Hi all,
Since UE4 went public in 2014 I know there’s been mumbling about improved transparency solutions to be added into later builds of the engine. Recently I was reading through Ehamloptiran’s Hair Rendering thread and saw stochastic transparency mentioned as a possibility, which appears to be similar in principle to an old post (for another engine) I read a while back on stippled transparency for deferred renderers.
My question is whether type of lighting-correct (and order independent) transparency rendering is viable and possibly a planned (or something similar)? Treating transparent surfaces as opaque for the purposes of unified deferred lighting would be fantastic and eliminate all the issues we’ve been dealing with regarding correct cubemap depth, SSReflections, and proper dynamic highlights, but I have no idea how expensive it would end being to get the effect looking nice and smooth after the layers of dithered pixels have been blended together.
Anyway, I hadn’t seen it mentioned in a while and wanted to bring it up to see if is a possible solution that’s being looked into or something that’s already been determined to be too expensive.
Cheers!