On the subject of Refraction, is there any chance we could get some sort of control over chromatic dispersion through translucent materials? I’m not sure if that’s the correct term, but there’s an example of it (courtesy of ArtOfCode) here: Shader - Shadertoy BETA
Basically when you look through the medium, the refracted scene has a sort of rainbowish fringe around the edges. I’m not sure how physically realistic this is, but it looks cool :o
As far as I know the standard way of dealing with this in Unreal is to just use emissive “opaque” translucency where you sample the SceneColor 3 times (R, G, B) and offset the coordinates slightly for each color channel, then merge them back together. This works well enough, but since translucency is not rendered into SceneColor, any translucent surfaces behind the object will vanish when looking through it:
Sampling the SceneColor is also one way that we used to do blurred/frosted glass in Legacy materials. Now with Substrate, we finally have a better solution for that. It would be cool to have a better solution to chromatic dispersion as well, if possible 