Hello I’m very new to unreal engine and last couple days struggling to one problem that I can’t seem to fix on my own.
I’m working on interactive archviz for my tiny house project. Everything so far seems to be doable or not problematic except making one material that is very fundamental for this certain project.
Some walls that take relatively big portion of area are supposed to be made of cellular polycarbonate sheets.
These are couple examples of how I want the material to look like from inside/outside. It’s important to have some solution that would work for both exterior/interior renderings.
So in short I would want translucent but not transparent material.
I use unreal engine 5, pretty much blank game project.
You can get a similar effect by using the “Subsurface” shading type for the material - add a pattern similar to the carbonate for the opacity and white for the base color.
(this is just a quick mock up)
Yeah I was trying this thing and it gave me decently looking results of the carbonate surface, however it didn’t let any light inside, even with opacity set to 0, as shown on first picture. Also I’m not sure.if it did catch the shadows from outside, (not at computer rn) but if I remember correctly the frame from inside the wall was not projected on the sheet on the other side of light source.
Like I could’ve get it to look decently only when I cranked up the exposure alot ( which is not really great way to go as there is also regular glass window and I’d wanna have openable doors), otherwise my interior was just dark black hole.
I was thinking hypothetically if it was possible to set material to cast no shadows (or ideally just very slight shadow to make light coming through the window slightly tuned down) and if it wasn’t catching shadows from outside make separate invisible model/material that would just be there to catch shadows and project them on top of visible carbonate material/model
Yet I have no clue if it’s possible or how to set such material inside unreal engine
With the subsurface mode you can also hook up the emissive color to simulate light coming though. Also, I forgot to turn off translucent in the material, it should have been opaque to receive the shadows:
Thank you man it sort of works as intended. Making it emissive did make it look better on interior side, however made it look not great on exterior side.
I separated polycarbonate model from frame model and turned off casting shadows on polycarbonate, just gonna mess little bit with texture and settings and I think this way I get it to work for both exterior/interior views
