Thanks for reporting! This is likely because something has been overlooked so it will be fixed.
[Update: now fixed for 5.4]
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Just wanted to shout out a few bugs I’ve come across while experimenting with Substrate:
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if you attempt to do a horizontal layer blend with the legacy UE4 input material nodes, you will invoke a hard crash of your system, almost as if it was hit by a power surge, and whatever material you attempted this in will be corrupted and not visible inside the editor.
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if you put a substrate slab inside of a material function once all saved and closed, you will crash the editor whenever attempting to open and edit that function again.
I hope this helps with the bug hunting for UE5.4
Keep up the great work guys.
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@SebHillaire Is there a way for DOF to play with translucency on a Niagara Mesh Particle System yet?
I am working on a project where we are making a beach of orbeez waves and we are using Substrate translucent material for the surface to get that layered thin-translucent volume feeling to the beads
What I found interesting was DOF worked brilliantly with regular spheres in distance, but when the instancing is done in Niagara, it outputs this instead of the regular beads and only when you move the focal distance to after the bounds does it appear (and only on after DOF mode in Translucency Pass settings in the material)
If there is any way you can help me and us for a solution to this, it would be amazing!
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Thanks @APOCRS1980 !
I could not repro those crashes on latest so I believe we already fixed that for 5.4 then.
@Adithya15 Translucency in combination with DOF is a complex real time rendering problem. That is the same behavior without Substrate enabled I believe. Sorry but I have to reinforce the fact that this thread is not a place to ask for discussion / requests / help for subjects other than Substrate itself.
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Hey there,
I noticed that enabling Substrate alters the way Lumen produces AO. Is this an expected and inherent improvement or a random, unexpected side-effect?
Everything is identical between the two images. The only difference is that I have enabled Substrate. The trees are the Megascans Black Alder ones, using Lumen with HW tracing.
i would call this an improvement. depends what type of contrast you prefer.
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It’s not just about the contrast. Here is a comparison, I tried to match the lightness between the two in PS. If you look at the bright leaf clusters on the normal (top), you can easily notice that they are flat geometry. The Substrate enabled one on the other hand has high frequency details all around coming from light interaction. It’s a significant bump in capability, so I’m quite baffled why this is not communicated.
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Thanks for reporting!
Enabling substrate will result in visual differences to some extent. We are constantly comparing before/after and IIRC we did fix some AO differences for 5.4. However we are not done yet looking at all the details. So this will be ongoing until we reach a production ready state. I will take note of this one still confirm it is fixed or still on going.
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Thanks Sebastien! Could you share some information on what gives the AO quality increase? This seems like a renderer and especially Lumen related feature. How does it tie into Substrate?
Thanks for the update Sebastien, my materials are stuck in limbo until 5.4 it looks like 
would it be ever possible to use a static switch parameter to disable and enable the second specular lobe, or atleast use the shader quality node instead for that? since currently doing that doesn’t enable or disable the second specular lobe on the BSDF
My understanding is that it was automatically a part of substrate? Similar to how the glint BRDF converges to GGX in the distance, so it’s disabled past a certain cull threshold.
yea but it would be really helpful if we could disable specular lobe for lower-end PCs/hardware
second specular lobe*
Yes we want switch nodes to work. But for some of them to work, some development needs to happen on our side.
In the meantime, you can at least progressively reduce the coverage of a Slab to 0. It does not make the material shader faster but it will simplify all the lighting computation down the pipe.
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Thanks, fix will be in 5.5.
As I believe the 5.4 branch froze a handful of days ago, do you know if substrate is considered suitable for beta in 5.4, or is it still considered experimental?
Unfortunately, for this 5.4 release, Substrate is still experimental. (we had to support/develop many other technologies within Unreal Engine, as well as ship our games)
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