Translucent Materials behind Other Translucent Materials Ignore Refraction

[MostHost_LA]

You guys really need to explore other engines and see how things are done properly anywhere else.
Its like Epic decided to quadruple down on Dumb when it comes to both reflections and transparent materials.

The crystal material is an interesting take btw. I would suggest you just code up your own very custom USF/material shader base for it instead of wasting time adapting the pathetic excuse of shaders for transparency that the engine offers. (Forward rendering hacks included).

And there is another option no one here mentioned:
Drop the Epic trash, use the version of the engine managed by Nvidia that comes with all the nice graphic stuff pre-packaged and corrected for you.

Ofc, its still limiting considering that the engine is just antiquated when it comes to translucencies…
BUT, at least, the Nvidia team changes the rendering pipeline around to improve it and make it work, unlike what epic does (which really in the past 2 or 3 years is the exact opposite of improvement).

So, is it a definite fix?
No. But it’ll probably be a nice step up.

Its also putting you more in the right mindset of what you need to do to get a game published with Unreal;
Grab the source, build the engine from source, heavily change the source to correct all their BS, build the game on the fixed source…
(Everyone should really do this if attempting to publish a game anyway, even if you change nothing of the source).

Regarding the rest of the convo - its very interesting, do keep going.
But also do keep in mind the fact that somewhere along the line there is more to it than you think.

Glass like any other object (water too) absorbs or changes light as it passes trhough (a lense concentrates for instance).
It’s not just refraction effects on a reflection… Say you put a light source on a wall, and then look throguh the transparency to said wall - well, the light beam from said wall could be doing all sorts of things to the transparent volume (becuase a tree like pictured is in fact a shaped volume).
Due to the shape of the volume itself, the light passing through the object could be causing all sorts of artefacts and wierd things.
And im not just referring to iconic things, say like Dark Side of the Moon cover art…
Which sort of illustrats my point (but it’s a prism not just any volume).

The realtime calculations needed to do stuff like this on a game are probably still outside the realm of pheasibility - but it doesn’t mean that sinilar effects cant be faked way better than the engine is capable of doing via the built in shaders.
As an example to this, Nvidia gives you accurate caustics though tinted glass…

[Shrooblord]

Everyone should really do this if attempting to publish a game anyway, even if you change nothing of the source

@MostHost_LA I agree; this is the way forward. It is my firm belief that “the real work” is done mostly custom by studios in-house. Also why some things are so incredibly “basic” or “vague” in the engine: because you’re expected, maybe even required to do it yourself. That’s the dev part in gamedev.

Don’t get me wrong; Unreal is the craziest, most interesting framework I’ve come across yet. And it handles a lot of stuff for you that saves such an incredible amount of time, even when compared to its direct competitors. But when you get into the weeds of a topic – like what you are talking about with translucency – you’re gonna need to start to get your hands dirty yourself.

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The rest of this conversation was indeed extremely thought-provoking. Thank you all for your words.

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I came here today because they made an update to translucent materials in 5.6. Apparently, “glass through glass” now renders properly, as seen in this screenshot:

On the right of the diagonal wipe effect going over the windscreen, you can see the old 5.5 implementation. The box in the background “loses” its glass cover, which feels very similar to what I’m seeing in my crystal. On the left of the wipe, it’s 5.6, and the glass-through-glass “look” is maintained. I’ll be booting up my old project in 5.6 soon and see if they’ve “magicked” my problem away with this update.

And if they haven’t, then I have a whole store of interesting angles to explore based off of the words that have been posted in this topic, so thank you all for that!

[MostHost_LA]

Yo, make sure to duplicate your project - unreal is never backwards compatible, so you cannot downgrade a project to an engine version that worked better unless you manually copy and paste stuff back into a new peoject!