So Blurred glass material is impossible in Unreal Engine 4?

[Davision]

@EdWasHere;298459

@:

To mask the character:
1- I uncheck “Receive Decals” in his rendering settings
2 - In the PostProcess Material, I use a “SceneTexture - DecalsMask” node, to get it’s silhouette as a first mask.
3 - I combine this mask with the one from “SceneTexture - CustomDepth” (which gives me the window silhouette). This way, I have a final mask and I use it to combine 2 renders of the Scene.
a) The first from “SceneColor”.
b) The second from a Texture RenderTarget (I got rid of the “SceneTexture:PPInput0” node, as it gave me this undesired halo).
In order to do that, I added a SceneCapture2D Actor in the scene and, in the level Blueprint, I put it every frame at the same location and rotation that the Camera Component of the character.
In the SceneCapture2D settings, I activate Gaussian DOF and uncheck “Skeletal Meshes” flag, so that the character doesn’t appear.
I kept my PostProcess Volume in the level, even if I don’t use PPInput0 anymore, as I need to attach my PProcess Material (blendable) to something.

Here is my PPMat setup.

Some problems, though, with this setup:

• Sky is not blurred. I think that’s because I capture from a SceneCapture2D actor (what’s wrong with this actor/skyspheres?) because I checked that if I use PPInput0 node, the sky is as blurry as the rest of the scene.
• If I put translucent materials in the scene, they appear to be affected by depth of field in the TextureTarget and they shouldn’t (is it a limitation of this actor? is it a bug?).
• If I set “Capture Scene” settings to “Final” with “Capture every frame” checked, I get an almost black window, something really weird (???!!!). If I uncheck it, it works - but it’s a problem as soon as the character doesn’t move anymore.
• Because I use the DecalsMask output, the mask isn’t defined according to depth and positions of the actors relative to the window.

For these reasons, I’m digging in an other direction, to get something more optimized, using depth calculations and getting rid of the DecalsMask output. Should be ready soon.

@Davision:

If you’re using SceneColor, that’s right, but if you use a second render from a second SceneCapture2D actor, then it seems you can still use some post FX effects. I’m experimenting with this now.
By the way: are there sreenshots of your painting game? Is it a W.I.P?

If you can define your mask with precision, you can apply the gaussian blur on anything in the screen. Here, I apply it to a plane only rendered in custom depth but you could apply it
to any number of any meshes set up the same way.

What do you mean by “animated screen masking”? If you mean a mask redefined every frame according to you needs, this setup already allows this, even if it has to be improved.

That is quite a big workaround to get that working! You do all that stuff to get the character in front not affecting the blur of the window but what about other objects that are in front of it, like a wall?

That is a interesting approach which SceneCapture to seperate it but for my painting game I like to have the blur in my post material and defined there, not for a specified object.
Here is a gif of my game, I mainly use the final render DOF blur for blurring the paint near the edges on the side:

The painting mask is basically done by using the translucent pass as a mask, which is quite the hack that then doesn’t allow me to use any other translucency in the game. Custom masks would here be much better too. The problem with your usage of masks is that you basically use up all the possible masks you can have just for your windows. So you can’t have anymore masking in your game for instance for outlines and decal mask is meant for masking decals which you can’t do anymore now.
With animated screen masking I just mean fading a blur in and making it more blurred on the edges of the screen and the like.

I’m also already using CustomDepth and DecalMask for other things, here is recent gif: http://i.imgur.com/B4GU8rR.gif