So Blurred glass material is impossible in Unreal Engine 4?

[jamesoloughlin]

Wish this was easier to achieve or maybe an updated tutorial of some sort.

[unit23]

@jamesoloughlin;733727

Wish this was easier to achieve or maybe an updated tutorial of some sort.

4.16 includes the Background Blur UMG widget feature. Just add it to a widget and set the amount of blur.

The post here has become obsolete.

[jamesoloughlin]

@unit23;733728

4.16 includes the Background Blur UMG widget feature. Just add it to a widget and set the amount of blur.

The post here has become obsolete.

unit23. I’ll look into. Thanks for helping an Unreal newbie.

[jamesoloughlin]

I tried using background blur on a 3D widget as a substitute to a material option but no dice. Background blur doesn’t work on 3D widgets.

[Doublezer0]

@unit23

4.16 includes the Background Blur UMG widget feature. Just add it to a widget and set the amount of blur.

The post here has become obsolete.

Hardly. I still learned a lot from this and if you need to blur within a material (not with a material applied in the world) then this helps a lot.

[amoser]

I haven’t had a chance to read this thread super closely, so what I’ve done may be entirely redundant, but I’ve managed to get what I believe are very compelling results (including refraction) by making use of a modified version of the spiral blur node and a little bit of math. If this is of interest to anyone, let me know and I can also post an explanation and the code + material graph, although it needs a bit of cleanup first.

[Antidamage (Addie)]

Very nice!

[Antidamage (Addie)]

I’ve also made a version designed for performance and added it to the Advanced Glass Shader if anyone feels like taking the easy route: Advanced Glass Shader - Marketplace - Unreal Engine Forums

[Mage_dux]

hello RyanB
I follow your code，but it reminds me that [SM5] /Engine/Generated/Material.ush(1284,20-40): error X3004: undeclared identifier ‘View_RenderTargetSize’.
Can you answer for me，thank you very much.

[anonymous_user_050222471 (anonymous_user_05022247)]

Coincidentally last “Epic Friday” I messed around with doing a radial style blur custom node. It only took 2 line changes to make it work with SceneColor like you want.

I added a distance mask as well so you can have the blur get slightly less as objects get closer to the glass.

This is probably not very optimized, I just barely got TempAA dithering working on it but the settings are very fiddly to fix the specular artifacts.

It requires that you hook up the SceneColor node somewhere in opacity otherwise the compiler won’t recognize the texture.

The material graph:

The hlsl code for the custom material node:

float3 CurColor;
float2 BaseUV = MaterialFloat2(ScreenAlignedPosition(Parameters.ScreenPosition).xy);
float2 NewUV = BaseUV;
int i;
float StepSize = Distance / (int) DistanceSteps;
float CurDistance;
float2 CurOffset;
float TwoPi = 6.283185;
float Substep;
float2 ScenePixels = View.RenderTargetSizeBaseUV;
float2 RandomSamp = View.TemporalAAParams.r+ScenePixels;
RandomSamp = ((uint)(RandomSamp.x) + 2 * (uint)(RandomSamp.y)) % 5;
RandomSamp=TempAARandom;
if (DistanceSteps<1)
{
return DecodeSceneColorForMaterialNode(NewUV);
}
else
{
while ( i < (int) DistanceSteps)
{

CurDistance += StepSize;
for (int j = 0; j < (int) RadialSteps; j++)
{
Substep++;
CurOffset.x = cos(TwoPi*((RandomSamp+Substep) / RadialSteps));
CurOffset.y = (TwoPi*((RandomSamp+Substep) / RadialSteps));
CurOffset =DistanceMask;
NewUV.x = BaseUV.x + (CurOffset.x * (CurDistance+RandomSampStepSize));
NewUV.y = BaseUV.y + (CurOffset.y * (CurDistance+RandomSampStepSize));
CurColor += DecodeSceneColorForMaterialNode(NewUV);
}
Substep+=0;
i++;
}
CurColor = CurColor / ((int)DistanceSteps(int)RadialSteps);
return CurColor;
}

How is this implemented with other nodes? Does anyone have the missing images that were linked in this post?

[jblackwell]

Just an FYI to anyone who’s still curious: the new strata materials pipeline explictly has support for physicalized rough transmittance through glass, essentially solving this problem sans hacks to my knowledge.

[v_zloy_v1 (v_zloy_v)]

Hi, I know it’s been years, but could you show me how you got this to work with refraction?

[jblackwell]

Substrate can do the same effect, not at my workstation rn but when I am I’ll post the documentation link. It was never too hard in UE4 but Substrate makes it trivial. The effect is limited bc it’s screen-space, but it’s also extremely compelling.