Translucent Materials behind Other Translucent Materials Ignore Refraction

The most common way to handle refraction besides screen space is cubemapping.

Here’s an example I made a while back. The biggest drawback to this method is that it is very expensive to update in real time. Static cubemapped refraction is very cheap though - far cheaper than screen space refraction as it does not even rely on translucency at all. Because of this, the technique is very common for ages. While it is a very old technique at this point, it had a surge of popularity recently due to being used in the liquid/bottle shading in Half Life Alyx.

What artists realized is that while people expect to see refraction they don’t actually know what physically accurate refraction looks like. In other words, avoiding artifacts is more important that actually having physically correct bending.

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