textures such as tree leafs.
Umm, you’re kinda pessimistic guy! 
Interpolation between normals is pretty common thing and I’m very confused why you calling this impossible. Material blending is the part of core material workflow in UE4 and you’re simply dismissing that oO
Check out Materials levels in content examples, orthis documentation
Start typing “MaterialLayer” in Material Editor and you will see a lot of different ways to blend stuff. Also there “BlendAngleCorrectedNormals”.
You can make 2 different materials and blend them with single node =/
Well, that’s what i like about UE4 there are so many ways of doing things and the method i came up with works just fine. As i said i’m planning on using the material that Alan Willard created, and because it was so complex they needed to use blueprints to fix some stuff, so i doubt that whole water project would be that easy to just plug into the material that i made. That’s why i’m using two different materials.
Well you see, i’m coming from CRYENGINE and if i mention something like that in those forums i would be called crazy.